Middle aged man............ Comedy gold

One thing I would recommend with man, is to not get a profet on your first turn, but get a (unicorn) knight commander and then make him a prophet. This way you get a strong, and fast prophet that can quickly lead a group of knights around and bless them all. Also, I think your bless could be improved quite a bit by dropping awareness and one reinvigoration for getting 5x undying. With enchanted blood, 5x undying is pretty much equal to +10 hp as units who is at negative hp at the end of battle will always heal up to positive hp before the battle fully ends.

A couple of thoughts on Heroism: you do discuss here how it doesn't affect your new recruited units, but there are two further considerations: firstly it does affect passive exp income and secondly your sacreds recruited later in the game will barely benefit compared to those recruited in the first 20-25 turns, simply because they will fight less and magic will kill more enemies as the game progresses. So making a statement such as " you will have roughly 1 more star" compared to going without it is true but it is more correct to say your first sacreds will have 1 more star while your later ones will maybe have 1/2 a star or less. Also regarding enchanted blood: I really like it vs assassin nations or nations that try to magic attack. It lets your sacreds regen up after fights and during the arena or chain assassinations, very handy.

Ashdod making moves to set that border

Nice. Man ma is one of My current faction interest.

Research bonus from heroism is nice, offsets drain a little. Also experience gives a boost to precision for sacred mages/archers/thugs with bows

eyy ma man!

I like to take enchanted blood paired with undying. The regen is enough to prevent negative hp units dying at the end of the battle. I'm not convinced that the regen offered is worth it without that synergy, but you are also getting mr. I kind of like putting 9 points into undying enc blood, it also can prevent a sacred mage from dying to a random arrow.

Marignon would be cool too. I think you have a Mari playthrough up, but uh, you don't really get a chance to do insightful commentary when there's a bunch of people memeing on voice chat. And I know I already said it but yeah definitely, I know what everything's thinking. "I'll set all the AIs to random personality and then I won't know what they'll do." Yeah in practice not really, you just end up sabotaging your game randomly because some of the AI settings are extremely badly performing.

The Heroism 3 (105%) math is pretty simple: between 8 unbuffed XP and 15, and between 25 unbuffed XP and 400, it is pretty close to straight plus one star (just because each XP tier is twice the last). Stops at 400 XP because that's when without Heroism you'd hit the max level. An XP star is 1 attack, 1 defense, 1 precision, 1 RP, 1 morale, and above 50 XP, it adds either 1 Strength or 2 HP and 1 encumbrance... Making it a very nice value conditional bundle (like 8 bless points worth of stuff... But who buys Precision for troops?) a la Blood Surge. But it does nothing for newly summoned sacreds, including battle summons, and so it is better the more durable your sacreds are and the more that you'll be using ones who've been around the block a while.

Seems like a bug in trusty research if you get the 1st turn research based on the magic scales of your cap instead of your drain level of pretender. A drain 3 Man shouldn't have 150 free research turn 1.

Personally i'm not that fond of the new defense blessings (awareness, blur) as first pick anymore. I would rather dump awareness and a point of heroism into 2 points of defense that works all the time. But that's me. :)

Wow that Slave market site is so lucky.

Heyy so I went to the patron link and signed up and all, but the most recent posts I see are from 2022. Am I missing something?

Fun! And this is a great nation. But so far, you haven't encountered _my_ problem with MA Man - not a big problem, admittedly. But those monks die in droves. I need them to bless my sacred cavalry, but they can't do anything else, so *they run into battle, hitting the enemy with their fists!* Yeah, they don't last very long. It doesn't seem to make any difference what orders I give them - after the scripted orders, at least. Once there's no one to bless - and no undead around - all they want to do is run forward to get murdered. It's not a big deal, I know, but it's a pain to keep running out of priests to bless my cavalry. Later on, once I have some Construction, I can make them a bow to keep them occupied. But that takes awhile, it's expensive, and they're still likely to get hit by an arrow. Oh, well, MA Man needs _some_ downsides, huh? :)

Is this not the best nation for the Weightless bless?

I think best to start with landless/longbow/Wardens then split those with wardens in stealth stack with huntsmen from forests, only then roll out knight/longbow. Starting knights too few so risk.

I suggest the name Temple Me Elmo