[Corinthian]

I must be in the absolute minority here because I did not ever see Ashdod as all that overpowered even in vanilla. Not that they were weak mind you. But over the course of an entire game, nations like Hinnom, Lanka, and LA Mictlan were all clearly more powerful.


The problem with Ashdod was mainly that it is so very hard for many nations to fight anakites in the early game. Witch means that whoever Ashdod chose to attack first is probably doomed unless they get help from other nations.


In this light, the Ahiman anakite nerf makes sense. It forces the player to use the Sheshai anakite instead. The Sheshai anakite is worse in the early game but probably about the same in the long run once counters start coming up. The Sheshai is cheaper and requires only half the resources witch means that it gets much more attacks. The drawback is of course that you cant make it prot22 and fatigue neutral.


Squirrelloids argument that Ashdod are an uber-thug nation is also questionable. Sure, Zamzumites from every castle was good before they were nerfed. But they were still arguably worse than un-nerfed Skrattis. And the nerfed version is also still worse than the CBM-nerfed version of the skratti.


As for adons, I never saw them as overpowered either. Nifelheim, Formoria and Hinnom all have clearly more powerful SC chassis. A third misc slot is nice and all but that also means that you have to pay for something to be put in that slot witch makes it expensive.

And that brings me tho the third problem with thugging with Ashdod. Namely the fact that Ashdod have terrible site searchers. Your best bet is to recruit Zamzummites and hope you get one with multiple paths. To sitesearch with your researchers would require a giant congaline due to them only having one path each. You can sire search remotely but that costs gems and although this is the most efficient method in the long run, those are gems you cant spend on gear for thugs.


Another problem is the fact that you are not going to see any Ashdod thugs before the end of year 2. Not only does ashdod have some truly mediocre researchers, they also need to recruit priests for their expansion parties. Cutting in to their limited mage recruitment. Even if you build hill forts and shuffle all the mages that can be recruited there without a lab to your capitol. You wont have the needed Alt 2, Conj 3 and whatever const any time soon.