EA Pangaea strategy

[Renojustin]

Dedas said:
Whom are you referring to? I'm not basing my strategy around maenads, if you read what I wrote you will see this. What I'm saying is that maenads could be used for various roles including patrolling.

Taking Turmoil 3 gives you something like, what, 15% more random events? Really doesn't make up for the 40% or more difference in gold. Especially when you can still jack up your taxes to 200% with Order and patrol with harpies.

The issue I had with the maenads patrolling is that they are worth 1/10th of a unit when they do so, and they need a commander to even be that bad. So say you use a Dryad or indy commander with 40 leadership, you've got effectively 4 patrol points there for the use of your commander and his upkeep cost, instead of using them for a cheap and highly effective harpy patrol. (due to flight bonus)

So if you can afford the scales, Order helps a lot more than turmoil, obviously, even for Pangaea. Even luck isn't all that great when compared to Order effects, and you can still get your leaders (who aren't very good in EA), so sacrifice that if anything.

You don't really need Luck for gem income either - with a death and astral pretender, the gem income you'll be lacking is Fire, Air, and Water... Water you can get with 25% of amazon sorceresses (and I think water bracelets only take W1 to build), astral pearls are easy because it only takes lizard shamans with 1 astral to Astral Probe, you get air with Faerie Court and your harpy commander, but fire is very problematic so don't expect to be hurling flaming spheres of death or making any fire items with EA Pangaea.

So I think your best bet would be to drop the luck and go for more gold on your Order/Turmoil scale. Nature's Bounty is freaking amazing if you have Order scales and you're missing out on a heck of a lot of gold without it. It's so powerful you'll find yourself recasting it as soon as possible after a dispel.

I admit that the idea of armies of naked wild women is pretty much one of the reasons people like us play games like this to begin with, and for that reason alone it should definitely be considered valuable. Just not enough for me to put my scales into Turmoil with Bounty jacking your income about 400%.

[kasnavada]

Turmoil is worth it, even more so for pangaea than others.

First of all, you will miss the large amount of maenads. You obviously underestimate them. Yes, they get beaten fast by units with high protection / defence and arrows, but with spells to protect from arrows, they litterally tear any low protection-unit with their bare hands with they do get in range. Furthermore, they work really well with the battlefield-wide spells like mass protection and growing fury that your pans are naturally able to cast.

When a few pans generate 60 - 80 (an army) every few months, you don't need to buy arrow catchers, enabling you to cut down on something that crucial for pangaea : maintenance costs. More money ? good, but if you need it to buy even more of the really expensive few good troops that can make a difference, you'll spend it in maintenance... But then, you'll be playing pangaea like ulm : forgetting that most of those good troops are stealthy. Being stealthy, you don't need those troops in large number, you need them to be strong enough to beat up PD, lone mages, and the commanders that (try to) bring reinforcements to your main opponent armies.

Yes, the point of maenads isn't to be the frontal attack unit. They are meant to be a distraction while your other units do the work. A way to make your opponent(s) believe your strength in number is much more than it seems. And thankfully, they make a wonderful distraction, since they are powerful, in their own way. Also, since they are not mindless, it means that as long as there is pans in a castle (they can leave that castle when they want), your opponents need to bring a few more troops every turn, because a dozen more of your units are repairing the walls every turn.

However, making them patrol sure doesn't sound useful when you speak about 40 of them. But you will have hundreds of them if you have turmoil. Given the choice, I'll have 400 maenads with 10 indy basic 30 gold commander in a few choice provinces (total cost / turn : 20 gold) than lots of armies of 40 harpies (I believe the cost is rounded up ?) that cost me 42 gold per turn, and costed 310 initial gold instead of the 300 gold with maenads + commanders, that is completly useless outside of gold collection purposes, and easily beaten by guerrilla tactics.

Routing with pangaea is really a non-problem. The dryad can spam sermon of courage, and I rarely see maenads retreat, especially when they are berserk.

Luck, well, luck is a vast subject. It brings in a lot more than a few gems. It brings you untracable wealth (not shown on the graphs), castles, free troops, castles, magic items...).

Finally, you will look much more vulnerable with a high order scale than with a turmoil one : lots of maenads are intimidating, and rightly so.

The point being, going for turmoil works very well. But it's another way to play that work probably more in MP than SP, since it rely on surprises, stealth, luck.

[Dedas]

Thanks for writing that comeback, kasnavada! Very well put, and in my opinion all valid points.

[kasnavada]

You're welcome !

It's just passing thoughts I had after analysing the graphs of a MP I just started. With turmoil 3 / luck 3 of course, and lord of the wild as a pretender !

In that particular game I happen to be have the third with the largest armies, largely thanks to maenads (but also other units... I'm not that foolish). Even though it's an MA game, maenad and stealth related strategy have a lot in common. I also noticed that the (rather copious) amount of gold in luck event didn't show on the graph, which make me look like one of the poorest ones on the map.

I just noticed that I wrote castle twice. The fact that I had a 1200 gold one free with luck just this turn must have influenced me somehow...

[Hadrian_II]

One more thing to say is that the later the game is the smaller the difference between an elite heavy infantery and a maenad becomes.

If you cast Army of Gold, Fog Warriors and Mass Regeneration and Weapons of Sharpness and Giant Strength of your maenads, they are quite strong. (and pans are supposed to cast these spells in battle [the fog warriors will be done by a farie queen])