Machaka in CB

[Saber Cherry]

PrinzMegaherz said:
I find it actually kind of strange that the black hunters do not spread fear. Actually, I can't imagine something that is more terrifying than a huge hairy spider.

Imagine yourself, at the army recruiting center, with four possible assignments:

1) Front lines, against berzerk flaming spiders of Machaka.
2) Scout out the Unfettered that may be oozing around the area, devouring villages.
3) Sleep with an Illithid until you conceive a Star Child.
4) Go into the Void Gate, and, uh... pray.

Dominions isn't a pretty place. I don't like big, hairy spiders either, but... they might not be the scariest things out there. Personally I'm much more afraid of giant lampreys. A nation consisting entirely of kangroo-legged bipedal leeches and lampreys would be horrifying, especially if they could latch-on to enemy soldiers's backs, drill into their spinal columns with a toothed tongue, and puppet the host's body while its mind is still conscious by directly driving the spinal nerve axons, forcing them to fight their friends while screaming "Get it off me! It's sucking me dry!!"

Spiders are scary the way space ameobas or carnies are scary. Kangaroo-leeches, especially undead ones, are utterly terrifying - like multivariable calculus final exams.

[Boron]

Saber Cherry said:
3) Sleep with an Illithid until you conceive a Star Child.

This has been drawn by the artist Dorian Cleavenger .
Doesn't really look like the worst out of the 4 possibilities. It's not nice but i would say overall its the best out of the 4 possibilities you listed .

OT: I agree with Ironhawk. Unless we are playing a game on a rich world what breaks Machaka as a bless nation is especially the huge resource cost. Even with CB 38 resources (don't know vanilla cost). Keep also in mind that with CB each point of sloth is -15% resources.
Iirc base resource points at your capitol are 80 on normal world richness.

For E9N9 you probably take the earthmother. Machakas heat 2 preference helps somewhat, 120 free points from heat 3 scale. But still your scales suffer a lot. Also keep in mind how expensive Machakas Mages are (expect the witch doctor but iirc he has a built in research cap so he doesn't profit from positive magic scales). Also to get more resources you will probably take another castle than the watchtower which is further limiting you.

Compare Black Hunters to White Centaurs. They do awesome with a N9E9 bless too but cost about half of the gold and less then 1/3 in resources iirc. So Pan needs no productivity to produce their sacreds and it even benefits somehow by turmoil scale with the maenads.
Machaka has +120 points from heat 3 but Pan doesn't need productivity and turmoil is not that bad for them neither with the maenads.

All in all in a game with normal richness the black hunters are likely not worth it i would guess. How many of them can you recruit in the first 20 turns? I would be surprised if you get averagely more than 20.
20 Black hunters are still impressive but as Ironhawk says from turn 20-30 on battlefield magic gets so dominating that they are not as useful anymore. Ctis e.g. likely already has banefire and relief by then. 10 Sauros cost only 1800 gold but i am 99% sure they beat easily 20 Hunters which cost 2500 gold.
Ctis is maybe a bit extreme since they are one of the nations with extremely potent battlefield magic in midgame but pythium and arco could give machaka quite some trouble too and vanheim probably also.
Finally there is the question how they would do vs. a SC God. My assumption is that they can't beat a good earlygame SC God like a Cyclops or a VQ.
If uberblessed sacreds can't beat an earlygame SC God and don't have a useful other ability like stealth or ultra cheapness i rate them second rate. If we pick the VQ example:
Mictlan wins vs. the VQ with eagle warriors.
Vanheim has valkyries. So they also win. The vans are stealthy, that's ultravaluable. I always thought Gandalf exagerates some months ago when he wrote about stealth but QM tought me how useful stealth is.
Jotuns Niefels are so strong that they will probably kill a VQ too.
Pans White Centaurs might lose but they are stealthy. And Pan could employ a few harpies for help.

The Hunters though most likely lose vs. a true VQ.

But the other stuff Machaka has is very diverse and useful. Their mages are rather good and quite flexible and most of their troops are useful too. All in all Machaka is a very balanced nation.
Their troops all have some weaknesses though. I am no real Machaka expert (only played a few SP games with them and one vanilla longterm game which deceased on turn 8x because of server crash, but because the game was vanilla i hoarded ...) but i always had problems with using their troops really well. They seem balanced but if you compare them to the great troops other nations like Ctis or Pan have i always silently cry.
For their main problem, the low morale i have found no solution.
I think hoplites together with a few militia as chaff and archers are ok and bane spiders are ok though resource intensive stealth squads, the other troops seem all very niche though.

[Arralen]

Machaka needs high ressources for recruiting
- Hoplites
- Spider Knights
- Spider Warriors (heavy stealth troops; cap only)
- Bane Spiders (heavy assassines; way overpriced in vanilla, as they are capitol only and easily die to standard indie commanders)
- Black Hunters (cap only)
- Hunter Lords (cap only)

As nobody builds Spider Knights, Machaka actually only needs high ressources in it's capital, and could get along very well with a watchtower and a +50 ress site there.

Furthermore, unless you stumble upon some sages, you'll have to rely on Sorceresses for research (cap on Witch Doctor) and Black Sorcerers for spellcastings and battle magic. Both are cap only, too, further limiting the numbers of melee commanders one could build.

I always found it hard to get spiders or stealth troops in any meaningful quantity.

Compare that to Jotunheim (blessable Herses everywhere with Watchtower), Vanheim (...), Mictlan (ultra-cheap Animal Warriors), etc.

Machaka surely looks very interesting and diverse on paper, but unless you are in a very slow game, your possibilities are severly limited: Buying knights with 12HP which turn easily into spiders with MR4 isn't very high on the priority list, if you have only 1 place to recruit them. Especially, if you have to recruit your mages and your inf (high admin castle) there as well. And on top of it the troops (not to speak of the commanders) are as expensive as mages, so they do not only soak up the ressources, but the gold as well.

Oc, part of the fun with the game is to play your nations strenghts and work around the shortcomings. But it would be greater fun if it was about putting emphasis on one path, instead an absolute this-or-that decision.
As it is now, IMHO it makes more sense to build Sorceresses and Hoplites, with the occasional Black Sorcerer mixed in, than to wait for the spider force to build up to a usuable level over severel turns.

[Chazar]

I also tend to agree with Ironhawk & Boron. However, I like to play Machaka already as it is. They are fine, (especially with the ConceptBalanceMod)!

Nevertheless I think it is foolish to try a bless strategy with Machaka in MP. I recall that in one of the lost elder threads (aka the posts that were written before the great forum update happened, which lost them forever in history) discussing machaka strategies, everyone agreed that a bless strategy would not work, simply because it costs so much and pays off so late. The advice was to go with good scales to build lots of Spider Knights (& some Archers, Chaff and Black Sorcerors every turn that I could afford one - of course). This worked pretty well for me in MP thus far. Without ever building more than five Black Hunter, of course.

So what scales can you drop for a bless? Order & Productivity are required to build your sacred troops and death costs money too. Without money and resource, the number of sacred troops becomes to small to pay off the disadvantges...but then again I cannot see any bless strategy really working with most other nations either.

[Endoperez]

Units seldom used, Mar 2004
Advice on Machaka appreciated, Apr 2004
Effective army for Machaka, Jun 2004
Gryphon Rider too weak? Jun 2004
Machaka and their spiders, Dec 2003


Does it happen to be any of these? I used the forum search engine. The first I found with
+machaka +"hunter spider" +blessing ,
more after leaving the blessing out of the search.

[halfzware]

So what scales can you drop for a bless? Order & Productivity are required to build your sacred troops and death costs money too. Without money and resource, the number of sacred troops becomes to small to pay off the disadvantges...but then again I cannot see any bless strategy really working with most other nations either.

Now I'm no expert, but... I think it really depends on the size of the game. The longer the game, the more punishing bad scales are.

[shovah]

cant see bless wroking... ever heard of f9 w9 vans? e9 n9 neifel jarls? f9 s/a9 flagelants?

[Chazar]

EDIT: The following post was meant as a direct reply to Endropez' very helpful post of a Machaka/BlackHunter/Bless-related thread-links list!

(Somebody here has too much time... )

Yes, I probably had Daynarr's comment and rabelais' comment from the "Advice on machaka appreciated"-thread in my mind. Only PvK seemed to disagree within this thread, but maybe I got the wrong impression.

Oh, and you missed other threads tackling the issue:

• "Newb Q: Pretender options for Machaka?": Zen's advice for beginners, which continues with "Machaka needs gold"
• "Last question (I hope) on magic learning strategies (Machaka or similar multi-path)?": Here a blessing strategy for Machaka is briefly contemplated as well, but no one really speaks much in favour of it.

Anyway, now that all these threads have been uncovered again, everybody can make up his own opinion what people once thought about it, for whatever that actually matters today...(Cast ritual: Knowledge of the Ancients)
From my experience I just say Machaka is much more powerful with Order+3, Productivity+3 (Hoplites & Spide Knights are cute) than without but with some bless...

[Chazar]

halfzware said:

Now I'm no expert, but... I think it really depends on the size of the game. The longer the game, the more punishing bad scales are.

Hmm, I am playing small maps and I would say the exact opposite, since a large map means a long game and plenty of sites, thus plenty of gems and thus plenty of summons and magic, making ordinary troops obsolete (but that is just a naive guess of mine). I'd say that having money/resources early on makes it possible to conquer your enemy mainly with common troops on a small map (mid-game).

However, research is usually also limited by money for buying and maintaining expensive mages, so accoding to the music currently in my headphones I sing along "Counterfeit dollars or english zloty, anything I can get. I want more!"

[Cainehill]

Chazar said:
Oh, and you missed other threads tackling the issue:[list][*]"Newb Q: Pretender options for Machaka?": Zen's advice for beginners, which continues with "Machaka needs gold"

Of course, one (not very dependable) way to get gold is to take Luck-3, Death-3, at least with the CB mods having increased the relative value of luck. Getting 200, 500, even 1000 or 1500 gold in an event can make up for quite a bit of otherwise bad scales. (Similarly, getting a staff of storms, ring of wizardry, etc).