Ok, I promised Corwin that I would do a short AAR for this game, so here goes.
Mictlan had a relatively slow start, and didn't really get rolling until turn 30 or so when we conquered Abysia's 10 provinces after many costly battles against their native magma-men. I expected Absya to be a minor addition to our empire, but their lands turned out to have the Steel Ovens (20% forge bonus) and Mount Chaining (40% blood bonus). Finding these two sites as Mictlan is simply huge, and they played a pivotal role in my strategy from that point on. Shortly after Abysia fell, Nieflheim and then Vanheim declared war on me. I was pushing dominion in Abysia (for reasons I'll discuss later), and this was crucial during the war since both my enemies had to go through Abysia to reach my other lands. I dropped all my nature gems (300+) on a gift of health, and fought multiple large battles at Abysia with my double health armies and large numbers of casters as backup. At this point I basically had every mage of note within range of Abyisa, since the forging and blood sites were just a province or two away. Nielfheim and Vanhiem lost the core of their strength in these battles, including their Gods, prophets, best thugs, and most powerful mages. While they assaulted this strong point, I was using Mount Chaining and my S2B2 casters to drop as many horrors as I could behind their lines. Both empires were hollowed out in this fashion, and I was quite pleased with myself.
Then everyone else declared war on me. Even Marveni, who was supposed to be my loyal ally against the Sauromatian threat, broke from their sacred treaties. According to the score charts, Mictlan had grown enormously during just a few turns, and so was now a major threat. Unfortunately, the charts were a bit misleading, since I had only black hawks and turkey-mages in my new lands, and was only barely able to keep their former owners locked up in their castles by using horrors and a few well equipped ArchDevils. I gave the war up as lost from the start, and retreated everyone of value from my undefendable East lands to a new battle line on the Abysian border. The western most choke point of my empire was suddenly the eastern most choke point of my empire. Vast caravans of Mictlani priests and holy warriors made the journey west to the safety of Abysia, while the slaves, independent troops, and map move 1 mages stayed behind to put a noble face on things.
The eastern empire was quickly gobbled up by Sauromatia, Formoria, and Marveni, but I was able to consolidate my control of the west, and then make peace with the other nations once we no longer shared a border and once Mictlan had been halved. In most games I would not have bothered to try and make a come back from this point, since Dominions is essentially a game of geometric growth, and any major setback puts you out of the running for first place. Fortunately, Mictlan has plenty of late-game abusiveness to go along with its early game triple bless abuse. Specifically, the Onaqui bat-mages, who summon beast bats each turn. In addition to being great blood and death mages, the Onaqui summon ~4 bats per turn when they are in dom-10. And with 40% off from Mount Chaining, an Onaqui will pay for itself in beast bats in 8-9 turns. This makes it quite viable for Mictlan to Bat-spam, in addition to clam spamming and blood stone spamming. In terms of return on investment, the Onaqui compare quite favorably with clams, though of course the bats are not quite as versatile as astral pearls. Still, with Mictlan's heavy blessing and some simple buffs (blood lust, mass protection, darkness, etc.) the bats are quite sufficient to massacre mortal armies and quickly tear down castle walls. I'm not sure how well known this tactic is, but I've found it to be extremely powerful in large games where the cost of clams is increased, or where there will be plenty of time for the Onaqui to pay for themselves. Anyway, I had about 40 or so Onaqui squirreled away back there, and their free-spawn provided the core of the Mictlani armies. I'm pretty sure I went the entire game without using the actual Summon Beast Bat spell.
Which brings us up to more or less the present day of the Great War. In many ways, Sauromatia had a superior position at the start the War. Mictlan was always behind Sauromatia in research, and so Sauromatia had nearly every useful artifact. In addition, Sauromatia had all or nearly all of the Elemental Royalty, as well as a legion of fully fitted out Tartarians. A large part of the war for Mictlan was the attempt to take back the useful artifacts, and whittle down Sauromatia's advantage in SCs (especially those horrible Air Queens). Mictlan's main adavantages in the War was its allies, its globals, Sauromatia's initial stales, and the awesome power of late game blood magic. At the end of the war against Vanheim we discovered a site with a 30% conjuration bonus, but I was not able to make full use of it until very late in the war, since the site was far way from my best mages, and too close to the front lines to safely move mages in.
That was the big picture, here a few tactical notes:
- Sauromatia quickly discovered the correct counter to the beast bats, which is to bring along a Staff of Storms. The Bats have a tactical move of 2, which makes them *slow* when they can't fly. They can still fight in a storm, but they can no longer run interference on enemy mages and prevent any retreating troops from making it to safety.
- Forge of the Ancients is of course huge, and in retrospect I should have started trading for earth gems more quickly. At the last turn I had 250 earth gems saved, and was supposed to get another 350 from Oceania on the next turn. Hopefully that would have take it down.
- Banish to Inferno/Cocytos is great in the late game, since it is one of the more certain way to get rid of tartarians/Royalty (at least in the short term). I found out the hard way though that you need to have your casters at the very front if you want to catch enemy SCs at the back row. Even that can be uncertain if there is a storm limiting your vision range.
- Lightning helmets were crucial in many SC duels. I waited far too long in either getting shock resistance or equipping my own Tartarians with them.
- Phoenix Pyre is not quite the unbeatable tactic that I supposed it to be. I lost several thugs/SCs because they were fighting on their own, fell below 1/4 hitpoints, and then retreated.
- Empowering a Tartarian to cast Wish is another somewhat ill thought out idea. It's kind of annoying to have your gem production schedule disrupted because your caster wants to "Whisper to the Dead" for a month. I know at my workplace they wouldn't stand for that sort of behavior for long.
- Horrors turned out to be quite good against SCs. Baalz's post on that topic was very insightful, and I got some use out of it at the end of the game.
- The Astral Windows that Corwin kept seeing was from me checking the besieged castles to see if any reinforcements had teleported in.
Whew! I think that is about it. GG Corwin, et al.
AARrrrrggh!
I really was spacing out.
Linear Mode
