I give up, you finally won me over

[Teraswaerto]

They are cheap and have good starting dominion, though I usually end up taking the Oracle... Also, try killing a Sphinx with 1000 hitpoints and 30 protection. It can hold a castle all by itself against conventional armies hundreds strong.

[atul]

Originally posted by Targa:
Can just research and cast rituals/forge? Can't go out and fight (unless you teleport or something, then you have to be able to get back home somehow), can't go search for magic sites (unless you use akashic spell). What's the appeal? Thanks.

As an anecdote, my first ever dom1 game, a demo pbem with friends in very crowded Urgaia map. We just wanted to check the game out. I played Marignon with Baphomet pretender (the immobile flaming head). Didn't notice it was immobile 'till the game started, either.

About turn 10, my only army was sieging Abysian capital, and Caelum decided to start peacekeeping operation by flying his army of 50+ troops over my capital and storming the castle inhabited by the pretender and just few soldiers. The annoying fliers were ground to dust.

Soon after, when I was extracting my justified vengeage and conquering the Last Caelian provinces, the Abysian troops blocked my army's path back home and C'tis broke our peace treaty, marching his saurolich pretender and an army of 150+ lizards to my capital, breaking the walls at ease and storming it.

My Baphomet, the sole unit in castle at that time, singlehandedly and unequiped, wiped that army out of existence, and the skin of said treasorous saurolich decorates the wall of local public lavatory to this day.

Immobile pretenders have their uses, even when chosen accidentally. I don't honestly think other pretenders could have done the same.

[Psitticine]

I play with the immobile pretenders quite a bit. I think they make early expansion a little harder, although the trade-off of having them busy researching, casting search-spells, and making items tends to set you up a bit better in terms of development.

As time goes on, my mobile pretenders tend to "settle down" anyway, save for really huge battles such as taking out an enemy capital, so immobility seems to make less and less of a difference for me as the game goes on, powerful (and more expendible) summons become available, and so forth.

[Targa]

Let me throw in another question here also:

I've been pretty much using rainbow pretenders for the ability to locate most (if not all) magic sites early on in the game. Unless you go with Arco, or find some other way to have a large pearl income and get a mage-type who has 3 astral (for akashic), there doesn't seem to be a very reliable way to find magic sites of all flavors (since your national mages are going to be limited in paths and levels). Am I placing too much emphasis on finding all the sites? What does everyone else do?

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Psitticine:
I play with the immobile pretenders quite a bit. I think they make early expansion a little harder, although the trade-off of having them busy researching, casting search-spells, and making items tends to set you up a bit better in terms of development.

As time goes on, my mobile pretenders tend to "settle down" anyway, save for really huge battles such as taking out an enemy capital, so immobility seems to make less and less of a difference for me as the game goes on, powerful (and more expendible) summons become available, and so forth.

As was very amply demonstrated to me in Zen's IRC game Last night, strategies that work quite well in SP tend to be quite bad in MP. I have a hunch that immobile pretenders falls into the Category of for-SP-only.

Feel free to disagree, since my first (and thus far only) MP game was Last night, so I still have very much to learn.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think Atul's example was pretty good for a use of immobile gods in a multiplayer game. Its a good choice for someone who cant seem to avoid the temptation to keep marching all your armies out to the front. A large high-hitpoint immobile pretender means not having to worry about surprise attacks at home.

As to site-hunting I think any extreme tends to be a bad idea. Working too hard to find every site is not efficient just as never searching isnt. Its somewhere in-between. (but I also have a big problem in that area. I just love to find surprises)

[Gandalf Parker]

Welcome coming over from the strategy newsGroups.

Hydra is too expensive to use as a patrol. Just consider the Hyrda to be an army by itself. If you see a province with Jade Amazons (and I think the Lizard independents also) then be sure to grab that. It will give you protected commanders for your hydras

[ February 07, 2004, 12:52: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[PvK]

Supply can be increased by building fortresses. Supply spreads to adjoining provinces from them.

Supply use can be reduced by magic items which provide supply. E.g. Bag of Wine, one per commander, reduces supply use in province by 25.

Heroes are often very useful, and there are specific national ones for each nation. Some other characters (sometimes with troops) appear for all nations at random too. Some of the mercenaries are also quite useful. The chance is mostly based on your Luck scale. If you want, there are threads here with more details.

PvK

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Targa:
Let me throw in another question here also:

I've been pretty much using rainbow pretenders for the ability to locate most (if not all) magic sites early on in the game. Unless you go with Arco, or find some other way to have a large pearl income and get a mage-type who has 3 astral (for akashic), there doesn't seem to be a very reliable way to find magic sites of all flavors (since your national mages are going to be limited in paths and levels). Am I placing too much emphasis on finding all the sites? What does everyone else do?

For some nations, it is enough to specialize in the nation's paths only, and holy. For example,
Man can research Thaumaturgy-2 quickly, and site-search in Air and Nature more quickly than with a pretender... and send a sole monk holy-searching. Abysia is much weaker in this respect because Fire, Astral, and Blood search spells are different paths, but you can just cast astral and fire site-searching spells and use a single Demonbred to manually find blood/holy site, or since you'll probably research Blood early, you can use a Dragon to manually search to fire-3 and holy-4 and cast astral and blood site-searches.

Atlantis is set with all (underwater) elemental site searches and water aboveground... never use a rainbow site-searcher with Atlantis. If you use a rainbow mage, give it 4 in the sorcery fields and 1 in the elemental fields... but the combat gods and underwater search spells are so powerful that rainbows are not a good idea.

It varies from race to race. If you want to find most of the sites without acashic record, you need a rainbow mage. But recently I played Vanheim with a water-only Blue Dragon and was able to find most magic sites using search spells... Nature with Druids, Bowl of Blood with a lucky blood-random, Air and Holy with Vanir, water with the dragon (manually searching), Earth with dwarves, Astral with a lucky 1-astral random on a dwarf, Death with an indy Necromancer from a site that lets you recruit necromancers... everything except fire.

If you gain critical mass in searching, you tend to stumble upon sites that let you recruit new mages that can cast search spells in new paths. In that game I found indy nature mages (druids), water mages (hydromancers, 1 and 2 water), death mages (2 death), and witches (worthless). Lizard shamen are also common, and have 1 astral (lets you cast the astral site-search).

-Cherry

[ February 08, 2004, 19:10: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

[Tuna-Fish]

Originally posted by Arryn:
As was very amply demonstrated to me in Zen's IRC game Last night, strategies that work quite well in SP tend to be quite bad in MP. I have a hunch that immobile pretenders falls into the Category of for-SP-only.

Feel free to disagree, since my first (and thus far only) MP game was Last night, so I still have very much to learn.

I disagree. Immobile pretenders are very good in MP too, if you know what you are going to use them for. Thee's 2 of the especially useful: Oracle and Blood Fountain.

Oracle is an astral-3, meaning quaranteed acashic record, even for nations with no astral mages themselves, also has the nice ability of being able to forge the slave matrix for use in communion for non-astrals.

Blood fountain is Blood-3, and is good enough to start a blood econ for any normally non-blood race. There's many good blood mages that can be summoned with blood magic, and hitting your enemy with devils when you are playing man can be quite a shock.

Both have great dominion and cost 0, so you can have some kickass scales with them, meaning more/better troops and faster research.