MA Marignon
 

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.

Re: MA Marignon
 

>With the A9, they ignore the first hit during each round of combat<

Hold your horses there. They don't get "luck" they get "twist fate" which is not nearly as good. Twist fate is still good, and I just used it recently for a nice A8/W9 bless for EA T'ien Ch'i, but it only works ONCE PER BATTLE and then is gone, not once every round.

Also, they changed the casting level requirement for fire arrows. Be aware of that!

Jazzepi

Re: MA Marignon
 

Hmmm... That changes some things. That raises the possibility of a F9/rainbow pretender. Have to check that when I get home.

Re: MA Marignon
 

My Advice, Go With Earth 9-10 and forget about the Flagellants. With earth 9-10 you get a wonderful revig bonus for all those lovely mages, all most all of which are sacred. Also helps when you want to thug those angels later in the game. I played a test game with a fire 9 bless and even then the Flagellents are worthless. Remeber they all come with afflictions out of the box.

Re: MA Marignon
 

I'm assuming you are speaking about s9. As jazzepi stated it only counts for the first hit of the battle not each round.

1) Not needed but if you can afford it, go for it.
2) They also have high protection, so they fair decently against archers
3) Flagellants also dies like flies, i dislike basing alot of design points on these. Basically you will use large crossbow armies and flagellant dies hard because of friendly fire.
4) Still very expensive for what they can do in base game.
5) I guess they have.

Re: MA Marignon
 

I'm also pretty anti flaggies. I used upgraded, domspawning, F9B9 blessed, affliction free flaggies in an Ulm Reborn game and they still weren't /that/ great.

I'd go for crossbow armies if you want the most effective strat, or whatever you want to do if you just like to have fun (that's the way I play).

Re: MA Marignon
 

I would not discount the A9/F9 dual bless (the Baphomet works well). It is very effective with Marignon, for the reasons that you have already outlined above.

Twist fate is great for flagellants. If they get hit, they tend to die, and with their def, they get hit a lot. Thus ignoring the 1st hit is every bit as nice (maybe nicer when rushing archers) than having a 50% of avoiding each hit.

However, with that bless, I find that I primarily recruit sacreds and mages. Gold is at a much higher premium than resources. I would go with order 3 and possibly sloth 1 or 2.

Re: MA Marignon
 

Marignon is a prety straightfoward nation;

Flaming Arrow crossbows as your basic army,
Royal Guard as front line tanks,
Flagellents as flankers, secondary support,
lots of fire mages,
some assorted infantry to taste.

Flagellants are easily a top-5 sacred (imo). They have two attacks, low resources/cost (almost free), can be recruited in any castle. You can easily make armies that contain hundreds of F9 flagellants, that will be decent against virtually every target. It's hard to think of another sacred unit per cost that has the Flagellant's sheer offensive potential.

The only thing about Flagellants is that they can't be on the front line; you have to have a screen of cavalry/infantry to soak up spells and arrow fire to allow them to close.

Re: MA Marignon
 

The problem is for your regular military units, they have a 2.X to 1 resource to gold ratio. The only units that cost more gold than resources are flagellants, knights, and leaders. The knights cost 61 resources a pop which is pretty pricy as those things go.

Re: MA Marignon
 

When I play Marignon, I buy primarily flagellants, knights, and leaders. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

What is the point of recruiting heavy infantry in your castles? They are not much better than indies.

Also, because a dominion strat works well with Marignon, I end up buying many more priests and temples than with other nations. High gold is key.