[Amorphous]

You seem a bit hung up about the spine devils.

Please consider that 40 of them represent a major investment at the stage of the game you are talking about. Since they cost 3 slaves and a blood 2 mage turn per unit in addition to the requirement of a researched level of blood they are at least the equivalent of 120 blood slaves and 200 research points. You need to make a commensurate investment as Machaka to get the sort of result you want.

Machaka is primarily a mage nation, and this is where you should look for power. You do not summon a wave of cheap troops, that is what low resource troops and spiders are for. You blight your enemy's capital, spread disease among his troops and poisons his land. To battle you bring your mighty sorcerers that frighten, curse and burn the rabble that your enemy managed bring against you. Then you feed upon the corpses and dance upon a dead god's grave.

Sure, a lot of spiders and men will die against tough oponents, but who cares? Machakan spears are the blades of the singing grass of the savannah and the layers of crawling spiders in the Machakan forests are countless. Let lesser nations worry about troops dying - Machaka always has more.


To put the raving aside, you have top notch mages - use them. Most of your mages can self-buff with Eagle Eyes, which makes them deadly accurate. You can get far with the usual fire evocations, but where that is not effective - say against Abysian troops - you have things like Magma Bolts as well as poison and stun damage. And frighten is always fun.

With your very resource cheap archers, Flame Arrows is ridiculously good against practically anything not fire immune.

There are plenty of battlefield spells that goes very well with your cheap and fast troops. Look at spells like Iron Bane and Curse of Stones to get an idea of what you can do.


Finally, do not underestimate spiders. Poison is rather effective in a lot of situations and those wonderful webs makes everyone very easy to hit. While all varieties of spiders have their place, the vast majority of those you buy should be the resource cheap ones, so you should have a lot of them.

Edit:
CBM changes things around a bit, but not that much really. Flame Arrows is harder to cast and Fever Fetishes are not available, which makes fire gems less plentyfull, but at this early stage it does not matter that much. Dragon Master does make greater utilization of Fire Drakes economical, though. And that helps against Abysia.