Reaper's Due and Defensive Pagan tribes gameplay.

Hi!

Reaper's Due and the free patch that came with it gave a little more flavor to defensive pagans, which had nothing except a feast every 5 years or so(West African had nothing :) ). Free patch 2.6 added three new intrigue actions for defensive pagans.

1. Summon Devout Warriors - we are allowed to summon 2000 event troops for 200 piety in the defensive wars against heathens. This is a funny thingy where an OPM can summon a deathstack of 12k warriors out of thin air. As I saw on reddit many players still don't know about it.
2. Worship Ancestors - We can ask our ancestors for few things: companionship, luck in war, prosperity, wisdom and health. Of course one of these favors won't be for free. We can sacrifice a part of our body, prisoner, some money to throw a feast, or just carve a small idol for small sum of money. I think that it doesn't matter what we do, the outcome is random. But, from my experience worshiping ancestors will grant us a positive outcome 70% of the times, 25% it will be failure and 5% nothing will happen. There is plenty of the outcomes, I don't want to spoil all the fun for you. Play a tribe and see for yourself!
3. Patron Deity - I think this is very OP thing. We can select one patron deity from four choices. Each of them gives +2 to a stat (except learning) and takes away another, example +2martial-1diplo. It is not a big deal, but events associated with these patrons are super strong. I will mention few. +2 diplo patron will boost of fertility and grant global opinion bonuses, +2 martial can boost our martial score and increase levy size in our capital by 25%! +2 intrigue can boost our intrigue score and reveal plots. And finally the real banger is +2 stewardship patron, we can get prosperity level 3 within 2 years, and another bonus called blessed lands +20% tax bonus in our capital. Level 3 prosperity + blessed lands + trade route+4 lvl market village can give us a decent income (for a tribe). Not to mention we can become friends with people who worship the same patron as us.

With these changes defensive pagans are actually capable of defending themselves and not get destroyed after few years. Nice and quite important thing is that AI will always summon piety/prestige warriors if the have less levies than their enemy. Overall Slavic, West African, Romuva and Suomenusko are finally playable and I am having a blast playing Suomenusko Russia right now.

I recommend start somewhere in Mali or Poland and start kicking ass with not-bad-at-all defensive pagans!