Dominions 5 Wiki

What we will cover here are:

• Pretender Design
• Early Expansion
• Research Goals
• Matchups
• Raiding
• Magic
• Small communion details
• Summons that are worth spending time on
• Site Searching
• Item Creation

These are very important aspects when it comes to exploring Pythium as a nation and deserve to be looked at in detail.

NOTE: If you disagree with any of these, then feel free to message me on discord. It should be easy to find me and I am always willing to adapt my views if the reasoning is good enough.

Pythium is a very powerful nation in the midgame. They have very good researchers and early game troops, allowing them to handily fend off rushes by several nations. However they do have their weaknesses so ultimate pretender design is of course up to personal preference.

Here are some of the designs I like using and others that I consider viable given certain situations.

Note: The following segment needs work since I am doing this without access to the game or pretender design it is based mostly around memory… I will not go into too much detail yet.

• Drakon

An option mostly for blitzes, this will prevent several early game rush nations(mostly elf nations) from being very annoying in the early game, as well as give you really good earth and nature site searching. The big flaws for this design is that you will probably have to empower in earth to get matrixes or empower lars in astral for the access. Since I do believe crystal matrix access is very important for MA Pythium. Use this if you are in a match with few players and you don't feel confident about your understanding of the nation.

• Frost Father

My preferred pretender is dormant relative rainbow. I will post gyazo links to the design and then explain the resoning behind said design.

https://gyazo.com/864202048ab6a472ac856f1bc4496153

The reasoning behind the bless is mostly mage related. It prevents mass aoe spells from killing your mages and communion slaves to a large degree. Will make you immune to several spells such as fire storm, fv(assuming you either go 10-15 pr or cast resist poison with N1 mages), most of the cloud spells, and reducing the effectiveness of air elementals vs your mages. The penetration can be replaced with far caster depending on preference. Unaging can also be removed for higher poison resist and some hp to regen 2 hp on communion slaves instead of 1.

I will talk about base expanding strategies with this pretender and these scales in mind.

• Freak Lord

Very interesting approach in that you can get into relatively good blood. It does sacrifice some aspects but does open up high blood by itself. If you are fine with slowly gathering blood slaves over the course of the game this pretender can break you into heliophagi, vampires, arch devils, and demon lords.

• Divine Emperor

Lack of hand slot makes this pretender relatively bad at getting to air boosters. However the 4 misc slots make him the best design for casting arcane nexus from a low level of astral. A very solid approach but not quite a frost father in regards to pure design bless on an elemental rainbow.

• Frost Father
• Divine Emperor
• Oracle

• Turn 1:
  • Here we start off with a normal Centurion or an Emerald Lord, and queue up a Theurg Acolyte. Our unit recruitment will be one standard, 20 or so retiarius, and then the rest of your resources into preferential picks. Remember to prophet your starting commander for a better expansion and spreading your scales early on.
• Turn 2:
  • Here we finish our recruitment by completing the Theurg Acolyte and another Centurion/Emerald Lord. We will do the same recruitment of units to get 3 expanding parties out. For the actual expansion, aim to expand with your prophet and his starting army, while grouping the standard with the retiri on the commander you recruited turn one for +2 morale which will definitely help a lot vs the early indies. This should get you new provinces during turn 2 for a total of 3 provinces at the start of turn 3 allowing you to start up some solid unit production very early on.