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What we will cover here are the following topics(if you are interested in a specific topic then there are links in the table of contents):
Pretender Design : I will review what I consider some of the best pretender designs. Explain in detail why I choose those pretenders and hopefully convince you that they can be worthwhile choices. This will not include too much detail when it comes to the execution of strats but I will try to cover it to a certain degree.
Early Expansion : In this section I will cover what expansions I find to be the best. I will not go into every single kind of expansion but will instead talk exclusively about non-awake expansions. Awake expanders simply make expanding trivial and should therefore not be included in a detailed overview of various expansion options(in my opinion).
Research Goals : Here I will talk about what you want to research early, and why. This will be pretty in depth so if you are not a fan of theory and execution I would recommend skipping this part till a later date. I will also cover some situations and matchups where your starting research changes, explain why it changes and some situations where your pretender design also changes heavily due to matchups.
Point Buffing : Here I will teach you how to think about optimizing your own point buffing with Pythium, thinking about what it is good against, when to use it, and when not to use it.
Magic : In this section I will talk in detail about the combat magic you have access to, talking a bit about what your communions give you access to. This section will go into more detail than the research goal part about the spells you will be casting in the mid game.
It will be split into rituals and combat spells talking in detail about the spells I think are worth casting, why they are worth casting and then talking in less detail about spells I do not believe are worth casting and why they are not worth casting…
Macro : This is how I look at your kingdom management. This is overall coordinated army creations, thinking ahead a few turns and having items ready when a thug pops out, thoughts behind site searching, when to stop and when to start recruitments and how much recruitment you have to do. Research economy, gem economy, gold economy, trading, diplomacy… are all aspects of macro in dominions. NEED TO REVIEW THIS HEAVILY AND ACTUALLY DEFINE MACRO
Micro : This is how I look at the execution of your overall strategy. How you script your mages, how you position your armies, how you move your armies, etc… This is by far the most complex aspect and there is no way of writing a definitive guide on how to do this correctly. All I can do is share my thoughts, to help you as a player maybe add said ideas to your set of skills. NEED TO REVIEW THIS HEAVILY AND ACTUALLY DEFINE MICRO
TODO: Add to macro - Item creation, communions, thugging, expanding. TODO: Add to micro - Army movements, raiding, unit commands. 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.
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.
Magic Paths: 33334141
Scales: …..
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.
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.
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.
TODO : Add a video showing off expansion.
At this point you want to aim at starting your first palisade as soon as possible.
NOTE: Keep an eye out for fort completion, you want to have 1 Theurg acolyte move to the fort when there is 1 turn until it is completed in order to make a temple and then a lab to start pumping out more mages.
These turns are your buildup as you prepare for the mid game, you want to aim for at least 5 forts which will give you a very solid point to grow from, if you successfully got 20 provinces then you can easily afford to go 6-7 forts. Get up scouts from indie provinces to get a grasp of your surroundings and find a target that you can take on in the early-mid game. Opening up for your pretender popping out at 12 to site search mountains, forests, wastes, and swamps.
This might be the most important section to understanding why we do what we do and how to discover your powerspikes in relation to your neighbors. Nothing here is set in stone, but these are your early research goals with situations when you want to go for them.
Here you have two main approaches which are both very strong, depending on whether they have cold resist or not.
A list of giant nations in the Middle Ages
This is usually a very swingy type of matchup. Pythium usually struggles vs giant nations in the early game while that turns around very quickly in the mid game. As such diplomacy and raiding can be very good ways of delaying a giant nation until you have your core research up. Depending on the which nation you are facing it drastically changes your starting research though soul slay is always a very important early research rush.
First and foremost we must realize what point buffs we have available to us and the difficulty of casting said point buffs.
The easiest:
Harder:
Hardest:
These are pretty much the only point buffs Pythium has access to. Now you might think to yourself "Wow… that's a lot" however these are split very annoyingly between your units, several of thse can only be cast by lars and arch theurgs and can be said to be pretty much useless outside of very niche situations. Perhaps showing which mage can cast which buffs will put this into better perspective.
Theurg Acolyte:
Random N indie:
Arch Theurg:
Lar:
Only 3 of the point buffs listed can be cast with low commitment and outside of communion. Therefor these 3 will be the main focus of our point buffing strategies. That is not to say the other point buffs have no place in our overall strategy, but those places are few and far between.
Let us look at point buffing from the perspective of small raiding. I will split this overview into a few different scenarios, to give a better understanding of how it works.
1 theurg acolyte decides to go out and raid. He is size 2 and he can buff 2 squares while hold and attack is in effect. First of all he needs to decide what spell he should buff with:
Here we will talk about what spells are the best in this context.
If we look at Cheat Fate then we can see that it negates the first hit done to our unit. This can be relatively strong versus cavalry with lances that break after the first hit. Aside from that use, it mostly has synergy with mirror image and spells that can break upon getting hit, increasing their effective duration. However, since we are dealing with neither of those scenarios here, this spell is very lackluster for us.
Now let's look at Luck. Luck has uses for human troops, giving them a 75% chance to negate a killing blow, this is very strong and definitely something we should aim for since we want to keep our troops alive. However, unless we are dealing with an enemy that has magic weapons, this is not the optimal point buffing spell since it only kicks in if the blow would have otherwise killed our units.
If we look at Body Etherial, we can see that it has an effect that is very similar to luck. It negates 75% of ALL non magical blows, meaning that against non magical weapons it is strictly the better option. Luck and body etherial stack very well together but in order to put up an effective raiding force and keeping your mage lineup small, body etherial is our best option.
So… after looking at his options, the Theurg Acolyte decides to point buff with body etherial. Now he has to make another choice… Will he buff himself, or should he buff an extra unit that goes on the front line. In most cases buffing himself in the first turn will drastically increase his survivability due to the chance of now avoiding stray arrows that might hit him. Since he want's to stay alive he can at most lead 5 units that he "reliably" buffs into combat. (Perhaps he can get 3 buffs off on emerald guards due to their low combat speed, but even then Body Etherial is a 0 precision spell).
So, we have 1 Theurg Acolyte and x5 human troops that want to head out and capture a province. We could increase this amount to 2 Acolytes and x10 human troops. Now the only remaining thing to think about is… how much do we need for various different pd strengths.