Yeah, I'm Goidius, the Rainbow in the Dark, Master of the Elements.
I was wondering on why no-one opposed my ascension to power. But it seems that you guys were busy fighting each other. I was ridiciliously paranoid (you probably noticed those warrior naiads just sitting on the border, they were a hasty summon army when my pretender settled in a build a lab. Yeap, just standing there, protecting my pretender. I thought that my ridicilious gem icome would have painted a huge bullseye on my forehead. I knew from the start that this game could not be won by conventional armies. Hence the awake F3A4W3E4D3N4B2 Ghost King with turmoil 3, sloth 3, heat 3, death 3, luck 3, magic 3. Here is the kicker. I got dominion strenght 3. My plan was to expand outside my bad scales while my awake pretender would create "pockets" of faith to prevent dom-kill.
early on to turn 35 or so, my Ghost King did this
a) Attack independent prov
b) search it
c) repeat
You can notice how my early gem income graph gets a significant boost every second turn
. The difficult research really almost boned me thought. I kept losing my sages in hordes to disease. But once I reached con6, I turned 240+ fire gems (due to my pretender & rigorious amounts of Augury) to lightless lanters in 2-3 turns. You can see this pretty easily in the graphs too. Lore Masters helped too thought.
Once I hit con8 for Well of Misery (cast with 80 gems, suckers!) and got elemental Royalty, things got easy. Well, things were pretty easy to me to begin with, I mostly waged war with AI Vanheim, who was too stupid to effectively counter my Bane Lord & Hashmal thugs. For 10 to 15 turns, I conquered like 25+ vanheim provinces with 3 Hashmals (with only pendants of luck for gear!) and 2 Bane Lord thugs.
Then I started steamroll over Ulm, who apparently hadn't really got his vampire economy going. At this point, I had death gem income over 60 per turn and I was able to equip a E2 Yeddeoni with Earth Boots, Blood Stone, Rune Smasher & Eye of the void (Petrify, how I love thee! If thing got seroius, those guys could aslo spam Living Earth with the blood stone gems) each turn and give him over 15 fossilized giants from that D/E national spell. As a raiding force.
Ulm fought pretty bravely, but I guess he lost spirit when he saw how the Fossil Warrior raiding forces just kept pouring in every turn. He also was unable to touch my main army (I had several guys there spamming Living Earth and air lore masters to arrow fend them against iron blizzards & two elemental royal SC's). I was also able to use earth attack to immobilize his troop deployments.
I really didn't bother with troops other than Levite Zealots & Giddeoni + summons (who are decbt with A4E4N4 bless), it took time to accumulate a reasonable force of them with my holy limit of 3, but with that gem income, I knew that time was on my side.
Some fun facts from my recent turn:
- I'm summoning, gearing and sending out a Ophan & Hashmal & Bane Lord every turn (and have astral gems to forge all the necessary astral gear too)
- I'm forging 3 Blood Stones per turn (I've been forging them form turn 35 or so, I could have reached them earlier if I hadn't messed up my research)
- I'm forging 2 to 3 clams per turn, my clamming really took a hit from the lack of nature sites in wastelands, I had to alcemize like 60+ gems to cast the mother oak.
- Fire income +31, air +23, water +30, earth +47 (before stones), Astral +47 (before clams), Death +81, nature +25, blood about 30 or 40 per turn on average.