Machaka screwed more than ever ?

[Verjigorm]

Originally Posted by Rookierookie

Spider riders cost that much for a good reason.

Well, the "Kill rider, free spider" mantra works well, too.

When another nation spends 30 gold on a unit they get:

Arcoscephale: Chariot (40g) (trample)
Ermor: Shadow Vestal (35g) (ethereal)
Pythium: Emerald Guard (23g) 17 pro 13hp 13atk 15def
Marignon: Royal Guard (30g)
Mictlan: Jaguar Warrior (25g) magic weapon sacreds
TC: Imperial Horseman (32g)
C'Tis: Sacred Serpent (30g)
Vanheim: Skinshifter (25g)
Jotunheim: Most of Jotunheim's units are around 30g
Bandar Log: White One (23g) sacred
Shinuyama: Dai Bakemono (30g)
Eriu: Daoine Sidhe (35g)

Really?

30g and more expensive units eat upkeep quickly. However, the reason that I can take a Dormant SC pretender is that, for the short term, I can use the spider riders (which, as you say, are nice) for the early game until I can get my thug farm operational. As the game progresses, my spiders will become less and less viable since the upkeep will start to limit both their population and cramp my magical expansion. Since regular spider riders don't have a high resource cost, I can hire lots of them even with my Sloth scales.

Now if I wanted to do Hunters, even with Sloth-3 I can still hire about 4 of them per turn from my capitol once I've captured my neighbors.

I'm not hiring any of the high resource spider knights, though... they have a lot of attacks, sure, but I'd need production scales to get them and they cost more resources than the hunters and for just 1gp more upkeep (3.33 vs 4.16).