Hello,

First, I love the concept of this nation, it fills a desperately needed gap in the mythology represented in Dominions. The sprite work is also top notch. Some of the summons are great.

But as a nation, mechanically it just isn't working out very well for me. Maybe I'm missing something, so I'm hoping the mod author can help me out.

The giant sacred porcupines seem to be a trap:

- At size 6, they don't take buffs very well.
- Their defensive stats are awful.
- They don't have enough killing power to make up for it.
- They die all-too-quickly to ranged weapons.
- Their ranged attack has terrible accuracy.
- That morale. )o:
- Animal tag (okay) and low magic resistance (ow).

The big problem is that their weakness to ranged weapons - and lack of poison resistance, and low protection - means you can't use these in conjunction with your (cheap, massable, quite useful) archers. And the nation has no native air access to help mitigate this.

But even if I spend the points for an arrow shield bless, and something to help them kill, they still don't perform very well. They're big sacks of HP but they don't have much utility beyond that. We can apply Barkskin, but it only helps a smidgen.

The Moos have most of the same issues as the porcupines, but at least they have three decent attacks to make up for it and their bow has some great range. Looking between the Moos and the Porcupines, I struggle to come up with a reason to use the porcupines - which makes me sad because I want to love them so much.

The archers are great, I love the blinding sand ability (I've had my most successful expansions using just the warriors and archers). But again, they're very vulnerable to archers - and since they walk so slowly, they take a lot of attrition before they're able to make contact. Even a squad of slingers is brutal to my little dudes since they have no helmets.

And in general morale is so low - even with a Champion to help out, the little guys tend to run from HP losses. And gods help you if someone wanders in with a fear aura.

Some of the summons are great (Chepassotam is very useful) but others, like the Nickommo and Kiwolatomuhsisok, just seem to duplicate paths I already have with minimal additional benefit.

I feel like there's some very obvious big trick (or a few of them) that I'm missing. They expand well enough, but as soon as I'm into my first war I feel like I don't have great tools to fight back. There's just too many ways to squish me and not enough strength to make up for it.

When you play this nation, what kinds of blesses are you taking to make them viable? What do your early and middle game army compositions look like? What are your essential research priorities?

I love these little guys, the nation is cool thematically, but I'm having issues making them work. And help would be appreciated.

Thanks!