Yipes! Could you hold off one turn, please? I’m about to storm the last VP, and I’d dearly like to wrap things up with the victory message.
ETA - to clarify, I’m referring to Inquisitor.
What happened? Essentially, I grew to #1 (with 4 out of 5 VPs, and a large lead in provinces/gems/income), and the other players dropped out, for various reasons (hopeless situation/no longer fun/no time to play/too far away from me to do much/all of the above).
I would love to say that I won through superior skill, but really I got very lucky with my starting position: I had the entire western continent to myself, and I had my back to two map edges, so didn’t have to worry about being jumped on all sides. This was also the perfect setup for my long-term-oriented Pretender build (imprisoned scalemonster with enough magic for Air Queens / the Forge / Staves of Elemental Mastery). It also helped that I got some good indies - predominantly High Magi and Adepts of Pyriphlogon (I never expected the Fire Nation theme to be as apt as it became). I then played well enough not to snatch defeat out of the jaws of a great starting hand. (At first, I underestimated my strength - I attacked Mictlan out of fear that I’d be overwhelmed by waves of triple-blessed, build-anywhere, blood-backed sacreds if I left him alone, and was then pleasantly surprised when my hordes of indy crossbowmen and samurai hit hard enough to put down said sacreds. After that, I moved onto Pythium once I decided that those hordes of conventional troops would be useless before very long, and once Caelum and C’tis jumped me, the rest was history… although the last few turns were more mopping up.)
Despite the above, I think that a determined coalition of the other players could have dragged things out or even taken me down by suicidally attacking - even though that would have been irrational from an individual perspective. For example, Patala (Rollory) was on the far end of the map from me, with Midgard’s capital and a couple of Caelian frontier provinces acting as a buffer between us. Theoretically, Patala could have thrown the kitchen sink at Midgard, knocked him out of the game, and barreled through the Caelian frontier (or else just built Pocket Ships and hopped over one small sea) in order to get to me - to say nothing of teleporting SCs in to attack me. In practice, I don’t know how workable that would have been - had he done so, he would have had to march armies from his homeland, through a long, slender strip of territory running along the map edge, to any front with me - but Gateway would have eased those constraints.
Agartha, similarly, could have pushed more aggressively through C’tissian lands to reach me.
As for the two main foes who actually did border me, Caelum and C’tis…
… I think C’tis’ error wasn’t waiting too long to attack me (he couldn’t have done so earlier, anyway - he was tied up fighting Pangaea); it was being aggressive enough to leave himself open to counterattacks, but insufficiently aggressive to actually threaten my key provinces. He stuck his neck out by besieging my frontier fortress, but when I clearly had enough men in there to resist the siege, he didn’t bypass it to conquer undefended territory (he could have marched far enough south to eventually threaten my capital), or throw more troops in to break the walls - he camped outside the gates, setting himself up for my Break Siege + retreat-cutoff. In the east, he sent out raiding parties, but didn’t bring enough men to actually threaten the ex-Pythian capital. In the centre, he had a large army that just sat in one place instead of moving forward and besieging the one fortress that A) was the bridge between the western and eastern parts of my empire, and B) had a sizeable garrison that I was able to move out to more active fronts, once I realised that there was no threat.
Similarly, Caelum kept pretty much to himself after our initial grand battles over the Pythian capital - save for the odd raiding party, which could be Mind Hunted to oblivion.
Ultimately, the key to my success was strategic mobility. This came in several forms: I could move large armies from one corner of my empire to another by using Gateway and the Flying Ship, and I could play musical chairs with boosters. For example, a wimpy E1A1N1? master shugenja could suddenly become a Rain of Stones-casting terror, with just a pair of earth boots. That was it was so important that the other players came at me cautiously: it let me reallocate resources, both troops and boosters, from quiet fronts to frantic ones.
All in all, it was a very fun game - thanks for playing, everyone! I did notice that it was predominantly an “armies + mages” game rather than an SC-centric one, and that, I thought, was much more fun. My Dai Oni barely did anything, and the only enemy SC I encountered was a single C’tissian wraith lord who sat in front of my fortress gates for most of his un-life.
