[The Panther]

These are interesting points, Aku. I guess after watching my hydras utterly rip your ice devils with ease, I suppose I decided that they could kill any SC. In fact, I had only 11 hydras in that underwater battle, which was less than 1/3 of them spread around my army. I also am fairly sure that the blessed hydras would rip the devils to shreds, what with the nine attacks (arranged three by three) per hydra and the poison. So I put you third because I felt I would be able to take you out fairly easily. Vampires are totally hopeless against the hydras with their regeneration. It would have been like swatting flies (flies seem immortal too when they swarm around you).

Plus your flmes from afar was fairly ineffective against my vine ogres, summer lions, and hydras, which was the only troops I recruited in the Last 20 turns or so.

However, I would have had severe trouble against man. His legions of longbows would have ripped my poor, slow hydras and they would have all gone berserked, thus making them even more suspectible to mass arrows. He would have lost tons of knights to the poison, though. But I would have probably lost all my hydras eventually to the longbows. That was why I thought he might have been ahead of me.

And as for you being able to rip Klatu, that sure makes sense to me. His longbows are no match for your fast flying devils. And flames from afar would utterly destroy his longbows before they got near you.

So, perhaps it might have been one of those rock/paper/scissors thingies.

Now, for Pasha Dawg, may I remind the UTTERLY DEAD spiders that they had exactly ZERO provinces left at the end? Even Caelum still had one province left, though it was under seige when the game went to the dawgs.

I also have to say that Serpent Cult is not all that bad a theme as I had orginally thought it was. In fact, had I gone 10 nature and got the extra regeneration plus the 4 berserk, it would have been even better. Blessed hydras rock big time! Each one is a full mini-SC without leadership. And the reduced upkeep cost on them is wonderful. But I was stupid and went only 7 nature, for some such newbie reason. Still, Serpent Cult was pretty darn decent after all, in my opinion.