Advice for MA Man

[Jazzepi]

ano said:
Well, I don't think that A4 is as important as you describe. Definitely it is but I find building the whole strategy around it a bit lacking.
MA Man can expand rather quickly using longbowmen so they don't really need an awake sc. I would suggest the following build:
Earth mother N4E4, dormant, Dom 6
Order 3
Prod 1
Growth 2
Misfortune 2
Magic 3
Earth mother may not be very great as it is, but it can be a very potent fighter when you give her winged shoes and enough reinvigoration and casting invulnerability at alt5 (which is your first main goal due to wind guide and mother oak). Your second goal will be gift of health and foul vapors at Ench5. Both these goals (including thau2 and const4) can easily be reached with magic 3, rich dominion and rather fast castle building or researching with tribal shamans. Bless effects are perfect to keep you sacred old mages alive (when a crone becomes diseased, just use her as a battlemage) and for extra reinvigoration in battle (in addition to soothing songs for which tribal shamans are perfect).
Wardens, IMO, are not worth using heavily due to strategic movement 1. They may be completely useless if you start in the corner - bringing them to front will take ages (you may use faery trod, but I'm not sure it is worth doing). You have perfect archers and very good cavalry. If you expand quickly and keep that advantage, I'm sure, you'll be able to find the way into air boosters (either being lucky to have A4 crone or using trade). Btw, with such build and being lucky to find some nature sites, it is definitely possible to have mother oak and gift of health active at the end of year 2.

I thought I was right about my general impression of crones almost never getting A4, so I went ahead and checked.

Crones have these starting paths (A2N3)
They random once for (AWEN +1 100%) and (AWEN +1 10%)

I believe you can do 1/4th times 1/10th times 1/4th to get the amount of crones that will have A4.

%0.625

That percentage means that if you build 200 crones, 1.25 of them will have A4.

So, yes, you really, really need A4 on your pretender. You can't rely on such a small percentage of you crones having A4.

Jazzepi