Guide: MA Pangaea strategies

[Omnirizon]

I think any effective Pan strat must utilize their amazing ability for stealth and cavalry raids. They simply have the best troops for such a strategy.

However, this nation is always been vexing for me to play. I try and get a grasp on the options they have available; but the requirements for pursuing any given strategy are often very contradictory to each other (high turmoil for Maened, but gold intensive troops, for example). Pan is the essence of chaos, and it is always hard for me to get a handle on this unusual nation.

Also, I think their nation specific pretenders are next to useless (with the exception of the Gorgon). LotW? Why would I want to spend actual design points on a glorified Pan? The Carrion Drag seems like a reasonable choice, but if you are serious about a carrion strat, you can pursue one as LA Pan without the dragon; thus in relation making this pretender in any other age a questionable investment.

[kasnavada]

Why would I want to spend actual design points on a glorified Pan?

Well, I like him.

Because you can skip recruiting pans in the first few turns of the game, get loads of maenads anyway, and concentrate on dryad / research, and have a few more centaurs / minotaurs / satyrs in the first turns. Which can also help a lot in getting provinces. Because in my opinion, pans are mostly useful for maenads or diversifying magic path (useful in mid game).

Also, if you take some blood magic with him, you can completly skip the use of pandemoniac and concentrate on commander summon with blood magic / pans.

Finally, he's stealthy. That means that you can also use the one automatic dominion increase in enemy territory.

While it may not be competitive enough or not suited to your tastes, maybe... but he's not useless. Far from it. Even if I got little doubt that other pretender surpass him in all the function I see him do, he can, like most pangaea troops, adapt to a lot of situations.

Actually, if it were not for the maenads possible access to blood magic (allowing sabbath and reinvigorisation) and death magic (carrions), I'll skip pans altogether. Quite often, getting 3 dryads will be more useful than a single Pan. Dryads are better for preaching, researching, stealth, their price means you don't care much if a few die (which isn't the case for pans... 3 dead is 1k gold gone to waste). In my opinion, pans are useful for advanced casting of earth and nature spells (with boosters), to start a death magic and blood magic economy, and to generate troops. I rarely want them on the front lines. However, they are very useful behind generating maenads, creating items and casting spells. Which means you don't actually need that many of them.

Speaking of which, another use for dryads and carrion commanders are wine arrow firing platform... however you need to research evocation 2. For me, it looks like evocation is not the most useful path to research, since the nature spells are mostly useful with poison-resistant troops, and since there is no spell in it that can be casted with pans (nor any other native units for that matter). That said, wines and carrions are immune to poison and summoned commanders have varying amounts of nature magic, so spamming poison cloud in combinaison with those troops could lead good results, but evocation 6 is a big drawback for that.

One last thing for carrion summons. AFAIK, the carrion lords are the only units you have with 3 level in priest magic. They are also stealthy, and got 3 in nature magic too. That make it interresting to summon a few with pans empowered or boosted in death magic.