[The Panther]

Oh vanquished foes Bwoony & Ambrosia:

Let's see, where do we begin?

1. I think your first mistake with the lizards was the choice of castle. Playing Miasmi, you want a fort with huge defense. The 50 admin and 500 supply on the Fortified City was not near as important as the too-low 100 defense. Had you taken the Hill Fortress or Dark Citadel, I might still be seiging it. And for sure, every single troop on the seige would have been poisoned before it was all over. I would have been vectoring in troops non-stop to maintain the seige and it would have been a far, far longer time before I sailed onto Caelum's island.

2. Your next mistake was compounded by the castle choice. Because it was 5 turns and 750 gold, you could not build one for a long, long time. This may have influenced your decision to build 3 uprotected temples. That 600 gold could have been far better used for nearly anything else. I know the dominion spread was your goal, but it is abysmally hard to spread dominion (even at the 10 level), into enemy provinces. You did spread your dominion slightly into my territory, but it was only 1 province deep and I concentrated hard on preaching it away since I had found a Devil's Den there. Thus, your dominion never impacted my territory at all and there was practically no income loss, as the Devil's Den requires a tax rate of 50 anyway to maintain order. As for spreading your dominion into Jontunheim, he was just too far away to have much of an impact there.

3. Losing the 5 empoisoners to the vans was nothing but a big fat blunder. Everybody makes blunders in every game. Some big, some minor, but mistakes will always happen over the course of a long game. That happened to be a big one as you already noted.

4. As for the assination strategy, I am not certain it would have worked. My prophet and Einhere both got skull talismans from the first encounters and thus could spam just as many skeletons as were you. Plus the level 4 prophet banishment was a huge factor in my favor as well as was the summoning of the ghost wolves. Even with only 3 HP, I don't think you could have assinated him with 10 or more empoisoners. The hero Einhere with the skull talisman would have been even harder to kill than the prophet. However, had they become diseased and afflicted from the Miasmi, that would have been a totally different story. Again, this goes back to the initial castle choice.

5. Your Caelum design was well-conceived. You used the improved elementals under Zen's mods to very good effect. When I first saw the Caelum pretender with the four elemental paths, I could not understand what the heck was going on with him. But when I saw him in action spamming elementals, I was very impressed. So was Tauren, since he was on the receiving end big time agian and again.

6. Flying your pretender into enemy territory alone was eventually going to catch up to you. But you were desperate by that time and had to take risks. It is hard to fault that plan, even when it crashed and burned.

7. My pretender never did truly die. When you see a pretender with 3 deaths at the top of the HoF on turn 15, that can only mean immortal. And when you see Vans with Fire 9 + Air 5 bless, that must be a Phoenix. In fact, Fawkes is the name of the phoenix in the Harry Potter books, so I thought it was obvious. I lost my bird twice trying to stubbornly take a vine province. The phoenix simply cannot kill Dark Vines, for they have too many HPs. I lost him the third time because he was feeble-minded and I did not notice when I sent him in. I was more careful after that and Fawkes was taking territory unterrupted at the end, solidly at the top of the HoF.

8. You could have had a better searching strategy, but that is kind of minor on such a fast map. Both Tauren and I had a huge stockpile of gems at the end that we could not spend.

9. Vanheim has a huge advantage on this particular map. The sailing ability is almost unstoppable. I can strike practically anywhere with no risk of retaliation. In fact, I just checked the current turn and I had 31 vans, 8 Huskarls, 4 devils, 8 horned serpents, 5 cave drakes, and 4 wyverns which would be arriving on your island over the next several turns. And many more to come after those. All with no worry about losing provinces on my homeland since fliers cannot go over water. My son and I agonized over taking Jontunheim instead of Vanheim with our first chioce but eventually decided you two were far more likely to grab the giants instead of the sailors. It worked out for us in the end. Plus Tauren discovered the Frost Fiend strategy and was highly enamored with it. In Cold 3, Frost Fiends are even superior to devils!

10. The map Chandra still needs some work. The iron mines in every city is probably a mistake, especially sonce you cannot play Mictlan with that. The C'tis starting spot was horribly inferior to the other three nations. Plus, as you said, there are still province connections that are not intuitive. And four players is probably all the map can handle.


I really like this 2v2 format a lot. It radically changes your thinking knowing that you are totally at war on the very first move. You MUST build armies as soon as you can or you will get overrun. Level 1 and 2 summons are important to supplement your army! Magic is not the dominating force like it is in the big FFAs. And having a partner talk over things makes for a better overall strategy. My son and I discussed this game endlessly over many a lunch in the past few months. It was too bad that your brother was so busy with school that he did not play much. I think that he would have throughly enjoyed this game too had he the time to do so.

And if you guys want a rematch, we are game. Different map, though, for this map is still not quite right.


Finally, I want to really thank Alneyan for hosting this game. As always, he was a superb host. I do hope to meet up with him when I am in France in June so I can buy a lunch for him! In a very interesting coincidence, my daughter happens to be an exchange student at the very same school in France which Alneyan attends!!! Odd, but true.


Fawkes of Vanheim (aka, The Panther)