[deccan]

Well, Panther, I suppose you should shut down the game once everyone has had a chance to look at their turns.

I think I was the one who first suggested the Arco-Ulm-Jotunheim alliance against Caelum, and that was before Pasha went on holiday. Our plan was to wait until Pasha came back to attack you, but then you started carving up Vanheim with Abysia, and Steerpike egged me on to attack you without waiting for Pasha.

I agree with you that Arco was the best placed among us to defeat you. Not only for the mind-attacking spells you mentioned (though those would have worked best seeing as you had a magic scale which would reduce MR), but also the easy access to elemental combat spells.

Personally, I tried a variety things:

1) Cold-immune, lightning-immune thug. I think that worked okay. The problem was that I had no air magicians other than my pretender and so I gambled on spectres to get a random air but never succeeded. You never did catch that raiding Bane Lord. I should have made a bunch of them.

2) Massed indy archers. That didn't work very well. I thought a hail of arrows would kill a clump of false horrors, ethereal or not, but they kept missing.

3) Undead and vine ogres. Well, the tanks are mindless, but you could still scare away the mages, which dissolved the tanks. Ouch. It didn't help that false horrors actually have very good attack / defense. Mindless tanks are useless unless you actually have mages in the back to cast some good spells.

4) False horror spam could be defeated with overwhelming numbers if I arranged a full line of troops so that some would slip past the false horrors and attack the mages.

5) I watched some fights with Ulm, and while the charcoal shielded Black Lord could pop false horrors, it didn't help him against lightning bolts / frozen heart.

Overall, I'd say that false horror is definitely overpowered. It *can* be countered, but the costs of countering it is so disproportionate to the cost of deploying it. And against Caelum, you can always switch to frozen heart / lightning bolt once the enemy gets close, so I'd need to defend against that too. And throughout the game, I was wary of assembling a huge ***-kicking army for fear of a Wrathful Skies.

It was frustrating too that my GK died so easily. He was supposed to cast Fireshield + Breath of Winter but I guess that Air Queen and all those False Horrors next to him persuaded him to attack instead of casting spells.

Towards the end of the game, I was making a lot of vine ogres and longdead horsemen to tank for N3 mages with Spell Foci capable of casting charm. Too bad I never got to use them.

Oh well, I'm good for a new game as well, though I'd need some time to experiment with Zen's mod. I want to call dibs on C'tis this time.