Alright, I got the go-ahead from EuchreJack to make this mini-LP and nobody else seems to object to it, so here goes. First off, pretender creation.
So what makes a Pretender? The desires and needs of his/her/its people of course! When you make you pretender, you consider what your nation wants.
-First off, does it have good sacred units? And what kind of bless would benefit them?
-What scales does it benefit the most from? What scales does it lose the least from?
-Does the nation have a strong or weak early game? If it's weak, can it hold off an early rush?
-What magic does you nation have? Would it benefit from increased diversity?
So let's ask Gath these questions:
-It has powerful cap-only giants and recruit-everywhere Levites.
-As a blood nation it wants growth, and its human soldiers need more resources than gold. The Iassacharite Sages are very efficient researchers with magic 1: 4 RP for 50 gold(but do we want efficiency or power here?). They've got alright PD as well as fortune tellers, so misfortune is fine.
-It's got powerful cap-only sacred giants with magic weapons that should be able to put down most year-1 rushes. It can also expand prety effectively.
-Not counting 10% randoms or summons, it can reach 3F, 3E, 4S, 4N, 3D and 2B with boosters. Unempowered, its mages can cast most spells use those paths, except N/D and N/B. These are fairly strong paths on their own, but a little diversification into water to summon Naiads and Kokythiai wouldn't hurt. A pretender with national paths could help craft the boosters the nation otherwise can't reach, especially if he can craft rings of wizardry.
Alright, let's get cracking. First, the chassis. I've decided to pick the Son of the Moon, a titan with 2F4S and no other notable features. Not exaclty a chassis for the classic giant E/N bless, but then again this strategy isn't going to center on sacred giants. Crazy, huh?
I've bumped his paths up to 4F/9S. Besides the bless, he'll be able to forge the flaming helmet and ring of wizardry. Sometimes you might want to take a suboptimal bless because you really want a certain combination of paths for your nation, but remember that a pretender can only do one thing per turn.
After a bit of consideration, I decided to imprison him. We won't need his help in the early game, hopefully, and there isn't that much he can do for us that better scales won't make up for.
Gath prefers it a bit hot, and we start with a Dominion of 4, which is nice. We want production and growth at the very least, plus magic if we can squeeze it in. Oh, and a high dominion. Not for the awe, but for the sacreds.
Alright, those are the scales. Dominion 10 might seem to be a bit high, but it's all good. Those are some good scales, we've got plenty of money, resources and population. All that's left is naming our pretender! And there's really only one name we can give him...
One of those titles does not fit in with the rest. The Afterthought? Really? What kind of title is that?
OK! Now we start actually playing the game, right? Well, yes and no. This isn't a whole LP, so I won't be going and conquering the entire world. In fact, I won't play very much at all. It's almost more like a guide than a Let's Play. Well, anyway, let's start playing.
Oh, look at that! It's World of Warhammer! And we're in Warhammer Scandinavia. Alright, let's quickly go through the units we have:
Reubenites and Benjaminites are pretty interchangeable. Reubenites are cheaper and have a bit more range, Benjaminites can actually survive a bit of melee and have more ammo.
Naphtali are PD and otherwise uninteresting.
Zebulunites are pretty good units, but nothing amazing. Standards are pretty nice, I guess, but they don't get siege bonuses.
Gadites aren't that great. They're interesting, but rather niche units. Still, they've got mapmove 2.
These guys are pretty decent blockers and arrow-catchers, but they're slow.
Finally, Levite Zealots are freaking amazing. They might not be Jaguar Warriors, but these guys are the reason I took Dominion 10: So I can recruit 10 of them each turn in each fort. They cost a bit of money, but save on upkeep. I'll talk more about them later.
Gittites are giants. They're not terrible soldiers, but they aren't sacred.
I'll cover the capital-only units last, right after the commanders:
Typical scout.
Only need a temple to recruit. Incredibly cheap to recruit and maintain, but don't have a lot of RP and have no use outside researching. So you should only recruit them if you want to save your money for something else.
Fortune tellers, capable of joining communions. They can cast curse, so recruit a few to cripple elite units in an early war if you want to.
Boring priests. Never recruit them.
Boring commander giant.
Oh yeah, these guys are interesting. Heretics, so don't recruit them early on, but they have their uses. It's best to stick them all in one big nest of heresy. 2N + FES random.
In vanilla Dominions, these guys are rather crappy, having only 1E1D plus a FESD random. Making them 1E1S1D transforms them into your best battlemage thanks to the magic of communions! Of course, you have to be able to pull off communions for that to be useful. I'll talk more about them later, as well.
The Kohen are your bloodhunters and blood mages. You have the potential to be a strong blood nation if you want, and these are the guys who enable you to do that.
Gath has three capital-only units, two of which are commanders and all of which are giants.
The Gibborim are sacred giants. Pretty neat, but I wouldn't base my strategy on them because they're capital only. Still, they're pretty good units and they've got magic weapons to counter ethereality and mistform.
The Seren is a thug chassis, I guess. Not strong enough to be a SC, and can't bless himself unless you make him a prophet.
The Kohen Gadol is your biggest, baddest giant. Kind of sad compared to early ages, but a theme of Gath is that the giants are going extinct. They've got two levels of FES as a random pick. You'll want to recruit a lot of these, not just as thugs but also to bless large armies.
Well, that was a lot of words. So what are we recruiting? A Yeddeoni and some Gibborim. We yank the taxes up to 140%, send our army out to address any complaints about the tax hike, and make our scout into our prophet. And then we hit end turn.
You may recognize some of those names. In fact, I decided to put in the same nations that are in the main game.
Our dominion has expanded. We can see that the province to the southeast is rich and lightly-defended. Let's take it. But first, let's take the one to the east so we won't have to go back for it later.
There's no super special strategy to this or anything. Commander stays back, troops rush forward, prophet blesses and starts smiting.
The army moves forward and the Yeddeoni starts researching.
Here's the research screen.
Thaumaturgy 1 is a pretty important early level for Gath to reach. It contains the communion spells, after all. Going to level 2 is enough to start remote sitesearching, if you think you can afford that. After that, Evocation and Blood are tempting early targets. Evocation allows your Yeddeoni-communions to throw around some nasty spells, like Nether Bolt, Blade Wind, Gifts from Heaven, or even Strange Fire, a national spell!
Perfect for taking care of pesky undead, like manikins and longdead horsemen, but also works on other things, like cockatrices and dryads! I'm pretty sure it's not normal fire so fire resistance doesn't protect you from it. Only 25% of your Yeddeoni can cast it, but that's fine because we're using communions.
Going for blood early allows you to summon Se'irim. They're buff goat-demons and benefit from your bless. It also lets you summon other demons, who are all pretty buff. A F4/S9 bless isn't perfect for these dudes, but it does boost their MR to 18 and helps them survive more fights. The Shedim is more of an Ashdod kind of thing, so let's ignore it.
Gath also has a bunch of other national summons. In Enchantment, there's ancient fossil giants.
And in Conjuration there's a bunch, but the most important are these:
Malakh, early game thug with awe but rather fragile and no magic paths beyond holy.
Hashmal, better thug but still not a spellcaster, just a priest. Awe and fire shield.
Ophan, even more powerful than the Hashmal but doesn't deviate from the same basic plan.
This spell summons four Ophanim and a Chayot. The Chayot is a true blue SC chassis, with four forms, each being a level 4 priest and having 4 in another path besides - fire, air, earth or astral magic. Of course, it costs a lot of pearls and has high casting requirements, being in Conjuration 9.
Besides Evocation and Blood, Alteration and Enchantment are nice ideas as well. Strength of Giants lets you hit harder and Raise Skeletons is a classic, while your Abbas can lay down Wooden Warriors and your Yeddeonis can cast Destruction or Iron Bane. Of course, leaving Conjuration and Construction out in the cold isn't a smart idea, you can summon your national units and gear them for some raiding, or just use the path-boosting spells and various items to improve your communions.
Anyway, I think that's enough for today. I barely did anything, but I sure wrote a lot of stuff. Maybe some of it will even be helpful to somebody, who knows? The next update will feature actual portions of world conquest and the reasoning behind Levites being awesome.
Poll
5 (13.5%)