Machaka and a W9 bless

[licker]

Just how viable is this thing?

I've been playing around with them since they were my faves in Dom2, but saddly what I saw from the strat discussion is that they are not particularly competitive in MP.

Oh well, I play mostly SP anyway, but it can be difficult to tell how effective the strats are there.

So, since Machaka has no native Pretender with W (using CBM, but I think this is true generally) you're going to have to shell out a bunch of points to get to W9, and basically forget it if you want dual 9s without being imprisoned (which may not be that terrible, but I'm not looking at imprisoned for the time being).

You can take Heat3, Mis2, and Drain2 pretty easily, taking Order3 for the cash (since spiders and mages are expensive). You can also take sloth1 as once you start to open up the provinces around your cap you will still be holy limited rather than production limited to get out the sacred spiders. Taking more than sloth1 really kills your early spider army though, so I don't do it (basically one a turn, and if you are unlucky with adjacent provinces you could be prod limited rather than holy limited). Growth is nice to be able to bump to 1 as you have elderly mages. Dominion can be an issue though, and since you want to be able to pump out spiders you can't take the low dom gamble, and have to go at least 5 (which still might be low for some folks).

Now if you go just W9 you have some room to add more dominion, or take slightly better scales, but since your pretender is going to have some other paths anyway, why not leverage them for a cheap 4 or 5 bless? Here we have really one useful option, fire, and fire is easy to come by on Machaka pretenders. Air is also of some benefit, and while it seems that Earth should be with the additional attacks of your quickened spiders it doesn't seem to make a huge difference (would be different if your mages were sacred, but they aren't).

The two chassis I've used so far are the sleeping Solar disk (F4A5W9) and the awake Arch mage (F4A3W9?1). Going the archmage route lets you get a better jump on research and site searching (though machaka already searches F well, and can't leverage early air income since they don't get it as a random anywhere easilly). Going the sleeping Disk gives the usual slower research pace, but the additional air bless helps your spiders when your archers start firing into the melee.

Using either set up means that you are easilly able to set up 2 indie clearing armies by turn 4 or 5 (depending somewhat on province layout), and can often have a 3rd army of 1 blesser and 1 spider lord with ~10 spiders, which has shown the ability to eat up pretty much anything the indies can throw at you even without archers or any kind of distraction fodder.

The blessed spiders already have high protection (20) and upping their attack to 15 makes their 6! attacks (at least I assume that's what they get quickened) get through that much more frequently. Tac speed of 30 is enough for them to plow into most indie archer positions on the 1st turn. Also the strat speed is 2 with forest terrain passable, all the Machaka leaders can move 2+ and the archers can move 3 if you need them.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there and solicit some opinions/suggestions. I'm curious to hear how well this could rush in MP, and how to counter it, as I don't have any experience in that area, but in SP (and yeah... its SP...) this set up easilly takes down the 1st AI I meet with very limited casualties (usually hit their capitol around turn 10 with one army, and send reinforcements as possible).