[Dragar]

As an aside, something I've learnt is not to rely too heavily on the devils. They rock as raiders, as surprise armies and as part of your army, but know they're coming and a storm knocks you dead. Storm and rain are abysia's killers really

I played with my similar strat in Beyond recently, had a poor start but was having fun in a 1 on 1 with pangeaa. The game leader pythium decided to attack me, and i quickly started shedding provinces. A devil army managed to annihilate an army of 3 SCs, inlcuding his pretender, and nabbed a heap of artifacts.

After that though I kept meeting storm everywhere, and they got chewed up - devils work by flying in large numbers to hit with 2 attacks, coupled with blood lust and ideally blood rain. Anything else they are too vulnerable with

Btw Baalz, I have to challenge your view of bottom-half research - in my experience when pursuing the blood heavily early abysia are bottom of the pile research altogether.

Note that their starting troops are decent for indie expansion, but recruiting more is slow and cavalry/elephants chew you up, so I generally find it hard to exceed moderate expansion. I have seen others do it though so it's something i need to get better at, it makes a huge difference if you can be size competitive and be able to pull ina lot of blood while still having cash to get your research going