The Rise of Pangaea, Turn 0

He was old.  The world had passed him by generations ago, and still he sat in his isolated hut and listened to the music of his horned friends while he read his newspaper.  

But then he felt it...the Pantokrator had fallen!  Now was his chance!  The world had gone to hell ever since they let everything get all civilized and sentient.  The withered man's form hardened as he stood up from his easy chair at long last.  He would show these whippersnappers the what for!  The world should be quiet and green, there should be none of these cities and villages cluttering up the place and ruining his view!  

It was time to war with gods.

He emerged from his hut, and as he did, the party that had gone one for centuries finally ground to a halt.  Softly, so softly, the word spread from satyr and nymph to minotaur and centaur.  It grew and grew, and soon the forest echoed with the old man's rage.


"GET OFF MY LAWN!"

And away we go.  Lilli's excellent post starts our game off here, so I'm going to jettison most of my learning material since it'd be duplicated anyway and focus instead on my own personal point of view.  You should definitely read her introduction first, though, since I'm going to be referencing it here. 

As the title says, I'm playing Pangaea.

Pangaea is about as single focused a nation as exists in Dominions 3.  That is not a good thing.  All my primary spellcasters, the Pans, have good to great nature magic, a little Earth, and a little Blood.  My only other native casters are my Dryads who have a tiny bit of Nature and are also my level 2 Priests.  That's all I've got, and while you can do a little summoning with Nature and a few other things, being totally closed out of 75% of the magic in the game is rarely a recipe for success.

However, all is not lost.  Because I have a Cranky Old Man!

Now Lilli already covered the fact that I've built Cranky to at least dabble in almost everything for casting purposes, but there's another factor at work here.  Most combat spells can be cast as is, but Ritual magic, including summoning spells, needs magic gems to fuel them.  And Pangaea only gets Nature gems.  True, they get a lot of them, but once again, being unable to fuel other spell types is a crippling disadvantage.  So I've built Cranky with the idea of being able to walk around in the wake of my armies and search for Magic Sites, which often (though not always) provides you with different types of gems.  You can only find sites of your magic level or less, so the old coot isn't going to find anything higher than level 2, but the most common sites are the level 1-2 ones, so its a trade off I'm willing to make.

I'm also hoping to find a site that gives me access to other spellcaster types as I go.  A nice Wizard site for Fire magic or a Sorceress site for Air and Astral would be perfect.  Or maybe a Necromancer site?  That'd come in real handy, because my national Summoning spells require Death magic, of which I have no gems and only Cranky able to cast in.

So why, you may be asking yourself, are you even playing Pangaea if its such a problem?  Well, its the Pans, really.  Because my Pans can autosummon a handful of berzerk naked chicks to fight for me every turn if there's Turmoil in my territory.  And by god is there Turmoil!  The advantage to this is mostly defensive.  Sure, I can (and will) throw huge waves of Maeneds at my enemies to wear them down before the guys with weapons show up to start stabbing, but the big advantage is that the autosummon keeps happening even if you're besieged!  So a fortress with a Pan or two will have its army grow and grow and grow, regardless of what the besieging army outside tries to do.  That means that if you don't show up with a huge number of guys at the outset, a Pangaea fortress can be all but impossible to breach.  I hope to take advantage of this to make it to the Midgame.

So, as the game begins, here's the plan: 

1) Expand as best I can, which, given my only so-so troops and lack of a Super Combatant like T'ien's Dragon, will be rather slow.

2) Avoid war with other players at all costs until I can get multiple fortresses up, each with a Pan or two inside to make it a huge pain in the ass to take them away from me.

3) Get Cranky out there searching to get as many sites as possible, and put Pan Fortresses on the spots with good sites. 

4) Build up my magic and try to survive to the Midgame where it starts being less and less about troops and more about magic.

That is the plan.  Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy...