Hello again!
I love tinkering with my pretender build so I prefer having a lot of points available. What are your favorite nations for this? I like MA Marignon, LA Atlantis and I'm trying out MA Agartha.
Posted Mar 19, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC
Want a rainbow? Want great economy scales? Go imprisoned. It depends on the nation(s) involved and size of game, but in my opinion imprisoned is the optimal choice more often than not.
The best nations for imprisoned pretenders are the ones with strong sacreds that can expand without attrition.
Strong sacreds usually means either glamour or good killing potential without being a glass cannon. Non-incarnate blesses don't offer much in the way of survivability except for stacking defense and resists. Stacking defense is not efficient because of harassment penalties. So nations with flimsy sacreds generally do not benefit from imprisoned pretenders because it makes expansion too costly, and your first war too high attrition.
If your sacreds can expand without too much attrition then adding strength, attack, defense and resistances from an incarnate bless will make them much more difficult for an enemy player to deal with.
The other kind of nation that can do well with an imprisoned pretender is one with very strong recruitable troops and mages.
MA Pythium has terrible sacred troops that are not worth blessing but they do have gladiator troops that are powerful enough to deter some sacred builds. They also have very powerful communion mages for mind burn or thunderstrike in an early war.
Middle and late age Ulm have guardians as troops. They have a high damage magic weapon that causes fatigue damage to sacreds. This plus the rest of their very good troop lineup keeps them safe from an early rush by enemy sacreds. Their mages give you many good options for combat until your pretender wakes up.
I think the two most important things to think about when designing a pretender are how will your nation deal with elementals (fire and air mostly), and how to fight an early war vs enemy sacreds. Elementals are very common and very tough to counter outside of a bless because they are ethereal and high DPS. Summons with magic weapons are very rare, and getting fire resistance high enough to deal with a size 6 fire elemental's damage is very hard with spells or non-fire crafted items. Magic weapons also counters fog warriors and ethereal point buffing on thugs/SC's. I almost feel like access to magic weapons either natively or on a bless is mandatory.
Being able to kill enemy sacreds with troops generally involves having very high dps. Enough attack to hit sacred cav, enough damage to get through high prot or regen giants. If your troops can hurt a strong blessed sacred then you can leverage your gold and production advantage against them.
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nearly every nation can make good use of imprisoned pretenders, as it can gives access to a good statbless while maintaining good scales at the same time. in general stat blesses can be usefull for nearly every type of sacred, aswell as resists. noteably mageblesses are udually non i carnate as well (prec, reinvigoration, farcaster/arcane finesse). in broad terms nations with sacred cav can get comperatively the most benefit out of such a bless.
One thing to look out for though when choosing such a bless is how capable your nation is when it comes to expanding. some nations have trouble expanding early and can get good benefit of awake expanders, others might have such strong powerspikes when reaching a certain research traget, that an awake researcher with a very minor bless might be best and others might scale so well in the late game that a dormant titan as a safety net might be more valuable. it always come down to opportunity cost
In addition to efficient expansion, you want some way to kill elite enemy units if you're playing MP. For imprisoned builds, this usually involves slapping some strength into it, though it depends on the sacred.
Some nations already have access to these things, and you can just straight up go pure scales while imprisoned, or pick other options as you say.
What nations come to mind for having good multi-tools available? I had some success with a pure scales/no incarnate bless MA Pan in a MP games. Won my first war after a somewhat slower expand. But then ran into giant werewolf thug with vine shield and Regen and it ate my armies. Also had frost resist I think so I could frozen heart. Was fun anyways but I liked the experience and though of trying it on Uruk but I had troubles expanding as quickly
Non-incarnate bless can still kill elites with sacred if taking a few copies of strength. If you're later in the game you can have strength +4 (or +5 if doing some kind of larger setup) and cast antimagic with some lizard shamans or something, but usually the build you describe doesn't willingly attack armies. Some things MA Pan can do against it w/o god:
Not an exhaustive list. What you need will depend on exact gear. Imprisoned bless is common on Pan.
Uruk should expand okay if you practice with them. They can do a lot of similar things, but also have astral for soul slay/enslave mind.
Less flexible things are nations like EA Abysia, EA Agartha, MA Marignon, etc. Those nations can be competitive/win MP games, but they will need to be more prudent with what they put in bless. Same for nations like Sceleria, which scales better than any other nation but everyone knows it and rushes them ASAP.
Thank you! Thugs are my weakness. I think you've convinced me to give mp another try.