[MaxWilson]

As far as I'm concerned, blood thorns on skratti ARE a new idea, and that's the most valuable thing I got out of the Baalz' guide (plus the usefulness of the berserking axes to mostly counter awe and fear--and dual-wielding athames and axes was also new to me). I'd heard skratti suggested before as thugs, but Quickness is usually a turnoff for me because of critical hits from fatigue, so I discounted that suggestion whenever I heard it, but Baalz changed my mind. Yes, many of the tactics Niefelheim can use are not unique to Niefelheim, and I'm dubious about the effectiveness of some enthusiastic suggestions, but skrattir really do have some unique synergies and I appreciate Baalz pointing them out.

I have no idea if I just disagreed with you or not, HoneyBadger.

One thing I'll mention here that I haven't mentioned recently: if you take a province with thugs and don't have time to besiege it, blood-hunting is a great way to shut it down for a few turns. Since you get d6 unrest for every slave found, and a skratti with B2 has a 60% chance of generating 5.5 slaves on average, about 7 skrattir blood-hunting should spike unrest to 100 and prevent recruitment on the round you move away.

On the other hand, I have to say that I've been a little disappointed with the skratti thugs in tests. Even the suggested SC builds (with armor and such) are great at dishing out damage, but less durable than I expect thugs to be, probably because of the -def from berserk. I expect a SC to be able to take out an army reliably, and in my tests my skratti approximations sometimes lose to armies even when there are 3 or more of them. They fare significantly better when there are some Jotun Hirdmen mixed in with them, though, so for now I'm thinking of the skratti as basically arty mages: you need chaff to absorb the hits while the skratti dish out the damage. And the axe is pretty nice against other SCs (causes chest wounds, apparently no MR resist).

Against the skrattir, Skelly spam (or Raise Dead spam) does work out pretty well too, because berserk skratti pick up 5 fatigue per round (7 if quickened) and have low enough def that zombies can actually hit them sometimes. And of course paralyze is great if they're still at the base MR 14. The advantage to all the blood items is that you're only spending gold, not "real" gems, and of course national mages also only cost gold (which is why I love nations w/ good recruitable-anywhere mages).

Anyway, I love the fact that I'm actually worrying about skratti as a problem. I wish every nation scared me as much as Niefelheim does currently--I've always worried about the giants and their cold auras but now they have a reliable SC-killer too, and I think it's great.

-Max