[TheDemon]

So I thought I'd take a gander back at the pre-game talk.

DrP is up to his usual mischief here. In retrospective I'm actually not sure how much of this is tongue in cheek and how much is serious:

Originally Posted by DrPraetorious

Lessee, we got a lot of love for monkey summons:
LA Patala / LA Marig (8) - weak in death (summons fix that)
LA Ulm / Bandar Log (10) - weak in fire *and* air
However, neither of these teams is going to survive long enough to use them. Just because you *can* make a team to hand blood slaves over for monkey summons, doesn't mean you *should*.

It worked pretty well for Patala/Marig. Ulm/BL were a bit of a trainwreck though.

Three very lopsided teams:
Lanka / EA Agartha (10) - weak in ASTRAL! Oh, the hillarity.
MA Man / EA Mict (10) - weak in earth.
Saur / Machaka (10) - weak in air
Their assymetry will be their downfall. Except Lanka / EA Agartha which spent all their points for the privelege of having "victim" stenciled on their head in magic marker, which they can't see because they don't have astral.

I think this assessment was fairly close, but in all honesty I didn't see much of Sauro/Machaka.

Just plain mysterious:
EA Arco / EA C'tis (8) - This is not the 8 bid I would've expected. Must've really wanted this combo.... for SIRRUSH! That's the evil plan. Weak in blood.
MA Arco / Kailasa (9) - I agree that Kailasa is a bargain at 4, but why not make a good team? Will probably put Arco in the middle thinking that elephants will help somehow. Weak in blood, air and death.
MA TC / MA Marig (9) - Weak in death and blood. Plans to somehow conquer the world with crossbowmen.
MA Aby / MA Jot (11) - has 11 points to spend and *still* weak in earth and air. That's an achievement.
Probably one of these randomly generated pairings will luck out and win. Or all four teams will be in smoking ruins by turn 20.

Let's ignore the obvious misinformation about Aby/Jotun, and instead laugh that three of the four teams here ended up in the top 3 or 4 (Kailasa was exchanged for LA C'tis).

Finally, we come to the actually good teams:
MA Pythium / Shinuyama (11) Now *that* is what you spend 11 points on. Weak only in blood, powerful military for quick early expansion, plenty of research potential.
EA Yomi / LA Abysia (10) Weak in air and water. Strong in crushing you. With a strong researcher like LA Abysia backing them up, double-bless Dai Oni become fearsome indeed.
LA Utgard / LA Bogarus (9) Weak only in earth. How the hell did Bogarus get priced at 3 in a team game? My prediction - will put Bogarus towards the plains, just to totally blow our minds; also, to kill us all with thunderstrike communions while Utgard heads for demon lords or something without interference.

Oh DrP... All 3 of the "actually good" teams... folded quickly.



Baalz is more serious:

Originally Posted by Baalz

Patala/LA Mari - I'm not so sure blood slaves are being pushed to the monkey summons here. Patala makes an awesome forge ***** and fallen angels are just as cost efficient as any of the monkey summons – particularly with a nice bless. Could be Patala focuses on const while mari focusses on blood initially, then it may make sense for Patala to pick up the conj summons. Monkey blood summons will come out eventually, but I think fallen angels are the faster payout here which is something to consider with a seemingly weak early game.

Off the mark there.

Bandar/LA Ulm - This one does seem more likely to focus on the monkey blood summons, but theres also some interesting rushes that could be leveraged with these game settings with the monkey astral summons and Ulm's forge bonus. I don't think I agree this one is weak early, LA Ulm with high resources and hard research should be pretty intimidating early on if played right.

Baalz surprisingly honest with his own team asessment.

EA Arco/EA C'tis – Arco takes magic-3/sloth-3 and rainbow, tossing in skull mentors to get a really retarded initial research while c’tis takes care of the early heavy lifting. Not sure where that research is headed but there’s probably a plan for something nasty, maybe a global they’ve planned around.

Baalz nails our gameplan fairly precisely.

MA Aby/MA Jotun – Strong early, mid and late games. They probably are hoping to leverage whichever temperature extreme is most damaging to their opponents with Aby clobbering the anti/thug stuff using heavy infantry/evo while Jotun does what it does.

Sees the Aby/Jotun team for what they are.

Yomi/LA Aby – Obvious strengths, but Yomi may have an uphill fight on this one. Lots of good archer nations matched with good anti-thug options. Also, overall team seems likely to have a rough time with banish spam/demon counters.

Utgard/Bogarus – Terrifying late game, but a real danger of not living that long. If they’re given enough breathing room this would probably be the strongest pairing but I imagine they’ll have a hard time keeping out of early fighting and depending on who they come up against that may be pretty difficult.

And he's right about two teams that had trouble staying alive.