Guide to playing Patala competitively

[KissBlade]

Twan said:
I think the title of this thread may be confusing, a Guide to play Patala in Blitz Games is not necessarily a guide to play Patala competitively on real maps (especially when no big mp game has been finished).

Each nation may easily have 3 or 4 good guides saying very different things. I doubt there is for any nation one "competitive" strategy, best at the same time in sp, duel blitzes on very small maps, duels on big maps, 10prov/player maps with many nations and 30prov/player maps with many nations.

I find no portions of my guide at all applicable for the current dom 3 blitz metagame. I have not declared this is the best guide, if you had read it even past the first few words, you'll realize it is simply my guide to them being played in MP settings. I am very thorough with my current strategy and I feel it's definitely one of the more viable options currently available to Patala. I have no idea why now people are setting up this premise that I'm writing this guide for blitzes.

[Leif_-]

Post deleted by Mindi

[quantum_mechani]

Blitzes are different than long term games, but not that different. This is because late game, everyone is more or less playing from the same bag of tricks, so what tends to matter is how well your nation did early game.

Now, I don't consider Patala weak, and I don't think that was Kiss's final conclusion either. They simply have - like almost every nation - a lot of troops that don't stack up to the others, or a few that are too good, depending how you look at it.

[Shovah32]

Post deleted by Mindi

[KissBlade]

Post deleted by Mindi

[KissBlade]

Post deleted by Mindi

[dirtywick]

I haven't tested this at all, but Markatas could be useful if you're using Rust Mist heavily. Removing the protection of a unit makes any hits they score likely to do a little bit of damage, and since they're very small they can swarm units causing them to accure defense penalties, especially against larger opponents, and the damage could add up quickly (if they don't all die first). Ideally I think that Rust Mist is best used with high strength units though, but it might work.

[Daynarr]

KissBlade said:
I have actually mentioned quite a bit of Patala's strengths and mentioned both a long term and short term strategy to them. In a blitz, it is a very poor choice to play Patala as their best feature, mages, cannot be really taken advantage of. I have mentioned that many of Patala's troops suck. This is actually after many strategic discussions from other players who's tried their hand with the nation. I have not played the dominions series for that long but I can safely say I have a good grasp of what are the important concepts to winning in multiplayer.

You suggested dormant VQ pretender with no bless and sloth scale. So for entire first year of game you get no bless, no pretender and no resources to buy enough troops. How exactly does that help early expansion you mention?

The only way you can bless your nagahs would be with your capital only mages since they are magical only and can't be ferried with non mage commanders. This is already a fault with them.

They have no more problems with blessing sacred troops then virtually any other nation with powerful sacreds (Vans and Helheim for example). Most of those nations don't have h3 priests to cast divine blessing on them. They can however make temples and hire normal priests to bless those troops and so can Patala. From GAMEPLAY experience you need 4-5 of them to bless a group of 40 naga warriors that are on hold/attack orders. It's no problem for them at all. No more then for almost any other nation that is. Do I need to mention that you also have prophet that can cast divine bless and is perfect for early expansion? And yes, you will use capitol mages to get your nagas around but then again, you want those mages in battle and gurus to do research. In worse case gurus can do it to as they can lead 25 magic units each.

Edit:typos

[KissBlade]

dirtywick said:
I haven't tested this at all, but Markatas could be useful if you're using Rust Mist heavily. Removing the protection of a unit makes any hits they score likely to do a little bit of damage, and since they're very small they can swarm units causing them to accure defense penalties, especially against larger opponents, and the damage could add up quickly (if they don't all die first). Ideally I think that Rust Mist is best used with high strength units though, but it might work.

Rust Mist is a good spell and could work with hordes of Markatas. However, as I've mentioned, at that stage of the game you should generally be supplimenting your forces with superior indies instead and/or mercanaries. if you have extra gold to dump, it should be invested in setting up another guru factory. When comparing effectiveness of troops, you need to take into mind oppurtunity costs. For example, why are loboguards more feasible than markatase? Well because they're not leadership heavy, they don't effect the amount of regular troops your commander should have, have better stats and are mindless allowing a more effective swarm tactic. Also ryleh works well with swarm tactics because most of the time you'll be fighting tritons and icthyids. Patala doesn't have this option.

[Endoperez]

Daynarr - pretenders don't cast Divine Blessing. Prophets do.