[Baalz]

I don't mean to sound confrontational, but I don't find any of these suggestions viable.

Kydnids: These *are* good, but too easy to counter in the numbers you can field. Assuming you've got no more than about 120 N gems to play with for the early part of the game you're talking about a total of 60 Kydnids - basically one smallish army. Lets just take a look at all my neighbors this time to see what the army I'd been building up over dozens of turns would face:

R'yleh - mindless tramplers backed by mind blasters. Dead Kydnids.

Oceana - The knights have the moral to ignore the awe and the first strike damage to punch through the armor. Dead Kydnids (good luck killing the 23 defense 17 protection knights - they can just let the Kydnids fatigue out if nothing else)

Helheim - very similar to Oceana using their heavy blessed sacreds, only they'll supplement it with raining down lighting.

Argatha - sacred statues backed by destruction casting mages. Dead Kydnids.

Mictlan - triple blessed jaguar warriors will destroy Kydnids. Dead Kydnids.

Sauromatia - Androphag archers and hydras supplemented by skellispam while the Kydnids die from poison and exhaustion. Dead Kydnids.

Nefelheim - Frozen dead Kydnids.

Arcoscephale - Kydnids would probably do a decent job against elephants, up until my opponent started fielding heavy infantry backed by small communions. Dead Kydnids.

In all cases my enemy can replace his army in a couple turns while that's all the Kydnids I have available.

Bishop fish - assuming I sacrificed *all* of my research I'd still not be able to recruit a bishop fish every turn (for the first few turns while I'm expanding as fast as possible and recruiting a few mages for site searching). Oceanic Knights have a (unblessed) MR of 14 and 16 hp, so each smite has an 18% chance of causing damage and will on average have to hit each knight twice to kill them. This means best case scenario 10 bishop fish will kill one knight per turn, although in practice it will be nowhere near this good as they won't all focus on one knight until he's dead, they'll end up mostly wounding two knights per turn. As the knights do so much damage that battles don't last more than 2-3 rounds I don't see how it would be possible to field enough bishop fish to make a difference against 40+ knights.

Yes, obviously my income vs a heavy bless nation is not directly indicative of actual strength, my point is that I don't think I could have played MA Oceana better nor had better luck and there is now *nothing* I can reasonably field against any of my neighbors. In a 60+ person game I had the *top* province count. After successfully raiding their PD, at the point I had no choice but to start fighting real armies I had more than twice their *combined* province count and income - both gold and gems. I had more than twice their *combined* research. I had almost twice their *combined* number of forts. This was not a slight lead, it was an overwhelming economic advantage, and I also had production-2 scales. I've thrown everything I could think of as an experience player and been totally crushed every single engagement by the sophisticated strategy of marching straight towards me.

Now to be clear, I'm not complaining about a specific game, but rather using this as a good example to illustrate my point - rather a best case scenario for MA Oceana. I'm far from an infallible player, but I maintain that even with an overwhelming economic advantage there's not really any feasible thing I can field against any of my neighbors (which are a reasonably diverse sample). This would be 10X worse later in the game with more research done....where I've still got nothing to field and everyone else's power has scaled up.


*edit*

Cleveland is correct, my math is a bit off on the smite but the sentiment is still correct.