The fortified city completely fails. The 5 turns and huge cost to build is hardly worth the little extra admin you get. The 500 supply is not really worth much, either. Nobody needs that much supply... I think taking the fortified city was my single biggest blunder in KotH. (Well, maybe not. I had some pretty big blunders. Like not even knowing what a dome was and how important they are.
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I agree with Panther that the temples were a bad idea. With 10 base dominion, as long as you keep your God and prophet alive (and your God was immoble so that wasnt a problem), your dominion will spread well enough. Alternatively, I would have taken a watch tower and built one for every temple. For 2.5 times the cost, you can make your temple *much* harder to destroy, not to mention having another location to build troops and mages, and the extra pretender points so you wouldnt have had to take that drain. Also then, with your nice order and productivity scales, you could have built those troops with the castle defense bonus (whatever theyre called) and stuck about 10 them in every tower. Vans are not very good at seiging, so that would have made your territory take forever to capture, meaning more deseased Vans.
I had some serious expanding issues this game as well. My god died early on to a lucky sleep-casting indy druid, and I had no priests to recall him. I didnt get him back untill like 2 turns before you resigned... Also, I sacked my prophet, a couple niefel giants, and a few HoF herses to about 40 heavy cavalry... certainly was NOT expecting that many... and so between losing my god and losing my army, my expansion came to a complete halt. I had better luck in test games; I was able to take 1 province/turn starting on turn 1 (yes, my god and starting troops could actually win 90% attacking blind against level 9 indys) and continuing indefinitely. No such luck here, though.
I was also doing a poor job of spending gems. I was using all my mage-time to blood hunt and summon frost fiends, so I had no research. IIRC, at the end, I had about 100 death and water gems piled up, and had just sent about 50 nature gems to Panther so he could start making horned serpents.
The elemental strategy was pretty painfull; I found that even my niefel giants had no hope of getting anywhere near the mages. So I just went all-out frost fiends, figuring flight was what I really needed. I really fell in love with frost fiends in my test games. Not only do they look really cool, in cold 3 they become stronger than devils for less the cost. They get +1 protection, strength, attack, and defense for every cold level, and in a Jotunheim vs. Caelum war, there will be cold everywhere. However, If you would have gotten staffs of storms out, I would have had no answer. But I guess its kind of hard to get that research when your mages are all busy fighting...
Looking at how well Panther was doing, I think he may have been able to win all by himself. His gem income was going through the roof from all the dark knowledge and gnome lore, he had huge Gold income after capturing Ctis's capitol (it had like 350 income!), and the sailing was a major advantage on this map. Not to mention Vans cost about half of what theyre worth. I think with a fire 9 bless theyre worth more like 150 gold. Also, Panther had the best starting spot out of all of us by quite a long shot. I dont think that map is too well balanced. I actually liked the older version better, where you started outside of the cities, and they didnt have the mines. But that version had a couple terrain and neighbor problems.
Anyway, Im game for a rematch. Hopefully Arc could actually get a chance to play it.