How viable is this MA Pangea strat?

[Butler's Medley]

I'm thinking particularly MA Pangea but I can't see why it wouldn't work for the other ages. I've read the various guides and they have plenty to say about the national carrion spells but most of them light on their reanimation abilities.

So what I'm asking, as a noob, is if it's possible to build a strategy around spamming them as cheap entry level SCs.

For an Enc6 N3D2 25 gem spell you get a sacred N3H3 45hp 19str map move 3 undead commander with fear, recuperation, stealth forest survival and 6 sleep vine attacks. To top it off you'll pick up some national H buffs along the enchantment road for quickness and regen. Blessability is also nice.

While it's hard to ignore a gorgon, and a strong bless might look sexy, I think an awake rainbow pretender for site searching might be the way to go (minor blesses still help), though a sleeping forge lord might be viable as well for all that needed kit.

The Turmoil/Luck synergy seems the way to go for this. The random gems will come in handy for forging and turmoil seems to increase the amount of freespawn maenads your pans get. In the early turns you could expand using dryads as cheap thugs (awe vs. non-archer indies) toting along some free chaff and when carrion lord is researched those thug items can be transferred. (A little more than 1/4 of your pans can forge dwarven hammers natively)

One bottleneck I can see is that carrion lord is a N3D2 spell, and while it's possible to get a pan with that it's highly unlikely (pans are E2N3 1E/N/D/B %10 1E/N/D/B) so either it's 2+D on the pretender for the booster or empower one of your 1D pans.

As a straight up fighty SC you can do better than carrion lords, but for the cheapness or placement on the research tree they seem amazing. The sleep vines, while negated by MR, will certainly help in tiring out traditional SC's (especially when fielded in numbers). The stealth means you could cause all sorts of havoc in the enemy's rear the addition of black heart could make them grade A+ assassins (forge-able by a national summons (hello luck 3), (hello recuperation) is this enough parentheses?)

Again, I'm a noob so while I'm sure if this were a viable strat. then someone would have mentioned it by now, but I'm keen to hear why it sucks the big one.

Oh, also: Gift of health is picked up on the way to Enc6

-Edited for grammar and vulgarity.-

[Doo]

My opinion is that 25 nature gems is not cheap, certainly not to field them in numbers and include any nature gem forging you may want to do.

But the strategy is advised in this page so what do I know?

The turmoil/luck choice is clearly a winner for the amount of free-spawn crazy ladies you will get, and they will die in their droves and be replaced almost as quick.

Depending upon if you play vanilla or CBM you might like to think about kitting out your pretender to cast Carrion Woods. CBM makes it castable on turn 1 and it can be pretty fun. Off the top of my head this means D6 and read this guide for more information, its a LA Pan guide but still worth a read.

[Finalgenesis]

Unfortunately, carrion woods has been moved up to ench 6 in CBM 1.8x (1.82 I think? not sure) for EA and MA Pan, LA still gets it at lvl 0

[Pyrrhic]

I'm currently playing MA Pan in a vanilla MP, where I am using Carrion Lords to solo Abysian PD. I really like them; however, the problem is that they need quite a bit of gear to become effective.

Sleep vines are resisted by MR, so you want to get in a lot of hits to give the opposition as many chances to fail their rolls as possible. Attack boosters are great of course; in my case a burning pearl is a no-brainer because of the 50% FR. However, a Ring of the Warrior (easy access for Pan) will do also.

Quickness is even nicer (another +3 att, +3 def, 12 vine attacks!) if you can get it, and here I would like to direct your attention to the Jade Armor. It costs only 3 E gems (w/ hammer) more than your standard boots, the 4 encumbrance doesn't bother you much because you're undead, and you get 15 much needed points of protection. Cast Regrowth at the start of the battle, and your CLs become pretty hard to take down between their 53 (not 45) HP, 15 Protection and 6 points of Regen.

Defense still isn't great, so add a vine shield to minimize the number of enemy attacks. Eventually you'll also want an Amulet of MR to guard against banishment spam. As I said, expensive.

EDIT: They'd totally rock with an F9 bless (all those attacks get additional AP fire damage that isn't resisted by MR). However, in all likelihood your pretender will remain the only person in your empire who can actually use fire magic, so that's probably a no-no.