[Blitz]

Myrmidons can hold their own against giants, since you can easily have three times their number with enough cheap castles producing them.

I don't know which is more amusing, myrmidons "easily" holding their own against giants, or being able to mass produce them with any effectiveness. Obviously cheriots are bad against giants, that was the point.

Forging is certainly _not_ a wash. GE Arco has access to almost every elemental item, and most of the astral items as well.

On the surface, it might seem that arco has the edge, but when you consider that most players use elemental magic on their pretender (air/water/earth), and not as much sorcery, you will find that it's much easier to fill the forging gaps as Jotunheim. GE gets paths FAWES, while jotun get WSDNB. Their strengths are different, but there's no clear edge to Arco.

Philosophers give you a huge lead in your research ability, since they are both extremely cheap, and extremely efficient researchers.

I hear this a lot. That advantage completely vanishes if jotunheim finds sages. It's an advantage to be sure, but it's a capitol only troop that dosen't do anything BETTER than the seithkona... it does it cheaper. GE can only recruit one per turn. Since jotunheim can generally expand faster than GE, often this advantage in COST seems more important than it really is. By expanding quicker, jotunheim has a moderately good chance of finding sages, and even without finding them, they can often make up the gold difference between a seithkona and a philosopher.

I guess the best question to ask would be this... would you rather recruit philosophers or seithkona? One does one thing better than any other unit... and slightly better than a sage. The other was the winner of my "Best mage under 100 gold" poll. Comparing the two seems silly.

It is highly debatable whether the Norna is superior to the mystic, since that requires you to make a judgement on whether a mage that is limited entirely to sorcery is better than one that has access to both elemental magic and astral magic.

I'm surprised you want to debate this, but maybe I shouldn't be. The norna is a better astral mage, and has access to level 3 death as well. She costs 220 to 180, but has an extra magic path. I'm a huge fan of the mystic, but if given the choice I'd prefer the norna. I imagine that's a matter of taste, but I think you might concede there's certianly no huge advantage to arco in magery... especially when you consider the Jotun Skratti, Norna, and Seithkona are available to jotun, compared to GE's single mage.

This is especially true when you consider that Jotunheim will never have a dozen or so mages that can cast astral fires.

GE will never have a dozen mages able to cast relief, drain life, or raise skeletons. I'd rather have a norna, but it's not a massive edge either way.