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## Dom4 Nation Guides/Overviews

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Shatner
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### Dom4 Nation Guides/Overviews

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Post by Shatner » Thu Oct 03, 2013 5:17 pm

With the game nearly out (we hope), I figured it would be nice to have a thread to post the nation-specific strategies and discoveries that people have in the weeks to come. I'll be posting here every so often as I experiment with Dom4, and I encourage others to do the same.

I've been playing around with LA Pangaea a lot lately. I like 'em and a big kudos to whoever designed the nation.
LA Pangaea is kind of like LA Atlantis in that you are playing as a superior race who has finally figured out how to manufacture heavy armor. Satyrs are faster than humans, have more HP, higher strength, better magic resistance, forest survival, and recuperation. Centaurs have better strength, hp, and mr than human knights, though they are not considered "mounted" and so they do have worse encumbrance. Map Move-2 heavy infantry who have Forest Survival are very nice, and ubiquitous recuperation along with high protection and shields mean your troops will tend to survive in a condition where those stars from experience actually matter (as opposed to the usual crippled, limping, armless, diseased veterans the other races end up with). It's pretty damn hard to melee a 3-star Dryad Hoplite to death.
The troop roster for LA Pangaea is well balanced and diverse. You can buy sneaky flying chaff, sneaky chaff with a strength of 11 and a spear (so they can hurt something in melee if they survive that long), as well as sneaky strength-11 chaff with a javelin or a shield. You have heavy defensive infantry, high-precision crossbows (average price, high armor, high resource cost), heavy cavalry, armored tramplers/heavy hitters, and heavily armored-but slow tramplers/heavy hitters who rage. The Stymphalian Harpies are actually capable of raiding low-pd provinces and harassing archers because they have a once-per-combat AoE-1 attack, so it auto-hits and will harm stuff in light armor; they're cheap and effective shock troops and they make a nice, additional arrow in LA Pangaea's quiver. Your cap-only sacreds, Dryad Hoplites, have slightly worse stats than your Satyr Hoplites (not least of all because they equip themselves with bronze instead of steel), but you don't care because they have moderate-strength Awe. Centaur archers would have been nice, if only to confuse enemy scripting, but it's an acceptable loss.
Commander-wise, you get a flying scout-commander, a sneaky commander, an 80 leadership commander, a slow-to-recruit heavy mage/thug, a dinky mage-priest who has AWE and SEDUCTION, and the best researcher and communion mage of the era. Nothing is overpriced (though the centaur commander comes close... Why did the LA centaurs lose EA and MA's inspiration boost?), and all the bases are covered. Also, let me emphasize that ubiquitous Recuperation means that troops and commanders almost always recover from disease, which can really help reduce your rates of attrition. This is good. Real good.
A mixture of Satyr and Dryad Hoplites can hold a line for a VERY long time, which is good because most of the killin' from this nation is done by crossbows and casters. Satyr Sharpshooters hiding behind a line-formation of hoplites is LA Pangaea plan-A. They have a precision of 14 so they tend to hit what they're shooting at (and when you drop Wind Guide it gets sick!), and good protection along with recuperation means they can weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (though not the crossbows; you'll have to screen against enemy crossbows set to "fire archers"). Pans cast the buffs your nation loves: strength of giants, legions of steel, weapons of sharpness, iron warriors, relief, regeneration, and poison resistance. Wooden Warriors is only useful when you want to throw a bunch of pissed-off chaff (Growing Fury) with Iron Bane at an armored enemy; your own heavy armor makes Iron Bane and Wooden Warriors for special situations only. Pans cast the nature and earth evocations you love: Blade Wind, Earth Meld/Maw of the Earth, Earthquake, Breath of the Dragon, Storm of Thorns, Sleep Cloud, Poison Cloud, Charm, Panic. Because of the auto-calc, your Pans are reasonably priced for their abilities, costing a third less than they did in Dom3 (220gp vs 330gp).
Then there's Centaur Sages, who are so awesome they get their own paragraph. They are very efficient researchers (6gp/turn for 11rp), so you will have LOTS of these guys, and if you need points, they make Drain tolerable. They each have S1 + 1xAEWN, 18hp, 13 precision, higher-than-average magic resistance, high defense + a quarter staff, Map Move-3, Forest Survival, Recuperation, and they aren't even close to being old. You wouldn't think of Pangaea as the nation that spams Thunder Strike, Soul Slay, Falling Frost, or Gifts from Heaven, but it is. And with a precision of 13 (18 with Wind Guide), those evocations will hit where it hurts. A communion with 4 slaves gives you access to S3, A3, E3, W3, and N3 communion masters, so the evocations you can spam are many and nasty. But what REALLY makes Pangaea the communion king of the era is how much abuse those poor slaves can take. Your slaves have 18hp, so they can already take more abuse (and are less prone to getting afflictions) than your standard human, and they have recuperation, so you don't care about their afflictions anyway. You have a nature master cast Personal Regeneration, and now your slaves are regenerating 2hp/turn which will let them effectively soak an extra 40 fatigue/round. If you give a Pan a Crystal Matrix, in addition to that giving you an N5E4 caster, it can cast Strength of Gaia and turn that regen into 4hp/turn. Simply put, you can easily and cheaply form a very robust communion with your ubiquitous lab rats to very good, very deadly effect, and this gives LA Pangaea a lot of flexibility. Even outside of a communion, your sages can still spam Body Ethereal (ethereal hoplites, centaurs, and minotaurs are extremely hardy), or combine their high precision with Quicken Self to use Vinebows, Ethereal Crossbows, and Bows of War to good effect. Oh, and the usual frozen heart/orb lightning/storm power+lightning bolt spam.
Other, miscellaneous observations? You no longer get national recruits from forests; you'll have to build a fort like everyone else. Your only priest is an H1, so you won't be generating many candles through prayer, nor will your god be called back any time soon. You can build temples for 200gp, so you'll want to spam them to ensure you keep the black candles away. You need high production and, while your recruitment options are solid, they do cost a fair amount of gold so you'll probably want order and/or growth as well. In fact, you don't have anything in a conventional sense that you'd want to waste a bless on. While your Dyrad Hoplites would love an F9E9 or E9N9 double bless, you'd be a fool to spend the points on it, and your Dryad commanders will probably want some sort of turn-1 whammy scripted during a seduction/assassination attempt instead of casting "Bless". However, for unconventional blessing, you can have an N9 imprisoned tree god for dirt cheap, and what that does is turn the Shroud of the Battle Saint your sages can forge into a super-cheap Ring of Regeneration w/extra hit points. That, in turn, will make your Pans, Dryad seductresses, and Dryad Hoplites even more unkillable. You'll need to have S2 on your god or plan to trade for a Starshine Skullcap because you have nothing but S1s who can't boostrap themselves. The only bad thing I have to say about the Centaur Sage is that he can't wear shoes, so no giving them Earth Boots. This means they need a Blood Stone for them to forge some of the larger crystal items (like Crystal Coins). For this reason, getting a minor earth and astral bless on your god (and maybe even a minor blood bless) is a defensible decision because of the gaps in your forging this will solve. You could do worse than an asleep or imprisoned N4S4E4 Monolith, or a cheapo S2E2A2W2B2 awake site searcher to fill out your magic while leaving your enough points for the good scales this nation wants.
So yeah, LA Pangaea. Good fun. I suggest you give 'em a try.
Last edited by Shatner on Thu Oct 03, 2013 5:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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