Beware of Ashdod

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by cthulhu

I'm pretty sure that 5 jaguar warriors with F8W9B9 could easily take an anakite. The problem is that the jaguar warriors would be easy prey to any indie archers backing up the anakites, and would tend to suffer serious attrition even against weak forces.

F8W9B9 jaguar warriors are rather special-purpose units with a special purpose bless, whereas E10N6 or E9N4F4W4 or whatever anakites are good for almost any purpose and the bless helps their spellcasters and SCs too.

As I've written many times, F9W9 and then AX or SX
I know that probably the standard counter for jags are archers. An A bless defeats that strategy.

You can, with many variations, make a Dominion 7 pretender. And 7 jags with that F9W9A9 bless will take no losses against virtually any independent. The only time you will lose is when your mictlan priest gets killed via an archer.

Additionally, Mictlan can afford that 999 bless - affording an E9N4F4W4 bless with ashdod is *much* more difficult. Ashdod *needs* a +3 +x scales. You can play a e9X4 bless with ashdod but I am far from convinced its optimal strategy.

I think it would be thematically interesting to balance ashdod by making its castles the equivalent of ermorian - something like 10 admin, available everywhere. These would but a severe damper on ashdods gathering of resources, and hence its ability to produce units.

Again, ashdod is very money and resource intensive. All of its units are expensive. So if you force it to defend against dominion death you are significantly reducing its ability to research or act offensively.