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 ====== Maerlande's Guide to Pretender Design Analysis ======
-//Am I an uber vet?  Does it matter?  If you are reading this, I'm probably a hell of a lot better than you. Mwahahahaha :D//
-//This guide was written for Dominions 3.  I am updating it now to dominions 5 although I am tempted to leave the Late Age Pan example as written for Dominions 3.//
-//If you want to comment on the guide we will be adding a comment section//
-There ya go!  I have opened the gates to confrontation and abuse!
-Here's the story.  You joined a game and you got a nation.  Let's just guess that you got a nasty random and are stuck playing some nightmare like Late Age Pangaea.  That recently happened to me although it wasn't the fault of anyone else.  I deliberately chose a nation that bores the shit out of me and seems like a desperate cripple.  But, I went ahead and made a pretender and played the game.
-====== Step 1: Review what your nation has. ======
-Start up a test game with the correct mods required by your game.  Just take a default pretender and look over your troops.
-===== General Review =====
-You want to ask these questions.
-  * What kind of sacred units do I get?
-    * Are they capital only?
-  * What kind of sacred commanders and magi do I get?
-    * Are they capital only?
-  * Do I have any other capital only units?
-    * Do they have special abilities?
-  * Do I have capital only commanders or magi?
-  * What are my common magic paths? Is this capital dependent?
-  * What magic randoms will I get and how can they synergize?
-  * What sort of researchers do I get? Sacred?  Low cost?  Recruit anywhere?
-An example will help here. LA Pangaea has the ??Dryad Hoplite?? sacred with 14 protection, Awe, formation fighter and a nice shield.  It's a very sweet unit.  However, it's 30 gold, 20 resources, 25 recruitment points and are capital only.  I can't make a design around that without ensuring enough resources and dominion strength to make lots of them. The rest of the units are non-sacred.
-For magi LA Pangaea has no cap-only options - all mages can be recruited in all your forts. It has the wonderful ??Dryad#705??, the ??Centaur Sage#2479?? and the ??Pan#706??.  The dryad quickly shows as your research core.  {{path>N1H1}} sacred with 7 rp for 160 gold and stealthy. A fine unit to make a lot of and has solid battle magic potential and leadership for sacreds with leader 40.  All around it's a unit better than many national non-magic commanders and those lovely bonii.  As well, all of Pan has recuperation so you will never worry about afflictions.
-===== Troops Review =====
-Now you need to look carefully at the statistics of your national units.  Things to watch for include:
-  * Do my units get good att, def, or str stats?
-  * Do I have precision bonus?
-  * Do I have cost effective archers? (10 gold or less and low resource)
-  * Do I get high power ranged attacks?  (long or composite bows.  Strong javelins.  High str sticks and stones.)
-  * Do I have high protection units (15+) and what defence do they have?
-  * Do I have units with extra high enc?  (eg. Atlantis)
-  * Do I have other bonii? (recuperation, stealth, tower shields, fast move)
-Back to LA Pan for our example. We've got the ??Harpy#239??.  Doesn't look like much but 7 gold/1 res/3 rec for a flying stealthy patroller.  We can potentially do stuff with THAT!  Looking over the other units there are some great ones.  LA Pan has good solid troops.  What it is clearly missing are the great stealthy raiders of EA and MA.  The satyr sneaks of LA are flimsy chaff that can't kill anything.  They are not anywhere comparable to the revellers of the previous ages.  But there is a gem.  The ??Minotaur Soldier?? has good protection, a heavy hitting weapon and trample with enc 5!  You might be tempted by the ??Grove Guard?? but look close.  It's got 3 more protection, berserk, and some other benefits.  But it's 25% more gold and 20% more resources.  It also has 2 more encumberance, and 2 less map move.  These are tramplers!  What matters is how long they can trample and how fast they can trample and how many you can mass. So in this analysis the Soldiers easily win out.
-Now we see that we have very solid troops that are good anywhere.  What to put with it?  It needs some screening.  Well early game let's probably stick with dryad hoplites.  They cost a LOT more than Satyr Hoplites but versus any not undead melee troops they will live far far longer.  And that has nothing to do with any bless.  So our core army will probably be Dryad Hoplites and Minotaurs for quite a while.  How good is this army?  More on that later.
-Another key thing to note.  <del> You have ZERO ranged ability.  The basic satyr has javelins but NO shield.  The have protection 6, lousy morale, and are most likely suicide units.  You won't be using a ranged combat strategy with troops.  Personally they aren't worth buying.</del> Pan has two ranged options: the ??Satyr Sniper?? and the ??Centauride Crossbow??. Both have decent protection, but with the Centauride Crossbow you pay a higher cost for the Centaur chassis - and it doesn't even have a helmet! If you want ranged troops you are better off with the Sniper. They cost more than independent crossbows but in return you get decent slightly more durable ranged troops.
-But what about later when capital only infantry won't be enough?  Do we have anything?  Sure. There is a damn fine cavalry in the ??Centaur Cataphract#698??. But they are high resource. It's going to take a very specific situation to choose those over more minotaurs. For infantry you've got the very good and cheap on gold ??Satyr Hoplite#697??.  But you won't be buying many if you don't have some production.  The one thing completely missing for Pan is a decent light infantry blocker.  The Satyr with shield has only a buckler and any monkey lover worth his salt will remind you bucklers are nearly useless.
-I see a clear conclusion developing here.  If we want to do anything with armies we better take some production.
-===== Mage Review =====
-The magi you can buy largely determine your middle and late game potential.  Troops are still important but the core of your ability to project power will be summons, forging, and battle magic.  Global spells have some effect but I find they are overrated.  Too much fighting over globals can burn up precious resources better used to win fights.
-Here are some questions to ask about your magi:
-  * What is my primary magic?  Most nations have one best path.
-  * What is my secondary magic path?
-  * Do those two paths synergize?  For example take fire and earth for magma magic.
-  * What kind of tertiary paths do I have?
-  * In the tertiary paths am I stuck with level 1's or do I have a good shot at level 2's.  I define a good shot as a 50% random of 4 options.  10% randoms with more than one path are near junk.
-  * What boosters can I forge with my national magi?
-  * What boosters will I really need to project power?  Example: If you have only A3 magi you won't be able to make any air boosters.  This could be crippling.
-  * What cross path summons, forgings, and battle magic fight my nation?  Example: Atlantis has a superb chance to make Manifest Vitriol.
-  * Am I missing any critical magic paths that I will be crippled without.  The most common one here is a lack of astral.
-  * What about my priests?  Do I have recruitable H3's?  Or can I get H2's that I can boost with crystal shields?
-  * Are any of my magi tough enough to be thugs too?  Self buffing thugs are extremely powerful since they need very little equipment.  Examples are the Arcoscephale ??Oriead??s or Kailasa ??Yaksha??.
-  * So I have movement problems?  Watch out for MM1 magi.  You'll have trouble getting them to battle if you need them.
-  * Do I have age problems?  Abysia is by far the worst case here.  A method to manage it may be required.
-So back to the example of my LA Pangaea build.  Looking over the magi you have the excellent researchers in ??Dryad#705??s for 160 gold with {{path>N1H1}}.  Pretty darn fine but what can you do with them in battle?  Well, they will do damn fine with bows and eagle eyes.  That's a valid option and they have leadership so you can stealth about.  Sadly, from troop review you have crap for stealthy troops.
-Next up you have the ??Centaur Sage#2479??, a 90 gold {{path>S1}} mage with 100% chance of either A, W, E or N, and 11 rp. **analysis here**
-Finally you have the ??Pan#706??, a {{path>E2N3}} slow-to-recruit mage. Sadly the randoms are 10% with 4 paths.  That's all but crap.  You might as well ignore the randoms and assume you will get {{path>E2N3}} magi forever.  But they aren't sacred and bloody damn expensive.  Pan has an upkeep problem.  What should we do?  You want the Pans but for battle you'll need earth boots or Evo 7 to get storm of thorns which is about the only reliable Nature fighting spell.  You get the great nature battle buffs but those are high level too and what do you do early game?  Spam swarm?  Not a bad option and a hell of a spell used correctly.  Still, pans are great magi but you'll go broke buying too many.  There is also the amazing spell transformation which can massively improve your upkeep problems.  But it costs N gems.  More on that later.
-<del>Now for the capital.  The Panic Apostate is D2N3.  Sort of wimpy really.  You have N3 already and death plus nature is not a powerful cross path.  The only good thing that comes to mind is Lamia Queens but... nature gems again.  Wtf!  How will we pay for all these nature summons?  However, a bit of a sleeper is the black dryad.  They don't look like much but with D1N1H1 there is a ton of stuff you can do.  Forge Bows of Botulf and Banefire Crossbows with eagle eyes!  Now that's solid.  Your Panic Apostates can spam Skull Staves to boost up to D2.  Clearly you'll need death gem income.  But the potential is there and the Black Dryads are sacred.  Also cheap at 150 gold.  Can you leverage this enough to make for real power?  Frankly, my feeling is no because I suck balls with LA Pan.  But it's theoretically very solid.</del>
-====== Step 2: Develop a Grand Strategy ======
-We've gone over what we can recruit and what we have for magic paths.  The next questions come to what to do?  I look at the grand strategy decision from a broad perspective and I break it up into three game phases.  In general, you can be good at two phases but rarely good at all three.  How you manage that is key to winning.
-==== Phase 1: Early game ====
-What is the early game?  The period when research doesn't much matter.  This is key.  You are working with armies and you pretender if available soon enough.
-Early game is expansion and early rushing.  Let's go over expansion first.  Most nations can do extremely well expanding with an awake pretender.  But that always costs late game power.  Can you expand without one?  In real multiplayer games a practical expansion is 15 or so provinces per player.  Some folks shoot for 20+ but the reality is that usually leads to an early death by a gang up.  In graphs off games it's more viable but in the normal graphs on games a huge nation is SUCH a target.  I prefer to expand moderately and keep in the average size.  I play for the win, not to be big fast.
-Early expansion is very easy with heavy bless or an awake SC pretender.  Without those you need some scripting skill.  Practice fighting with the minimum troops required and you'll do just fine. Do you have powerful expansion troops?
-__LA Pan Example__
-Let's look at Pan.  I ran some tests and learned that very small squads (5-10) of Dryad Hoplites set center on hold attack to draw the opponents with a pair of small minotaur squads on both back flanks ate most anything.  So these fairly cheap squads led by independent commanders did a fine job.  For larger armies I simply added more.  The hoplites hold off cavalry quite well with awe and Minotaurs can chop up cavalry with their axes given.  Looking over the hoplites I realized they work fine without a bless and this saved a lot of points for other options.
-Other nations may have more complex needs.  A nation like Neifelheim with giants can mow down near anything with an E9N6 bless and a couple giants.  That's the simple version.  But what about challenging nations like Bandar Log?  The troops are very meh and it's hard to make the strong ones when you are really going to want sloth 3 and leverage summons for troops in mid game.  With solid scripting you can expand very well with Atavi archers and screen troops as long as you are careful what you target.  But the traditional view was always to use an awake SC.  Personally, I very rarely take an awake SC unless it provides something very important to the nation.  The one case where I really like an awake SC is with EA R'lyeh since bless is a waste and it's all scales.  The Kraken is dirt cheap, needs no magic, and provides a strong disincentive for the other water nations to rush you before you can roll out your astral magic.
-The last key point in early game planning is how to manage a rush?  The easiest method is usually alteration magic and prepare to roll out your research magi.  Earthmeld, numbness and a number of other alteration spells can take the pain out of the typical early rush by uber blessed sacreds.  This though is nation dependent and you need to think about it.
-==== Phase 2: Mid Game ====
-What is the mid game?  In my view it's period of the game when research begins to matter.
-I consider mid game to begin when expansion is complete and diplomacy and maneuver starts up in a big way.  It tends to be dominated by armies and/or thugs with some mage support but research needs are very critical so magi are quite busy.  Do you have some solid mid game options?  Things to look for are recruitable or summonable thugs you can gear cheap.  I try to limit thugs to a total cost of 15 gems.  My classic is a regular bane with a brand and cheap shield.  I don't go for 10 gem shields on banes.  It's too much.  This is very viable for Pan.
-It's also when you MUST site search in earnest.  Due to the distribution of sites, manual search with magi with duel or triple paths is by far the most efficient.  Having looked over Pan's options I am thinking of going with a site searching rainbow pretender who rolls out on turn 12.  I don't go for awake rainbows.  12 turns of searching is nice, but you really don't have a way to use the gems that early and it's a cost of 3+ scales which hurts.  Turn 12 you can escort your pretender or best option you have researched Thaumaturgy 1 and you have Returning.  That's by far the safest option to protect a site searching pretender.  Give it some extra pearls, script returning and not much can ever harm you.  A thing you will really want is to work on Construction research, find a few air gems, and gets some flying boots on that pretender.  It makes moving to search much more efficient.
-So the needs of gems, armies, thugs and research will heavily impact your pretender design.  Can you leverage your national power and still not leave any glaring gaps in your options?  Will you have a way to eat a neighbour?  It's the time of the game to look at weaker neighbours and plan to be in the winning group.  Games usually narrow down to the 3-4 real competitors for the win by now.
-Many nations can start to convert from recruitable armies to summoned armies.  This is a time to look carefully at the cost/benefit of summons.  There are some VERY efficient summons which hold up well late game and there are a lot of inefficient summons.  However, some of the inefficient summons have niche use such as shoring up a defence in the early game during a rush.
-__LA Pan Example__
-Pan has an obvious choice.  Manikins and the Carrion leaders.  But it's a lot of nature gems.  We better plan to get Mother Oak up fast.  This will probably require some luck with randoms on pans or a booster or two so you may need some construction research.  I prefer to avoid having my pretender cast too many globals to avoid the loss.  You may want to try Carrion Woods but I found that spell very awkward to really use.  The manikins are undead and appear everywhere.  It's a frustrating pile of micro to collect them and form armies.  And if you don't collect them anyone with a scout can kill them with a Holdx5, retreat script.
-====Phase 3: Late Game====
-What is late game?  This is the period of the game when research dominates.
-Unless you are playing on very small maps with few players you will need a late game plan.  Here are some classic late game plans.
-  - Be massive huge and walk over everyone.  This is the basis behind most major bless builds since they begin to stall out as late game approaches.  If you aren't already the biggest and baddest economy you will find the high magic late game counters very painful.  Huge swarms of tripled blessed jags are completely useless versus teleport master enslave.
-  - Dominate the world with crazy piles of freespawn.  The classics are EA and MA Pan, LA Ermor, EA R'lyeh and LA R'lyeh.  But this method also requires serious magic buffing since freespawn chaff dies like flies without huge buffs.  Your plan will require a hard push for the big army buffs: Will of the Fates, Army of Gold/Lead, Massed X, etc etc.
-  - Roll out lethal squads of battle magi.  Blood and astral come to mind as the tops for this option.  Most other paths suffer because by late game 100% resistance to the elements is not hard.  I strongly recommend this plan includes a huge push for very broad diversity.  It is also my favourite late game plan.  I also like to add squads of elite troops and elite summons as both heavy meat in front of magi and for tactic specific methods such as storm flyers landing in the rear.
-  - Thugs and super combatants.  I'm going to list this as a grand plan but personally it's deeply flawed.  These should be included in any plan and need support.  There is no such thing as an invulnerable SC.  Too often I see folks going this route and forgetting to back up those 200 gem SC's.  Along comes a custom counter and poof.  All those gems are gone.
-  - Put up game winning globals.  The obvious culprits are Utterdark, Burden of Time, Arcane Nexus or Astral Corruption.  However, these are suicide if you don't have the resources to hold off the inevitable attacks from everyone.  On the other hand, if you don't plan to put these up pretty early, you will have a slim hope of doing so.
-  - Put up lynch pin globals.  TheDemon reminded me of this.  It's not by itself a game winning strategy but it's very important.  All of the gem generating globals fit here as well and very valuable globals like Gift of Health.  These are not globals that force your opponents to team up to kill you and you can great value.  The important thing to consider is how you will cast them.  Can you use national magi?  Do you need some construction and boosters?  Is this a job for your pretender?  Even an odd spell like The Looming Hell can play here.  It's a weak global but very cheap and a great deterrent to limit raiding.
-  - A massive blood economy and sacrifice slaves for the dominion kill.  This is only viable for a few nations but it's very effective when done right.  I won't go into great detail on this option.
-__LA Pan Example__
-Looking hard at Pan I feel my best option is to have a very strong economy and especially a very strong gem income.  So I'm going to search all paths at level 2 with a rainbow pretender and build armies of thugs, sc's, and elite summons.  This means great scales and intense site searching.  I will plan for the two key globals with Pan: Mother Oak and Carrion Woods but I won't bother with fighting over Gift of Health because Pan's units all have recuperation.  These two globals can be cast by pans with a booster or two and the rainbow can easily make moonvine bracelets.  Then I will back it up with a broad group of multi path magi using those gems and the EDM summons to ensure I have diversity of battle magic.
-Testing has shown I can expand very well.  Not as good as some but more than adequate and with some good diplomacy I should be a tough nut to crack and able to hold my own until the battle magic rolls out.
-===== Step 3: Analyzing your opponents =====
-You chosen or been given your nation.  You've clearly looked over your options and have a pretender concept in mind and some tactics for the different activities.  What about those wankers who are ALSO in the game?  What a pain in the ass.  If single player was at least a competent challenge I could avoid the agony of getting beat by other players.  And let's face, even the best player loses about 5/6 games or 9/10 depending on their preferred game size.
-What are we looking for?  Let's go over some obvious major issues.
-  * Nasty dominions.
-  * Dangerous sacreds.
-  * Powerhouse blood.
-  * Blood sacrifice.
-  * Stealthy thugs.
-  * Recruitable SC's
-You can't predict all the things that your opponents will do.  But you can make general predictions.  Is EA Niefelhiem in the game?  They will probably base their strategy on Jarls and a monster bless.  What do you do?  I don't have all the answers and it's a tough thing to measure.  But you will have a rough time if you do not consider your opponents fundamental goals.
-Let's break it down.  You have say 9 opponents.  Look at their nations.  What will they likely do?  Try to have a plan for the most obvious actions.  Sure it's hopeless to plan for everything but the key is to keep in mind the obvious actions.  This section of my guide is in some ways the weakest but in others the most critical.  I can't hold your hand through every situation you might encounter but the point is to keep things in your plan.  Look over who you have to face.  What might they do and most importantly what things they might do that are most dangerous to you.
-__LA Pan Example:__
-My opponents in this game were (including their most obvious strengths):
-  * Bogarus - incredible research, solid blood magic, and communions
-  * Mictlan - superb blood magic, dominion sacrifice
-  * Ermor - massive freespawn armies and horrifically toxic dominion
-  * R'lyeh - great astral magic, underwater, very toxic dominion
-  * Jomon - diverse magic, underwater forts and province defence
-  * Midgard - skinshifters, air magic
-  * Ulm - blood magic, strong heavy infantry, freespawn
-My greatest worry was Ermor since it's land become a barren waste land and my plan for a strong economy would have been hampered if Ermor was my neighbour.  This did happen and was a great problem.  In hindsight, I worried about the wrong opponent.  Mictlan won this game.
-===== The Wrap Up =====
-I have chosen to not list other national choices.  If you have worked the analysis you should have an idea of what to do.  Here is what I did.  Btw, it didn't work :)
-==== The Pretender Archtypes ====
-I use these archtypes to guide my pretender design.  You can clearly hybridize but you may weaken the functionality.
-  - The Awake Expander (design to fit fighting awake naked)
-  - The Bless Chassis (Design is all about the bless you need)
-  - The site searching rainbow (basically 2 in every path)
-  - The artifact forging rainbow (The Magic Booster guide explains this one quite well)
-  - The key spell pretender: Such as Pan getting a Carrion Woods caster out early.
-  - The all scales pretender
-==== The Pretender Plan: Late Age Pangaea ====
-I've put this all together.  The key choice is diversity.  I'll make a pretender that can site search for a broad gem income and forge a pile of good stuff.  What does that really mean?  Well, for site searching, the game system is pretty simple.  Level 2 in a path finds 90% of all sites in that path.  So if you want a huge gem income with the least effort a rainbow pretender with 2's in paths does it most efficiently.
-But for forging there are other considerations.  Most paths have a clear booster path using level 2 path base. Some need cross paths and there is an excellent guide on the wiki on how to do this.  <del>to be added link</del>
-The exception is air magic.  There is no low path air booster.  The first air booster is Air4 path requirement and the only other option are the challenging Staff of Elemental Mastery or artifacts.  The staves are available with 2 weird cross paths: Air and Earth or Fire and water.  So to reliably get the ability to max out all paths you require Air4.
-Having decided that my end game is diversity to the max and a monster gem income I am making a rainbow.  I don't subscribe to the theory that year one gems are useful.  Searching in year 1 too much is just an invitation to be killed.  I'm going dormant.
-Here is my plan.  I'll go dormant.  My pretender will arrive right about turn 12.  Given my armies are solid and my expansion is tested, the pretender can site search right away.  But I do want good scales.
-I chose a crone.  The crone is the cheapest rainbow chassis by a long shot.  3 base magic paths and 4 misc slots.  The big disadvantage is no body slot.  Beyond that it rocks. Scales are:
-Order 3
-Production 1
-Heat 3
-Growth 3
-Luck 0
-Magic 1
-Now to pick magic.  I have already decided to be a monster site searcher so that is 2 in every path.  But Air needs 3 for boosters assuming a Ring of Wizardry eventually.  I chose:
-{{path>F2A3W2E2S4D2N2B2}}
-This design had 7 points remaining.  A very nice thing about rainbow chassis is you can keep very low remaining points.
-Some may wonder why S4?  My plan requires the ability to make Rings of Wizardry.  Without native high astral this is tough.  But S4 and E2 make Crystal Coins and Starshine Skullcaps to get to S6.  It's potentially possible to work with s3 but there is always a risk of magic duel.  I prefer S4 on rainbow pretenders.
-Last but not least is Dominion.  I didn't leave much room.  I can only take Dominion 5.  I will have to be careful but Pan gets very cheap temples.  I'll have to aggressively make temples and defend them.  Pan also gets stealthy preachers in the dryads.  This gives the potential to push dominion on the borders.
-==== The Sacrifices ====
-  - I will not have an easy time putting up Mother Oak or Gift of Health
-  - I will probably never get Carrion Woods going which is a very powerful national spell but a micro management nightmare.  The undead manikins need leadership and LA Pan does not get undead leaders in province defence.  You can have all your manikins killed by a simple scout attack.
-  - I am betting on a good late game at the sacrifice of an early rush potential.
-  - I will struggle to maintain strong dominion.
-==== Addendum ====
-An alternate pretender chassis was brought to my attention by Calahan.  The freak lord can do much the same things as the crone for the gain of a body slot and loss of one miscellaneous slot.  I like 4 miscellaneous slots but you can't make great use of the 4th.  And a body slot is very important.  Additionally, the freak lord is much tougher and can fight if needed.
-The comparable freak lord ends up with slightly different scales:
-O3P1H3G3Misf1M1 F2A3W2E2S4N3B2 Dom 5 and 2 remaining points.  Losing one scale in luck and gaining one nature isn't a bad trade.
-~~DISCUSSION~~
+I have rewritten this guide for Dominions 5 on my blog.  It doesn't make sense to me to maintain the guide in two different formats (blogger and wiki) I have removed it here.  The link to read it is: [[https://grogmission.blogspot.com/2020/09/dominions-5-pretender-design-and.html|Pretender Design and Analysis by Maerlande]]

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