[Taqwus]

Originally posted by Cthulu13:
So could someone give me a general description of each of the 17 racess, including strengths & weaknesses? I've already bought the game but i took the free shipping option and am not sure when it will arive. Thx in advance...

Races are highly variable. After all, the selection of any given nation/race defines only some parameters -- your 'national' units (which can be recruited at any of your fortresses, exception being underwater for land nations and land fortresses for underwater nations) mostly, but also what spells you get without researching, terrain preference and such.

You then get design points, and how you spend them will REALLY affect strengths and weaknesses. For instance, with C'tis, you can spend a whopping 200 points and pick 'Desert Tombs', which gets you access to powerful unholy undead priests, in which case you'll probably be cranking out undead even faster than usual... and Ermor-Ashen Empire is very different from Ermor-Broken Empire.

Heck, even without themes... Ulm with Fortified City, Order 3, Productivity 3, Drain 3, Growth 1, Luck 3, Prince of Death w/ Death-6 (something like this anyway) will play rather differently than Ulm with less powerful scales and a magically talented rainbow mage. The former is tuned for using the pretender as an early head-basher, and will be powerful with conventional forces but will have trouble achieving any magical versatility early on, while the latter would have more trouble cranking out and supporting large conventional armies, but the rainbow mage would be better at finding magical sites and perhaps opening up nonconventional options, esp. with magic sites that yield mages with random capabilities.

Things do vary a lot. It might be safe to generalize somewhat, such as Ulm generally being the steel-heavy approach, Pangaea having more stealth, Arcosephale and esp. Pythium being well-rounded with versatile mages and good heavy infantry, Man having a number of interesting traits such as easy longbow access and strong, if pricey, stealthy units... but scales/themes can make a big difference.

And then there's style and taste... different people may prefer different styles for assorted reasons. I suspect that you might be interested in R'lyeh, which gets to play with units that strongly resemble certain elements of a particular horror/sci-fi mythos.