Qt3Snoozers:
Wow, you guys either have a really good memory or took great notes.
I will go back and see if I have a few notes and add some more later, but will do a quick summary for now. Akaoni hit on most of my involvement in the large scale of the game. He was my closest ally and actually was a big help in my early survival in the game. Once I took over on Turn 9, I had 4 total provinces and only 3 commanders not counting scouts: My pretender, one good commander and one mage Oni General. So, I was really concerned by not having any mages researching and being surrounded by Pan, Abysia, and Niefel around my capitol. I had a feeling I was a really good target for Pan to snuff out fast and was glad to work something out with him and Abysia to keep them off me at first. I was going to work with Abysia a bit, but Pan turned on him and he agreed to let me have one of his provinces when he was on the way out, which helped quite a bit. The scales I had ended up being Turmoil 3, Prod 3, Growth 3, Misfortune 3, which didn’t end up hurting as much as I thought it would. My first turn I had 9500 people leave my capitol and my lab burned down once, but I honestly didn’t think it hurt my game as much as it seems it would. The Luck 3 events sure would have been nice, though, and I don’t think I ever did get a hero to show up, which would have been nice.
The research thing really had me worried. It was turn 9 and we only had level 1 Evo done and that was it. My first thing was I finally made the Oni General our prophet (we didn’t appear to have one) so that I could take the throne that we did have, so one of the starting provinces was indeed a good one! Unfortunately the throne only gave our blessed troops darkvision, which basically did nothing for me with armies of demons and undead. My next first plan was to hurry to the island south of me that I could see with one scout that Machaka was starting in and apparently expanded in the other direction. I overbid on the infantry mercs to have a screen of good fighters and hired a bunch of demons to bolster the army with the archers that were already hanging out in the capitol. I needed to get a good chunk of that island if I was to have a chance!
The island plan worked flawlessly. After I took a province or two down there, Machaka reluctantly agreed to let me share the island with them and that let me get some forts up and get up and on my feet with some mage production and get my research ramped up. In the meantime, in between helping out Pan with Niefel to gain some more needed territory, I tried to chase around the bad events that Misfortune 3 was causing me with my demon priests and my prophet to summon armies of undead to help bolster my armies. I would have probably at least changed the scales to have Luck 3 instead of Production 3 with the low resource Yomi troops, but the Turmoil did help quite a bit to boost the Yomi troop effectiveness and the Growth 3 never hurts and helped my Sorcerers with their old age live longer.
My Pretender was pretty mean and a really good combatant and awake so I tried to use him as much as possible early on. He had similar paths to our national troops and I ended up really missing Astral, Air and Water for most of the game and couldn’t even get a 2N mage to save my life. I ended up having to empower Water and Air just to get to 2 and got lucky to get a 1A1S crystal province from Niefel that helped a bit there.
It was actually Fomoria, I believe, that finally convinced me to fight Machaka as DireAussie had taken over and was looking to mix it up and try to turn the tide for his nation. This was huge for me as it hit Machaka at a bad time for them and we were mostly unopposed although it took me a while to take some forts due to the large amount of troops and mages inside.
Later in the game I managed to get Eternal Pyre up with only one booster on my Pretender, and this was huge in making me relevant. I was able to do a lot with all of those gems and later on with the Alchemist’s stone I conjured up 2000+ gold on more than one occasion. Another big choice I made was to go for Construction 9 and try out Iron Dragons and Poison Golems. These ended up being effective, but I made a blunder in thinking Iron Dragons were commanders, which messed me up a bit. It also took so long to hit Const 9 that I fell way behind on some other critical research targets that I needed at critical times. I actually feel I could have made a run for the win if I would have went for Evo 9 instead and had Flames from the Sky at my disposal when I was advancing on Ermor near the end there when he almost won.
All in all, though, I had a great time. At the end I was just forging all sorts of artifacts I would see as they would appear due to some poor mage dying in the world somewhere. I had lots of fun tools to use and got to use some on Ermor in that last battle. I had the Unquenched Sword, Sun Slayer, Tartarian Chains, the arm-loss axe and all sorts of other goodies. Another big mid game move we made with Fomoria was I actually forged and sent him the Sceptre of Dark Regency to allow him to get the Well of Misery up, which he felt was necessary to try to make him relevant again. It worked out flawlessly and I never did really end up needing that Sceptre til the last battle to allow a lower mage to cast Darkness so my Dai Oni could thug it out with artifacts.
