[LintMan]

Great post, Blitz. I'm playing an Arco game right now myself and have some questions/comments.

1) What is the independent difficulty level you have in mind here? Does a no (or low)-magic wyrm stand up well against level 7-9 indies? How about your elephant/hypaspist army?

2) You avoid the routing trampler problem by grouping your elephants in with your hyps: The elephants don't hurt the overall morale too much by doing that? Also - if your elephants are lumped in with your main melee units, don't you end up with lots of situations where your elephants end up standing around in the middle of a mass of your own units, while your very front row of units does most of the work?

3) I don't think you mention chariots at all - do you think they're not worth it? As I see it, they're smaller (size 5 = less damage) and more easily killed, but they're also far cheaper (30 vs 100, I think), and have 1 extra morale over the elephant.

4) I'd prefer to use tramplers in a flanking role, where they can race ahead and devastate the enemy. But of course, then I get the morale/routing problems. I've seen a recommendation to group a few heart companions with the tramplers to help keep their morale up. I tried this and it helped a little, but not really enough. Can you group elephants with stuff like mindless 50-morale vine men/ogres to get a much bigger morale benefit?

5) You seem to prefer hypaspists over hoplites. To me, the hypaspists seem to cost more and have less armor and a shorter weapon than hoplites. The only benefit is they are faster - is that worth it?

6) You also slightly mention Cardaces, but not Peltasts. I like putting a big group of Peltasts on "fire closest" behind a wall of hoplites, which seems to work fairly well. I haven't seen much use for Cardaces, though.

7) I like your staff of storms/no missile unit army plan. Slingers are stinky. I'm guessing, though, it must make the attrition rate for your melee-ers a good bit higher, since they'll have to do most of the killing.

8) I love the priestesses, but I sometimes find it frustrating that the tend to start casting wimpy 1-nature buffs once their scripts run out, rather than, say, "sermon of courage" or banishment. For my priestess-prophet, it's even more annoying when they're casting Protection on some slingers instead of casting Fanaticism! Do you find yourself sometimes wishing Arco had a Holy-3 non-mage as well, like I do?

9) I also think the lack of a cheaper Holy-2 priest is a bit of a gap for Arco. The high cost of a priestess (110 vs say 50 for a H-2 priest), makes me tend to have less of them in my armies, making me more vulnerable to undead. Indie priests are easy to find, but I often don't think to recruit them.

10) Another Arco weakness is death magic. It takes some effort (and a lot of death gems) to bootstrap your way up to be able to cast the higher-level death summons.

11) While priestesses might be more efficient researchers, cost-wise, I would never recruit them expressly for that purpose. I'd much rather spend the extra 70 gold for a roll of the dice on a mystic. I can never have enough level 2 and 3 elemental path mystics for site searching and item forging, and of course they also research when not doing those things. And for pure research, I rely on sages once I can find some.