Machaka and a W9 bless

[licker]

Well to try and shore up some of the weaknesses being discussed here I tried an awake f4w9s6 glyph. Scales were 03H3S1G0M2D2 and I had a dominion of 5. This is with CBM as well.

That pretender gets you 20rp per turn from the start, which helps to offset at least some of the research problems.

Of course the map I tested on stuck me in the middle of a bunch of mountains, so I wasn't able to use the strat move2 very effectively. Anyway, with the improved research I was able to get to Iron Will pretty easilly, which with the bless, gave my spiders an MR of 17 (I think, don't have the numbers in front of me at this computer).

So is that a reasonable MR to counter the kind of mage spam you would expect around turn 20? I think I had it a bit earlier, but it also takes some time to put the right mages in with the armies. And I would imagine that its also possible for Machaka to buy/trade for some early items which should also help them since I find it difficult to research const and spare many forgers (well as the pretender is the only way you have Astral, and he's being used to help keep up the research).