[JimKnopf]

Thank you all for your support.

Maybe some of you are interested in my efforts and pretender setup. The only non-Ermor nation I played until now was Arcoscephale because it was the nation I played in the Demo and I liked the high level of their priestesses.

I tried differnt ways to win.
First I tried the simple way. Building standard troops and building local defence until 10 and later 25. But that was not enough. I simply had not enough troops to attack a nation and keep the others from attacking me. In these games I lost quite early.
In later games I tried to be more peaceful. Trying to build a compact empire and abstaining from the conquest of provinces if the ratio of gained territory to additional borders seemed unfavouvorable to me. Instead I planned to increase my research and scan all provinces with Acashic record for magic sites to be able to build powerful armies of summoned creatures. But that didn´t work well either. Because the AI nations continued their wars and one or more of them usually grew big and powerful. And my empire was on their menu before I was ready.

Now to my curent setup.

I played as Welli the Oracle. Pretender God of (surprise,surprise) Arcoscephale.
Reasons for Oracle: cheap, high dominion, Astral magic lvl 3 (no need to reruit an Astrologer instead of a Mystic to cast Acashic Record. Ok this not really a big advantage.)

Magic: No changes

Dominion Theme: Restless worshippers.
Domion str.: 8 (I want my dominion stromg because it has so many benefits for me)
Turmoil: 1
Productivity/sloth: 0
Heat/Cold: 0
Growth: 3 (More people = more money = more troops, temples etc. Besides I like the thought of an empire of life as counterpart to Ermor)
Fortune: 3 (It would be a catastrophe for me if a strategic border province would revolt and another nation would conquer it before I could get it back. And the good events are really nice.)
Magic: 3 (I want fast research to get powerful summons and spells, and I want my spells to do much damage; besides priests are more effectiv against the undead units of a certai empire.)
Castle: Fortress (fits best to my other choices, because no points remaining)

Any stupid choices in your opinion ?

In the game setup screen I changed some settings to increase my chances of winning:
world richness: rich (the benefit for nations with high growth should be larger than for such with low growth or even death)
special site frequency 75: (I expected to be able to cast AR quite fast so this should be to my advantage)

As you can see I tried to be clever (Normally I would call this cheating).

Nevertheless. It looks bad again for me. It started promising. The neighboring provinces to my starting province were not too well defened. I made good progress. The first AI I met was Ermor in the west. Not too good. But I was lucky insofar that this happened the very turn I conquered the province I intended to make to my western border. So I installed enough defense to and went north to secure my northwestern border. Mercenaries liberated in the meantime remaining independent provinves with weak defences. While securing my northwestern and northern borders i encountered Abysia, C´tis and Ermor again, this time coming from the north. Additionally I could not resist to conquer two underwater provinces because they could potentially shield six other border provinces. Three of these I already had conquered Two others had strong independent defenders that decided to spare at the moment. The last province was independent but only reachable by sea at this time.
The neighbours of my Water provinces were R´yleh, Atlantis and again Ermor.
The trouble began when suddenly Jotunheim conquered a province neighboring to my home province in the east. This province had been well defended and so I had decided to wait with an attack until the easy prey would all be mine. Maybe that was a mistake. But on the other hand I now had almost 20 provinces in the west and north with very few border provinces.
Since in the meantime my business in the north was finished I moved my troops in attack position to attack the Jotun province. The war went well.
To protect my western and northen borders I increased local defence there each turn when necessary i.e. wenn it seemed to me the enemy forces in the adjactent provinces might have a chance to conquer one province of mine. To the south were my water provinces. These I filled with Shamlers and Ichtyds.
Suddenly C´tis declared war on me and started to build up forces near my northwestern border. Additionally I had reached the core territories of Jotunheim in the east and resistance got harder, So moving troops at a large scale to the west was no option. The Problem with the Jotun core territories was, that these were many little provinces with many interconnections, which made it hard for me to hunt his armies down. I tried to counter this with the building of local defences in each newly conquered province, and attacking lightly defended provinces with mercenaries. But even relatively small armies ofJotunheim were able to defeat local defenfes of 25 ord annihilate mercenary bands.
Besides that the strength of local defences in the nortwest had become up to 80 and 90 to counter the amassing of C´tis troops. So raising their strenghth had become very expensive. And finally they were able to capture one of my provinces. Strangely it took them mysteriouly long to break the gate of my fortress in this area. So I was able to move the Jotun legion just in time to the west to requonquer my territory before C´tis could make use of the breach in my defense belt of provinces with large local defence.
Unfortunately Jotunheim used this chance to recover and reconquered most of its core territories.
To make everything worse Atlantis had declared war on me, too. The first battle was a victory for me but on the long run i lost my sea provinces because I had not the money to replace the trops fast enough. And last but not least Ermor kept moving large stacks of troops along my borders ignoring the fact that are lots of AI provinces worse defended than mine.
That was the moment I decided to stop playing and instead start this thread.


Now my questions to you did I make some real stupid mistakes ?