[IndyPendant]

Well, I PM'd Xox, and he has responded acknowledging my win. The game is officially over, and I can finally say good game all! ; )

I received, created, and exploited a number of lucky breaks this game. The first, ironically, was Ulm attacking me very early in the game. If he hadn't, I probably wouldn't have attacked him, but early game he was just about the best possible foe I could have. Low-MR, high-resource troops and limited battle magic, and a capital on the shoreline. Yum!

Second lucky break was discovering a Citadel of the Lore Masters site early on, which jumpstarted my magical diversity and bloodhunting something fierce.

Third lucky break that I leveraged to the maximum was sort of Marignon. (No offense, CUnknown! ; ) He offered to help me mop up Ulm's remaining forces, and I let him take a bunch of provinces primarily to avoid looking like a big, tasty target to everyone else. I was comfortable with what I had won. This developed into a respectfully wary, friendly relationship between our two nations. And then he promptly went on an aggressive conquering spree--which allowed me to turtle up, research and site search like mad, and point frantically at him while whistling innocently...; )

I also found it strange that I got *all* the artifacts. Every. Single. One of them. (That I could build, anyways.) Was anyone else even close to getting them? I went Conj-5 for sitesearching, then Const-8, then Conj-8, with only a few stopovers for a couple of levels in other schools. And except for Wild Hunt, no one else bothered with globals. At all! That surprised me too...

Next lucky break was Marignon's Wild Hunt, because it allowed me the excuse I needed to launch some offensive globals early, exploiting the loophole CUnknown left me. ; )

Last major lucky break was when I realized how I could win. It felt kind of cheap, so I suggested changing the winning conditions so that the provinces would have to be held for 3 turns--and was flat-out refused. So I blinked, thought "okay then" and turtled up even more fiercely. By the time Marignon attacked T'ien Ch'i, I was fully outfitting about 2.5 Starspawn thugs a turn.

I was actually really nervous about that. At first I was concerned someone would try to take my land provinces away from me--forcing me to divert research and equipment resources to fighting a war. Then I was concerned Marignon would conquer too quickly for me to build up a sufficient number of thugs--or that he would do something similar to what I was quietly planning, and blitzkrieg the last ten to twenty provinces he needed for the win before I could react. I was also concentrating almost all of my efforts into one single tactic, and if I lost too many battles when the time finally came, or if I underestimated Marignon's defensive strength even with Utterdark up, I really had nothing left except Globals. You have no idea how much time and thought I put into agonizing over every little detail, or how many hours I spent on those last two turns....

I had a ton of fun with this game!