AAR: Pyrothere

[LDiCesare]

This thread is to provide a short AAR of the MP game Pyrothere.
I hope other participants will post here too, as this may be interesting to people who were not involved in the Pyrothere game to begin with.
Settings were:
Map: Spring Rains, with custom start points.
Vanilla. Late Era.
Slow-paced game.

[LDiCesare]

I played LA Man, Towers of Chelms.
My pretender was a rather lousy rainbow.
I started thinking I wouldn't last long, which probably didn't help me in the long run.
I planned to get a big gold income thanks to judges patrolling, and lots of castles in order to be able to defend myself easily with all my defend-bonus troops. This was based on a strategy guide in this forum (probably Baalz).
Patrolling for gold works very well.
Hoping your troops will be able to defend your castle is an illusion, a lure you shouldn't fall to.

My first war was a skirmish against Ermor. It was a big mistake.
T'ien Chi had asked me to help, and seeing I fear LA Ermor, I sent some troops. Wardens, who walked through a portal and far away, got into friendly fire against T'ien Chi patrols, took some provinces, but TC would have fared as well alone, and I lost lots of time bringing troops there which would have been better used on another front.

I then went into a war against Atlantis. It went rather well, with Atlantis crippled on land, lots of magisters instilling uprest, and I also took several water provinces.
I then made another mistake. I thought I needed help underwater, so I called R'lyeh. I gave them 3 water provinces in order for them to do the rest of underwater fighting. Then they staled after taking my provinces, just when they should have been attacking Atlantis.
This resulted in a huge loss of gold income for very little benefit. I believe I would have done better without R'lyeh, although the squids might have attacked me of course, but they wouldn't have been worse than as an ally actually.

Anyway, Atlantis was more or less handled when Caelum attacked. That's when I thought I could use my many magisters to defend castles. Wrong. Hordes of fliers and undead tear down castles easily. So I basically retreated, hoping to be able to regroup somewhere in order to block Caelum. Unfortunately, I still needed troops against Atlantis. This resulted in Caelum having an easy stroll through my lands. I tried a few communions but atttacking Caelum only resulted in critically scripted mages getting thunderbolted away and the whole battle plan folding. Earthquakes were rather inefficient too.
I only managed to hold one fort correctly, with some communions + fog warriors + draconians flying out before casting storm to avoid Caelian from flying above my walls afterwards.

Overall, I lacked a proper plan for my pretender, and I was totally wrong believing the fort bonuses of my troops and commanders would be useful. They might have been against non fliers without hordes of undead, but Caelum has easy access to both. In fact, many LA nations have easy access to undead so hordes of wall-tearers will certainly be easy to mass for most nations. Therefore, hiding in castles will just not work. My research was also rather poor. I spent too much energy fighting Atlantis to properly research Alteration.

I had forged a lot of matrixes for communion, but was really afraid to use them because a single earthquake or some other large area of effect spell would have ruined lots of mages easily.

[Illuminated One]

Well, I was Tien Chi.
I had a e9 cyclops with very good scales (my only bad scale was sloth, I assumed that I'd start next to two forests like everyone else, still it was ok).
I was next to Ermor, Utgard, Ulm and Bogarus. When I had some scout reports about very large forces of giants on my borders I prepared for a war and allied with Ermor (evil me), but when he then attacked Utgard it became quickly apparent that I'd have a very large Undead empire killing my population below me, so I cancelled the NAP and attacked Ermor instead.

Asking a few people for help (sorry about just sneak through my province it will be fine...) I took a large force of mages and whatever priests I could get and went southwards. This is something I later regretted bitterly, as when I came to artifacts and uniques a good bunch was already taken. Often the mages did nothing better than banish, but I couldn't pull priests out of my hat and still, when Ermor was finally down to one province my initial force of about 40 mages had melted to 10. During the war I built tons of temples to prevent Ermors (and to a lesser extent Ulms) dominion from spreading and to have priests. When Bogarus was quickly conquering Midgard and I made war plans against him, organizing my mages into strike teams (called hordes) and giving them funky chinese names to remember what they were supposed to do.
I'd have been mostly trying to drown him in undead chaff (I had the priests anyway, why not kill them off? Only that the armageddons then made their death final), with my mages having a variety of SC killer spells at their disposal. I also tried to thug out some ancestor smiths for cheap raiders but this worked not so well, when I tried it against Ulm.
In the end it never happened since the Ermor front grinded to a halt on his range of castles and with so many around me going AI in the end I had lots of other engagements (I wasn't really happy about Bogarus taking a lot of these from me, though) and letting Ermor just regain two or three territories would've ment a lot of pain again.