MP: ANDalusian Sun: Lolomo wins after more than 2 years of gruelling competition!

[LoloMo]

Yes it's finished after two years!

All the while, I had Wraithlord pegged as Tien Chi. The fight against Mockingbird was really tense for many many turns

This is a brief summary as far as I can remember, and may not be entirely accurate as some of it was 2 years ago!

When I designed Ulm, I went for late game advantage by choosing order, growth, productivity and luck scales. I chose an imprisoned moderate astral oracle. It was quite a risky and non conventional build for late Ulm, but I was hoping that the buffs from the lesser holy war mod would synergize with Ulm's low magic resistance. It didn't, although I might have forgotten a some fights against indies that were helped by divine armaments.

I had middle of the pack early expansion against indies. Sometime around turn 30, my first test arrived when Atlantis rushed Abysia, conquered their capital, and became my neighbor, and at that time arguably the leading nation. I knew I didn't have much time to act before Atlantis solidifies his power, so I attacked with the majority of my troops after spying that Atlantian troops stationed at the Abysian capital was manageable. I was successful, my rangers worked well against shieldless Atlantians, and I used communions and blood burst.

Around the same time, R'lyeh mounted an attack on Atlantis itself so I was able to consolidate my gains.

[LoloMo]

At this time, I still had no vamps, and for many turns after focused on empowering in blood and building up a vamp and blood hunting economy.

Tien chi and Mictlan quickly took the lead in income and gems, and this lead they would hold till the lategame.

I turned to churning out loads and loads of wolves from wolfherds to inflate my army score to make myself an undesirable target. I had the biggest army score from mid game to the end, and I think this allowed me to work on developing my blood economy unmolested. I was probably 40 turns behind Mictlan in terms of blood, and by the time I tried to summon them, all the blood SCs were already taken.

Tien Chi, Mictlan, and Bogarus were the most aggressive mid game, taking out nations left and righ. Tien Chi never relinquished his lead till the end and Micltan was consistently second. Ulm was somewhere third or fourth along with Bogarus.

Around turn 60 or so, I started feeling Mictlan's dominion push. I had to work extremely hard to counter this, and ended up making more than a hundred juggernauts. In late game, I was alchemizing most of my gems to make juggernauts just to maintain my dominion.

[LoloMo]

Around turn 80 onwards, Mictlan, Bogarus, and Tien Chi got into a brawl that would last the next 40 turns. During this extended period, Tien Chi got Arcane nexus, Gift of Health, and Misery up. However I took my time before attacking TC, as I had such a difficult time countering Mictlan's dominion, and didn't want to deal with a victorious Mictlan. Although Mictlan was loosing provinces, it didn't look like he was loosing his fighting capability.

At this time I started making plans to take out R'lyeh. Between Mictlan blood sac and my juggernauts, R'lyeh dominion was constantly in danger of being snuffed out. I used possession to make lots of sea troll commanders, and made lots of piercers for them. My plan was to march them over to R'lyeh capital along with juggernauts, and hopefully just take his last candles out. It was going to be a massive investment with high risk of failure, as R'lyeh had a massive mage army.

I didn't get to implement this plan, as Bogarus fell (became AI), and Mictlan was at this point suffering from low morale as he had been fighting TC for so long and was steadily losing ground. I turned around and attacked TC and Bogarus.

[LoloMo]

War with TC was a lot of prodding attacks and back and forth land grabbing. Both of us were hesitant to commit a significant amount of power into any single battle, as a loss would be catastrophic. I had the advantage of being able to make a fort in one turn with 3 red seconds, so I made full use of that, creeping steadily into TC lands, and moving juggernauts into my border forts. TC had lots and lots of SCs - Zmeys, Wendigo's, Tarts, Grendels.

I had terrible luck with SCs, so I stopped making them after I lost the first 5 to the silliest of things. I think one died to TC province defense. TC had super huge income and just piled on the PD everywhere.

I started making assassins using vamps, fiends. At first success was limited, and many attempts resulted in expensive assassins dying or retreating to their deaths. Breakthrough for me was when I realized that the vine whip didn't need to hit to entangle. Took a few tries to finally got a combo that worked reasonably well: vine whip, piercing or armor negating second weapon, berserker pelt, horned helmet, messenger boots, black heart, water bottle, and 30 blood slaves. I had a few infernal hell assassins also mixing things up. With this set up, I was able to check TC's raiding SCs. Speed boots was a good counter to my low hp vine whip assassins, but then you get hit by an infernal hell assassin instead.

[LoloMo]

Thank you Dimaz for being such a good Admin! I can't imagine two years of granting extension requests and looking for all those subs. Hope we didn't consume all your admining patience :-)

[mockingbird]

Originally Posted by LoloMo

Thank you Dimaz for being such a good Admin! I can't imagine two years of granting extension requests and looking for all those subs. Hope we didn't consume all your admining patience :-)

Yes, thank you Dimaz! Your administration was very much appreciated and made it an extremely enjoyable game to the end.

Hopefully I will have time to post my thoughts on the game later.

[Amhazair]

Updated the OP to appropiately grant Lolomo the glory he richly deserves.

Thanks to Dimaz for seeing out the (inevitably quite boring) job he took on without being able to guess it would take such a huge portion of his life.

And also well done to Mockingbird, who I welcomed as a shiney newb in a previous game I organised not even a measly 3 years ago, and who can now, by evidence of this game, clearly hold his head high in the most august company.

(I would say something about the other final survivor, but an honorable 2nd/3rd place is the very least we expect from the masterful Wraithlord, so it's hardly worth mentioning, is it? )