I agreed the WD's are decent combat mages early.
W/R/T 3 magic: If you are going to have 3 magic... 1/1/1 is much weaker than 2/1 or 3/0 long haul (outside of research), because the spells worth casting once you have decent research... almost always require more than 1 (or even 2 courtesy of a booster) in a path. At which point you use the experienced but no longer combat efficient mages for ... research!
(or forging, which is even more favored by >1 in a path, though this is balanced to some extent by the ease of empowering multipathers.)
Unless it's an extremely crowded map, I tend to think upkeep is much more important than initial cost.
Usually by ~turn 25, 50+% of my income is mage upkeep.
It usually means you have to make infrastructure decisions early, because you won't have the cash to do much once the basic expansion is over.
Not to mention with sacred your boomers are blessable.
I'm not saying machakas mages are bad, I'm just saying that the change is quite large, and not obviously needed.
Machaka has lovely units, but with the exception of the archer, hoplite and priests they are all extremely pricey.
IMHO Pythium Arco Vanheim (etc...) are much stronger, and no nerfing has been seen or even suggested there.
Rabe the Deficit Spender
P.S. I believe... (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, that would be great!) ...the spider transforms require you to survive the first hit. This doesn't happen particularly often without specially loading you mages with (many) forgable items.
[ February 24, 2004, 07:32: Message edited by: rabelais ]
Re: PBEM Multiplayer Game: No new positions (was "New Multiplayer Game")
Hybrid Mode
