[alexti]

alexti said:

That sounds like an interesting challenge. By death nations do you mean Ermor or any nation that has national death mages? Do you allow battleship summoning (elementals,skeletons,false horrors etc)?

I've tried the game with the following restrictions:
- only national troops (and pretender can be used) and mercenaries can be used (no indy mages);
- no ritual summons;
- no creature generators (neither permanent, like devil generator nor battlefield ones such as living water, lifelong protection etc);
- no gem generators;

To my surprise I've won without much difficulty, which is probably because I've played Jotunheim. My plan was to use blessed woodsmen and later on use niefel jarls as mini-SC. Considering that research didn't look like a high priority I took drain-2. I've got monolith with E9W6S4 (dom 6) which left me with enough points for decent scales. Early on I wasn't buying mages at all - just woodsmen and jotun jarls to lead them. I had to wait a bit until I got enough woodsmen to keep a good line (to avoid being surrounded) before expanding, but then it went easy - I've steamrolled over indy and my AI neighbours (Man, Arco and Abysia). I only bought few mages to search for sites. After getting construction researched (mostly by pretender) I've bought some more mages and equipped them with skull mentors. I've tried to use Niefel Jarls as SCs, but it didn't work particularly well, they were only useful to take poorly defended provinces, so in the end I've conquered everybody mostly with woodsmen. Afterwards, I think it might be easier to play any other Jotunheim theme - I had virtually no mage support on the battlefield.

Though, I've played on small map without Ermor or water nations (with them things would be more difficult I think). I suspect this approach wouldn't be that successful (but perhaps still viable) on a large map, but I wanted to finish it before Dom3 anyway

This strategy will likely work with any other bless-efficient nation.