Learning New Race (Machaka)

[Teleolurian]

Pretty good, I'd say. The Black Hunters look to be a tremendously good sacred unit- if their offense were higher, they'd be almost as good as the Wardens of Man (my favorite commando squad). I tend not to think of the summons, but I'd assume that with an offensive blessing I'd be liable to bring in a group of Fire Drakes early on, and potentially Vine Ogres (a Fire/Nature 4 pretender would be a viable blessing, and if I could spare the points I might even bring Fire up to 6). My natural fear of micromanagement usually leads me to make sitesearcher pretenders that can just follow my early expansion armies and check for sites, usually with enough of a guard to keep me from dying and allowing me to take small provinces when my main forces are waiting for reinforcements.

I'd completely neglected to notice that the Spider Riders (cheap) are essentially cavalry archers, I'd been using them as light cav instead. Probably my first fatal error.

[Taqwus]

Don't forget that Machaka has good access to fever fetishes (which go very well on disease-immune mound kings ).
And yeah, the Spider Knights are strong cavalry archers that can be produced at any fortress, unlike the Black Hunters.

If you care about other paths of magic, don't forget that death magic lets you access spectres (D1, ?1, ?1) and nature lets you get lamia queens (random sorcery picks).

[NTJedi]

The Black Hunters are one of the best units in the game because when the rider dies you still have a sacred huge spider under your command. This spider has lots of life, can win most types of knights and has a nasty poison.

I wouldn't summon any fire drakes... at all... it's better to alchemize the 11 gems into gold. 5 fire drakes... the gems can be used to provide 825 gold.

The worst part of Machaka is the province defense... 0 protection thus they die from anything. I even had them get killed from tennis balls.