Re: Tactics: Countering Summoned Horrors
 

Well, that sounds like a bit of a defeatist attitude Sombre. Yes, its not cheap to put a mage or a magic item in each province but you're talking about trying to counter a strong aspect of a strong nation that the player has cultivated and researched up to in the late game. He's forged boosters, forged sanguine rods, built up a blood economy, and is spending scores of blood slaves every round. You could also say that your opponent is forcing you to put amulets of MR and lead shields on all your thugs, or script arrow fend in all major battles, or keep squads around patrolling for spies, or putting domes up over your best provinces, or etc. etc. etc. If you've got the foresight to plan ahead and forge them all with dwarven hammers you could forge 33 moonblades for 99 pearls (about the cost of 1 summoned & extravagantly outfitted SC and hardly ruinous at that stage of the game). Mix in some cheap mages and you can cover a fairly large empire well enough that it gets wasteful to cast horrors. With your alternative being that you rapidly lose every province which doesn't have a fort or large army I'd say its a good plan to start doing if you see Mictlan using such a tactic on your neighbor.

Re: Tactics: Countering Summoned Horrors
 

It's not defeatist. I'm not saying you can't counter it and you might as well give up, just that if they force you into an expensive counter the send horror tactic pays off. If they continue it heavily and your counter works well against it, then they start to burn resources. It's just a matter of which is more costly in the long run; the attack or the counter. If they're roughly equal though, it's always better to be on the attack rather than the counter, because you are actively controlling how the game progresses, not reacting.

And yes, I would say that you 'force' people to use arrow fend, amulets of mr etc. Any counter that you have to use or suffer seriously is one you're being forced into. Of course if you correctly predict their attack and have the counter ready and your counter is cheaper and easier than their attack, or they continue trying their attack despite it not working, you have the advantage. With the advantage the next move is an attack of your own which they will hopefully fail to counter, counter too slowly, or overcounter when you're actually going to switch tactics.