[Jazzepi]

I summoned a ton of statues. They were great, but the problem wasn't holding off the vans. I built tons of heavy infantry. Heavy infantry does a great job of "holding them off" and the statues are really no different than the infantry. Neither one deals any damage to the vans because of their low attack values, and the van's high defense coupled with high protection.

So what ends up happening is that your meele guys couple with the vans for several long turns. The vans have their reinvig, high protection, high defense, high attack skill, high morale and multiple attacks. They simply break your heavy infantry through morale and fatigue, while your archers are unable to do any damage. See, the whole problem here isn't being able to stop the vans cold in their tracks. The problem is /actually damaging them/.

Honestly, I didn't try magma bolts, but I was busy trying to research up to destruction to blow the armor off the Vans, and get the AoE version of earth grip (earth meld). See, the other part of massing chaff was that if I blew the armor off the Vans, then the huge amounts of light infantry would have no problem wearing down their high defense skill since it's -2 each time they try to defend against an attack.

Just so you know, I ended up "winning" with diplomacy by offering to forge Emor in the game, who had been rather buddy-buddy with me since the beginning, whatever they wanted if they'd simply lay siege to the capital. So Van was weakened by our fighting, I mean he would have killed me in the long run, but he was definitely weakened, and Emor came in and pooped all over his capital.

Jazzepi