I got pretty lucky this game...I started out with my capital literally two provinces away from Mictlan's capital. I was reasonably concerned...even with an awake SC god there is not much I could have done against a bless rush...thankfully Mictlan agreed to a NAP and eventually seemed to get mired in a war with literally all his neighbors. I was able to expand reasonably rapidly but my position was really exposed, I was surrounded on all sides but I was reasonably happy with the amount of land I had so I established NAP's with Pythium, Man, Jomon Pangea and Abysia (I was really a big pacifist in the early game). My early focus was to get as many cheap castles up as possible as quickly as possible to jump start my research while site searching as much as I could. Tien Chi had been complaining about his weak start location (and it was quite bad) and when I saw that he was my neighbor and that his god was a crone and was out manually site searching I figured he'd be a relatively easy kill in the early game and would have the potential to be a big pain the the *** if allowed to live to the late game. So I banded together with Abysia and we were able to dispatch Tien chi...unfortunately I underestimated the ai and ended up sitting on his capital and another castle that the ai built in the north for what seemed like an eternity. I had planned to dominion kill him but his dominion was quite persistent and lived on in abysia's northern land where aby had no temples. When I did eventually successfully storm his capital I took it with ease but my god (The destroyer of worlds) took some light damage and managed to get feeble minded. Not a huge deal since my early expansion was over; he would sit on Tien's capital doing nothing for the rest of the game.
I was lucky enough to find 2 indy mage sites...Gnomes E2N2, very useful battle mages and wizards who gave me access to all magical paths and have a natural 10rp/turn for 180 gold. I quickly researched my way up to Maelstrom and put that up and with hammers proceeded to clam like a *****. I was making an average of 4 clam of pearls/turn for quite a while, I ended up stopping at 50 clams. C'tis having well of misery had me concerned so I eventually overwrote it with my own and picked up some nice death unique items. Most of my death gems ended up going into liches, I ended up with 6 of them and would use them to cast manifestation and leprosy...Marignon and Atlantis took most of them, despite the fact that they are anonymous spells I did not throw them against people I had NAP's with.
Jomon and Marignon went to war somewhat early on...I had pretty good scouting the whole game and watched most of the battles. Despite generally taking heavy losses due to Mari's impressive PD Jomon seemed to have achieved an advantage over Mari and killed his god when he accepted peace and they returned to prewar borders. I considered attacking and trying to wipe out Jomon at this point but he was pretty new to multiplayer and I had given him some advice and kind of felt bad about attacking him...so I ended up sitting around summoning/forging. All my neighbors seemed to be stagnating...the eastern powers were destroying each other with no nation seemingly managing to achieve an advantage. Eventually Pythium went ai and so did Jomon so I moved in on the two nations simultaneously. I took an undefended province of Pythium's (I had scouts all over Pythiums land and he would always be leaving provinces with 0 PD...drove me nuts but I did not want to fight hydra masses. When I took the province the ai decided to send some human made hydra armies my way...an unpleasant surprise, I had seen what those things did to bogarus's nice SC's and I was not really prepared to fight them...So I kept the AI's armies at bay by constantly killing all its commanders with earth attacks and manifestations. To the west jomon gave me some nasty surprises as well. The AI can be pretty serious business with human created armies in its hands. I had a cavalry mass overrun a large astral mage force with an infantry front that was not big enough to properly protect it, and his astral mages made using my SC's a dangerous prospect. Eventually though I wore down and conquered most of both these nations and in Pythiums land found the ultimate gateway.
By now my SC force was really strong...Marignon was fighting Pangea and Atlantis was fighting Atlantis, I gave them some aid with remote spells when I'd see a big stack of troops from Marignon or Atlantis. At this point I was pretty sure I would win and was just trying to weaken/demoralize my enemies to make them a bit softer down the road. With my SC's I was able to take over most of C'tis in 1 turn and had it all in two (except for the castles which I was content to leave under siege) Mictlan was dominion killed and I ended up splitting his land with Man before giving Man warning on our NAP. I was careful not to fight Ulm because I wanted the ai to continue focusing on Atlantis.
At this point Marignon was pretty much dead and Abysia still had a lot of land but his armies and mages were pretty much destroyed by Atlantis. Man had invested most of his money in PD...I couldn't even get scouts into his land but I knew that my SC's would easily dispatch any number of unsupported PD. The only threats to my power as I saw it were Pangea and Atlantis. I had talked to Pangea and he indicated he didn't really want to fight me and knew I was in a much more powerful position than him so I sent troops south to start raiding Atlantis and started striking in Abysia to claim some of his vast amounts of undefended land. That's pretty much it, thanks for the game everyone!
Sorry bout the wall of boring text
Re: Discharge - LA game - Started
Linear Mode
