MP: ComfortZone - All MA Nations - Running

[licker]

Originally Posted by Xietor

f9 bless gives the spiders a magical attack, and your attack skill can never be "too high"
especially when machaka's sacred spiders can fight angels and other thugs with very high defenses effectively. Plus you get fire damage on all 3 attacks.

But as I pointed out, I did not actually sit down and design a bless for machaka. All I said is if I played them, I would take a very heavy bless and ride the spiders as far as they would take me.

It would require a lot of testing for me to ultimately decide upon the best bless. And to do that you also need to look at some of the units they likely will be fighting.

If memory serves, their pd is awful, so i likely would not take misfortune for design points.
But good luck to the player that took the spiders!

If you dig in the forums I started a thread discussing a machakan bless strat using w9 since I feel that it offers them the most benefit. f9 would be easier to get without mangleing your scales too much, but I didn't find it really helped that much (though I would recommend that you take a f4 minor bless if possible).

I believe I used a divine glyph (AWAKE of all things...) with f4w9s6, of course scales were not great, but I've not found the misfortune (at 2) to be too bad considering that you should also take O3. Drain is a bit of a pita, but you should be able to forge skull mentors natively, once you find some death income, and in MP finding death income is nominally not too difficult if you find someone willing to trade for hammers or fire or earth gems. You will probably also need to take a touch of sloth, but unless your capitol has a really bad starting position with respect to neighbors with resources, once you clear the area around it you have enough resources so as not to be limited there with your spider production.

[Xietor]

I would definitely want n4e4 in there at a bare min. Once the rider dies, the spider has a ton of hps and can really benefit from regeneration. That also helps keep afflictions down.

E4 is also key as fatigue can bring down even the best sc. In fact that is how I typically kill sc's.

Given their low mr without a rider though, and the number of s races in the middle era, maybe a s9 n9 e4 bless is the way to go.

And if you run into ethereal right off(ermor) use flaming arrows. Flaming arrows has to be high on your list as machaka I think in any event.

[Xietor]

With respect to the machaka spider bless, you can do the s9n9e4 with an imprisoned Sphinx order 3, 1 prod, 3 heat, 2 misfortune 1, 0 luck, and 2 drain. If you do not like bad events, or micromanagement associated with misfortune, scrap the 1 production
and take 1 death and 0 luck scales.

The berserk at n9 gives some protection boost, attack boost, and of course good units that fight to the death are always nice. Especially units with high hps, protection, and regeneration.

With 22 players in the game, make friends with a race with high research(ctis) and trade with them for some lightless lanterns and that drain 2 is more helpful than not.

[JimMorrison]

Okay, as I really dislike that map (it's pretty and all - for an SP map) for the same reasons I dislike many maps; it is actually really awful for aquatics.

So as I promised you Cleveland, here are 4 examples of my efforts with the generator last night, let's see if I can figure out how to get the images to display properly, I seem to remember it's more complicated than it needs to be.....

[JimMorrison]

Okay, well that worked just fine! \/

Anyway, if there is any support for a change here (I think the one with the 2 lakes is fairest for water and land, and they are split perfectly for 1 aquatic in the small lake, and 2 in the large), then I will do up a quick job of fixing terrains, neighbors, and potential start locations, and post the completed file for mass consumption.

I ran the mapgen 30x last night, don't you want to sample my luscious fruits?