[deccan]

Well, unlike anatoli, I'm not happy with the way I played this game at all. I started off with probably the richest patch of provinces on the map, which explained why I had more money than anyone else throughout the game. And I didn't have any really close neighbors, except for Vanheim.

But I made some really dumb mistakes.

First, I killed off my starting slayer by instinctively setting him to retreat, and then forgetting that, set him to assassinate an indy prvince. Doh! I learned the hard way that retreating from assassination combats means automatic death.

Second, I tried using my Scorpion King pretender as an SC naked. Luckily, he only got away with an affliction.

But most importantly, I never quite grasped until very late that this was a VP game and did not castle many of my VP provinces and I didn't realize that the VP limit was 15 points, which was really very easily reached.

Early in the game, I met Vanheim (Frosted Flake) and he joked about allying together against Jotunheim (who was allied with Caelum). I also gave gifts to neighbors like Ermor, Atlantis, Vanheim etc. so that I didn't get involved in any early wars. But as the game progressed, Vanheim got tied up in a war against Man which stopped his expansion, while I ended up being boxed in between the two big powers, Jotunheim and Ermor.

Since I was the third big power, I obviously wanted Ermor and Jotunheim to fight each other, so that I could pounce on either one as the opportunity arose. But I sensed that Jotunheim was reluctant to turn his back on me, so I backstabbed Vanheim (I told him that we never had a formal NAP and gave him a one turn notice as a courtesy). I did it to make Jotunheim feel better about turning his back on me, to expand without getting in the way of the war between Jotunheim and Ermor and for the two VP Vanheim capital.

What I didn't expect was for Ermor to steamroller Jotunheim the way it did. It didn't take me long to take Vanheim's capital (I would have taken it faster if I had used my devil army, but I was afraid Frosted would come out of his castle with a Staff of Storms to ground the devils and thunderstrike them so I only used a couple of Archdevils instead), but by then, with the slowness of the 1-move Abysian Infantries, I couldn't really move my forces to attack Ermor. Also, I realized that attacking Ermor really didn't make much sense. Since this is a VP game and the VP limit was set so low, it was much more rewarding to take VPs from the weaker nations, like Vanheim and Man, than to try and take them from Ermor.

Also, I'd like to point out to everyone who's wondering why I didn't do more to stop Ermor, I had two 1-VP provinces near my border with Ermor and those provinces were uncastled. Ermor could easily have taken those two provinces and won the game four or five turns earlier if Anatoli had chosen to ignore our NAP.

Ah well, if the game had been set up with a higher VP limit, I would have had fun mass casting "Flames from the Sky" on Ermorian hordes, but as it is, I never really got to fight any really big battles or do anything really cool (I was considering casting "Second Sun" in response to Jotunheim's "Illwinter" but decided to save the gems for mass casting "Flames from the Sky". Jotunheim was begging me to cast Flames near the end, but I was one turn away from researching it when the game ended.

All in all, I made many, many mistakes in this game, but learned a lot from doing them.