Congratulation Micah, well played!
Oceania wasn't the nation of my choice
and i start the game with a big pretender design mistake. Choosing an awe wyrm without any magic and good scales was definitivly wrong!
The wyrm helps a little for early expansion but the good scales were wasted and the missing magic cost me a lot of gems for empowering.
I had a order/growth 3 but was hit by the old scale bug at the start of the game and later by the newer scale bug. I ended up with only 34.250 population in my home province by turn 51. I never got a pop losing event and thats a real shame for growth 3!
In addition my good dom 10 is also not as good for water nations because water provinces tend to have a lot of neighbours which let the own scale spread in a very poor manner (and have to fight a lot of enemy dominions).
The lack of good magic paths like death, astral and the non-magic pretender hurts me a lot. I build up some clams and had a lot of fetishes but ended up to use my astral/fire gems mostly to empower mages
or converting in other gems.
Also water nations aren't a fan of this map. There are only "sea" provinces and not one "deep sea". I "voice of tiamat" very early but found nothing great in quality and quantity. And for my taste there were to many land nations home provinces on (or near) the coasts
I was sure Ulm was played by Jurri but was really unsure for the rest.
The game was fun to me. I like the victory conditions and the non-diplomacy part. I'm undecided about the random nations, maybe secret bets are possible or at least some nation exclusions.
However, i would really appreciate a successor!