[Warhammer]

I was looking at Marignon for the first time last night. I had initially thought of taking Pythium for an MP game, but opted instead for the unknown Marignon.

Looking at their troops, I noticed a few things:

1) Their troops are resource intense. Looks like I will need Production 3 scales.
2) Most units do not have shields. Archers are going to love these guys.
3) Knights of the Chalice are nice. But, the more interesting sacreds are the Flagellants. They aren't all that great statswise, but with flails and the right bless they could cause some mayhem.
4) Royal Guard cav. have better base stats than Knights of the Chalice.
5) The pikeneers and halbardiers have long reaches.

From looking at these guys it appears that my typical army is going to have a front line of pikeneers/halbardiers with Swordsman there for the heavy lifting. Against heavy archer forces, Men at Arms will figure heavily in the battle.

The interesting decision is whether or not to go with a bless strategy for Marignon. A F9/A9 bless could be very interesting with them. The Knights of the Chalice with a F9 bless become Att 17 with flaming weapon horseriding wielders of death. With the A9, they ignore the first hit during each round of combat which adds quite a bit to their survivability. Flagellants actually become quite a viable and cheap force for Marignon with a F9/A9 bless. They are not going to be an incredibly powerful force, but against Ulm or another nation that uses shields, they can certainly be a great throw away unit to crack those lines.

The ultimate question with Marignon is what to do with your pretender. As previously mentioned, you can pursue a bless strategy with success, but this is not on the order of the Vanheim bless in MA. The problem with the bless is that it mirrors what your mages already know. Hence, you will be severely lacking in all other magic paths.