Yup, agree with akaoni, you could have rolled over us fairly easily. According to the scoregraphs, You were actually in the lead for most of the last half of the game in most areas. Your activity, or lack of, actually cast a very long shadow over my actions - you always maintained a very large troop presence on my borders that I couldn’t ignore. For that reason more than any other, I generally limited my aggressive activities to short skirmishes that kept my troops close to home incase I needed to defend against you, and more than once or twice, i was certain you were planning to move aggressively against me.
Really, wasn’t my favorite game by a long shot. The inability to get scouts up (and when i did, to have them killed by the hordes of birds running around) meant I was blind for the first half of the game. I never got to see Bandar at all, and very little of shin. I didn’t seem to get that many lucky events, and could never find a good source for astral mages (i had one province with wizards that gave me a 20%(x2) chance of an astral path, which commonly gave me an S1 every 6 rounds(it was a slow recruit)), and then in the endgame I got a few spectres with an astral path that i had following around my raiders for mindhunt protection(which never happened).
In the end, i felt I didn’t really have enough power to take on anyone directly - well, at least not without compromising my defenses. I don’t quite think i was as weak as Akaoni implies, and even when I sued for peace with him at the end, it was more because our struggle only served to weaken both of us for very little gain. My forces, particularly around the capitals was strong, and bolstered by an impressive array of artifacts:
The bottom two rows of that are the artifacts (i keep my magic box tidy so i can find things easily :)). The few callouts there are boots of the planes, mage bane, sword of many colors, astral harpoon, ember, black mirror and the ark. I was really curious to bring the ark into battle - and had it planned - but it had to be the right battle, so i had an army of sacreds ready in wait to unleash it, but alas, it never came about. The harpoon, i talked about abit, was a weird surprise, as i figured it would pull the target to the creature that held the harpoon (in fact, it pulled it into the province where it fought and beat the Pd), but the creature holding the harpoon was nestled safely inside the keep. The absolute MOST disappointing artifact i got for the first time was the lamp - yes, the djinn is a mighty chassis - immune to fire and lightning, ethereal, trample and high morale, as well as F5, A5, E3, S3, However, as soon as it gets summoned from the lamp, the lamp can be forged again and it will return. Because of this, i was afraid of equiping it with anything, lest someone else reforge the lamp and get it and quite likely knowing dominions, all of the things i had equipped on it.
oh, since i mentioned score graphs i should post that…
