Beware of Ashdod

[Irishmafia2020]

I love to play Ashdod in my epic single player games, because of their obvious advantages. I usually play with the "all-nations-mod" so I face the tougher EA/LA opponents as well. The primary drawback to Ashdod is that their units require immense resources to produce. They are similar to Ulm in the sense that they can produce powerful military units, but they require provinces that have a lot of resources to produce a major army. Therefore, if you want to hinder them in MP I would propose that you put the resource multiplier at 50% or 75%. They will be unable to produce many giants, and those that are produced will be part of thug teams rather than an overwhelming force of regular infantry. The resources needed to produce mages are much lower, however, so the obvious workaround would be to turn SC death and fire mages every turn (which Ashdod can do). Keep in mind, even their scouts can be thugged-up with the right equipment (there giants after all), so Ashdod is plenty dangerous even with fewer resources. The Ashdod player just has to make mountainous provinces a priority so that they can produce as many non-capital giants as possible with those resources.