[Makinus]

In the past few days i´ve been looking at the discussion in this thread and tried playing Machaka with both schemes (bless strategy/riderless spiders strategy) to see what my mileage gets...

After some SP playing i find that the riderless spider strategy is unbeatable in the early game, and gets much more bang for the buck than the big blessed spiders strategy...

The big blessed spiders, at least in SP, is however more powerfull after you expanded a little and is able to max produce the sacred spiders from the capital and is more effective if you are able to produce 10+ sacred spiders a turn (either via initial dominion of by building temples to increase production). About the bless i found that an E bless does little to the sacred spiders, while even a small N bless does improve a lot the sacred spiders survivability (specially their riders). A good W bless do help a lot too.


I found both fun and strategycally sound, at least in SP, to create a F2W4S4N4 great sage pretender and produce only brown spiders for the first year and a half, then, after i expanded my nation and have at least a second castle, start producing sacred spiders in the capital and brown spiders elsewhere...

On the mage front, i always produce the Sorceress and forget about the witch doctors... some Black sorcerers for their paths but research wise i leave everything in the hands of the sorceress and they are very interesting as combat commanders because of their spider forms....