Good Pretender design for Marverni?

[SelfishGene]

I'm having trouble coming up with a Pretender build for Marverni that doesn't completely suck. Of course i have some preconceptions...

First, i think Marverni should take 3 Productivity, because this underpowered nation doesn't stand a chance unless it can really pump out the troops (and even then it might not matter in the long run). I also think they need a fairly reasonable dominion in order to enjoy the fruits of having good scales.

OTOH, i think that a "Rainbow" Pretender with 3 or 4s in many path would be preferable because you'll need lots of summons and magic in order to survive. But in order to get all these things, you need to make the Pretender Imprisoned, which rather defeats the whole purpose of using a site-searching Pretender. PLUS, you HAVE to have blood on your Pretender (and preferably high scales) in order to make any use of the Blood Sacrifice ability....

You can make a 9-path Dragon, except that you have no use for Fire gems and the Nature dragon kind of sucks. And Marverni isn't a very good bless nation...

There are just too many issues that a Marverni Pretender has to overcome, as an Early Era nation.

Or you could wreck the scales and make a Vampire Queen SC Pretender, but this isn't very thematic or unique to Marverni's abilities in any event, since anyone can do that...

[Graeme Dice]

SelfishGene said:
First, i think Marverni should take 3 Productivity, because this underpowered nation doesn't stand a chance unless it can really pump out the troops (and even then it might not matter in the long run).

That's probably a decent idea, so that you can get more Ambibate nobles, which are almost as good as principes.

OTOH, i think that a "Rainbow" Pretender with 3 or 4s in many path would be preferable because you'll need lots of summons and magic in order to survive.

I can think of few situations in which you'd want a rainbow pretender. A magically diverse nation like Marverni is definetly not one of them. You have guaranteed access to astral, nature, and earth site searching spells, and are likely to eventually have a water 2 druid.

PLUS, you HAVE to have blood on your Pretender (and preferably high scales) in order to make any use of the Blood Sacrifice ability....

Don't waste your pretender's time by having him search for blood slaves. Use scouts for blood hunting if you need slaves and have no blood mages available.

Or you could wreck the scales and make a Vampire Queen SC Pretender, but this isn't very thematic or unique to Marverni's abilities in any event, since anyone can do that...

Realistically, if you aren't planning a bless strategy for a nation, and aren't underwater where you won't have to deal with land-based sacred troops, then I would almost always pick a SC pretender. Doubling your expansion rate is a hard thing to pass up just for a potential minor advantage later in the game. That said, I definetly wouldn't use a VQ, since she's extremely overpriced.

[Wish]

with marveni you want a sage, and this is why: its not about recruitable troops - clearly they are sub par, but the mages are POWERFUL, so you want some decent evocation and at higher construction levels they can make decent Golem thugs/SCs and armies of mechanical men. At medium enchantment they can make armies of living statues.

I have been tooling around with marveni a lot and this is the only feasible solution i've come up with regarding them...

so you go with a sage,who can help them get the research faster. Give him a little death and he might even be able to replace himself with skull mentors then go around looking for magic sites to power the marveni machine.

alternatively, the SC pretender is very useful as well, since Marveni is very bad at early expansion. so I have to agree with GD there.

[KissBlade]

Hmm... I'll have to agree with Graeme on this one. You need to take advantage of marveni's battle magic ability. I always recommend a combat pretender (dragon, or a dom 9/10 wyrm/cyclops) for nations with crappy troops. Also you really don't need to blood sacrifice with them either. I tend to ignore that ability completely.

[Wish]

yeah, forget the blood. for reals.

a Awe-dom prince of death is nice too, cause he's so scary that their morale dips into the negatives.

[Teraswaerto]

I don't think Marverni is all that weak, unless you are comparing it to Vanheim or something...

Druids are great, and the troops are not that bad either. I'd take good scales, magic, order and production (or maybe swap order for luck). Having a pretender that can do early expansion would be good.

[Graeme Dice]

Wish_For_Blood_Slaves said:
with marveni you want a sage, and this is why: its not about recruitable troops - clearly they are sub par, but the mages are POWERFUL, so you want some decent evocation and at higher construction levels they can make decent Golem thugs/SCs and armies of mechanical men.

I can't think of any reason that having a sage would help towards this end. The 20 research points he provides is two turns of mage recruitment, and if he's researching, you are expanding half as fast as you would be with a 50 point wyrm.

Give him a little death and he might even be able to replace himself with skull mentors then go around looking for magic sites to power the marveni machine.

He's going to find a bunch of sites that you won't be able to use with your national mages, and since he can only forge one item per turn, you're never going to be able to make good use of a rainbow mage.

[Aleph]

Can we talk a little more about Prince of Death design? I've definitely had an awake Dom 10 Death 5 PoD take out a couple groups of indeps singlehandedly before items or research, but it seemed like he might have gotten spanked if I'd been less lucky. Would you think sleeping, to get more points and give people time to get a little construction action going, or just throw him out there solo from the get go and hope for the best?

[Shovah32]

I often set him sleeping to buy some extra scales and give me a chance to forge some basic armour or weaponry