Golden Era Discussion

[gibson]

Lets talk about the new Arco theme. I like the thematics of it, especially the Skeptiks and the Philosophers. The Icarids are especially cool too. The Myrmidons look to be quite solid HI (and look cool to boot). Wind riders are powerful as well (if insanely expensive).

Main limitations I can see is all the good units of GA cost a lot of resources; with the mandatory 1 sloth, this makes it very difficult to levy any significant number of quality troops. The peltasts and Cardaces get destroyed in combat rather readily (I haven't played much with Arco standard so I don't know how Arco usually gets around this, with Elephants I'd suppose). The new chariots seem good but are also extremely expensive.

The 50g Philosophers with 5 base research are awesome with a 3 magic scale. Combined with the versitile and powerful mystics, GA with magic 3 can probably research faster than just about anyone. However, the unpredictability of the Sage's magic picks makes it difficult to focus on a particular research goal unless you have a pretender-based strategy. Additionally, the seemingly weak initial military choices seems to suggest to me a SC pretender approach might work well, to grab the inital provinces needed to get things going. Mercenaries might be useful too.

Feel free to contribute any thoughts on how to make the most of this cool new theme; I'll be trying them out over the next couple days.