End Game:
When I took time to think about it, turn 87 actually wasn’t that bad, and I realized that it actually might have saved me considerably more pain. Lanka would obviously have to wait now - the dome would interfere with direct magical attacks, and my forces on the capital were too weak to capture it. I did lose an important caster, and a bunch of gems worth of material - but gems I had in abundance, and I did have other F/E casters. However, in stopping my magical transports, Lanka inadvertently left me with the forces best able to counter Kailasa’s push. Had my attack on the capital been successful - I would have had heroes, items and armies too remote to return to aid TC.
Kailasa was the obvious threat right now, but I couldn’t ignore Caelum and potentially Yomi. Sea of Ice! It was a brilliant solution to these threats. In one swoop it isolates the Caelum army and divides yomi (without actually directly attacking him). They could then either work around it by teleporting troops/commanders from under the ice, or work to dispel it - but either would cost them time and gems. I also distantly hoped that being confined under the ice might cause Yomi and Caelum to war with each other, but i knew that was pretty unlikely.
With Caelum and Yomi cleaned up, that left only Lanka and Kailasa. I decided that Lanka, like a wounded enterprise, wasn’t going anywhere - I could tie it up sufficiently with a few Sidhes. The disruption they would cause to the gold and gem income to lanka would be enough, i figured, to keep Lanka from harassing me. And so that left me the bulk of my forces to defend against Kailasa. Now how to best do that…
While Kail had broken the walls of TC(nice job on that, btw - those eagles do have some really good uses). I knew his force wasn’t strong enough to take on the city. I had a dozen casters, including my pretender and Antrax(Banefires 4F3D) and about 70 troops however my heavy hitting thugs, including Lugh, my prophet, the ether lord and the wraith, were all elsewhere. While his troops had flight, they never had storm immunity and so they wouldn’t be flying (i had a staff of storms as well as Tempest, so storm would be up at start). This meant that the fight would be in front of my walls, where his forces would be channeled and susceptible to my casters, who would also have ample time to buff the defenders. But still, even believing that i could withstand his forces, i didn’t think he would fight. He had 2 armies in tow - the first had taken my astral mage factory next door, and the second was just behind that. That’s where his mages and his grunts would be - so i had 2 turns, i figured.
Magic might be a problem, and to this point, I never had a dome up in defense of TC (why would I need it, there was no threat there?!) This made it easy to return forces, but i also didn/t want interference. My guess was that he’d do one of two things this turn - he’d back off TC entirely to see how i responded, or he’d quietly reinforce. My gut was telling me he’d back off - we’d played enough games together that I thought Akaoni would figure I’d respond in force. By leaving a token defender there, he’d get a gauge for the fight he was in - meanwhile his first and third armies would all converge into a superstack beside TC to take it for good.
I decided not to play into this. I would return my heavy thugs, and the troll army. They were all coming in magic transport, so they’d safely make the fort. And if i was wrong, and kailasa did storm the walls - these forces would be present for a very nasty surprise (castle storming coming later in turn resolution than magic rituals(including transport)).
Turn 88 was pretty uneventful. Sea of ice went up. Eyes of god came down. An arrow hit my pretender in the heart, but thanks to the gift of health no real injury was sustained (no affliction). An earth elemental also killed one of my support casters in TC (the one that had the staff of storms). This could have been bad - an elemental or a remote attack killing a key support could be pivotal in the battle to be fought. I needed to get some protection up.
Kailasa did not retreat from TC as I had thought, but neither did he attack. instead, he brought up troops to reinforce them. His third army was now bordering TC, and so I didn’t think an attack was imminent this round either. At this point, all my important defenders were back, and his chances of successfully storming the walls were, in my opinion, not very good. I now had over 300 defending troops - half of which were trolls and ogres. In addition, those heavy thugs of mine were all back, supported by an air royalty and bolstered by those artifacts that I had been creating for the last 20 turns…yes, if an attack came, we were ready.
I’d lost the lanka capital - this was expected, and now my forces would play cat and mouse with them - just seeking to be annoying and prevent his forces from opening a second front. Domes were going up though all around my territories(including 2 domes in TC), and i was hitting Kailasa with remote attacks of my own. The 2 domes in TC was interesting - initially, i did this because i was pretty much using all my air gems (magic movement largely - you can see in that screen shot how many i was carrying at this point. This is also what made losing air items like staff of storms and pocket ships annoying, is that they were actually somewhat painful to recreate - often meaning that i had to postpone something else to do it) and I figured i had tons of fire gems so why not create a fire dome - some of Kailasa’s casters are pretty frail so it might just work. That didn’t really pan out though, but what it did do is let me know how effective my ‘real’(astral) dome was doing. At only 50% effectiveness, it’s hard to rely on the astral dome and so you might not know how good it’s doing(it only alerts you when it stops something). It stopped 3 of the 4 attacks, letting through an earth attack in one really strange battle.
Sometimes you have these fights where there are no real stragglers on your side. Every commander you have has a purpose - they might be there to cast a key spell like fog of war, or some wards, or relief. Or they might be there to summon undead, or cast some nasty battlefield spells like magma eruption. Or they might be there to be a SC or thug and fight hand-to-hand. But, point is, everyone’s got a job to do. Sometimes in these battles though, you have too many jobs and not enough able bodies. You might have something you really want done - but everyone’s busy doing something else important. So, in these instances, you might find yourself giving a scout a key artifact like Tempest and dressing him up to play a part in the battle. Of course, if you’re going to do this, you should give the poor bloke some protection…and you end up with something strange like this happening:
Vulcanus would survive that battle of earth and water and lightning, but it was amusing none-the-less.
This is all on turn 89. Not much is going on in Lanka - trading as per expected. Caelum is starting to get a little more aggressive though, and is starting to send thugs out into my territories around its capital of Machaka. I kill some of these remotely, but there’s a couple of nasty ones that will emerge over the next few turns. Additionally, they start taking some of the old lanka territories - i find this particularly funny given they are ‘allies’. At one point, Caelum owns more of Lanka proper than either myself or Lanka does…
But in the south at TC, a window opens up for me. Kailasa has splinterred off some of its forces to gain some additional territories around TC. Surprisingly, Kailasa also tried to storm the fort. It ended up poorly for him…