[iainuki]

I feel like I should add my own wrap-up to this game note. My variant strategy was, obviously, a living pillars bless. I knew it was a bad idea, I just didn't realize how bad an idea it was. The major problem was that everyone else in the game took dominion that ranged from "high" to "maxed," so from the very beginning of the game I was struggling to avoid dom-kill. Urraparrand greatly exacerbated this problem because the water twists around in one-province-wide channels, meaning it's virtually impossible to hold dominion in the water, even if you have strong dominion. I think the take-home message is that even in a variant game, low dominion is not a viable strategy, but especially on this map.

My other problems stemmed from plain terrible starting luck. While I was taking my initial provinces around my capital, I had independents recapture one of them, and then not much later independents killed my capital's PD and besieged it for a turn. Between these and having to puor money into temples to avoid dom-kill, my start was abysmal. Moreover, the living-pillars bless is a rush build, and I didn't have any good choices for rush targets: Yomi was close but not easy to overwhelm with living pillars, and Hinnom, Pangaea, and Arcoscephale's capitals were all too far way by the time I managed to find their capitals. From the situation in the first year, I could tell I was more or less not a contender in the game.

I tried making diplomatic overtures to R'lyeh, but they went to war with me. However, while living pillars are useless against gibodai, BK/BQ thugs are quite good and so while I was initially frightened, once I saw how long it would take R'lyeh to reach my capital, I figured I could manage to hold them off, and I did. However, the war with R'lyeh accentuated another feature of the map, which is that the distance between our capitals was so long that by the time either of us managed to reach the other's capital, we would have in place a counter to whatever we were using. (Yay for water movement.)

Meanwhile, I'd be frantically trying to avoid being attacked by anyone else, and had succeeded. I helped get Arcoscephale to go after T'ien Chi, and participated in that war to an extent. I also, somehow, ended up starting to organize the grand anti-Ermor coalition that characterized the midgame. I gladly took Arcoscephale's offer of a mutual win since I knew I wasn't going to win in any conceivable universe. On the whole, I'm amazed Atlantis managed to survive to the end given how terrible my start was. The best summary I can give of the game, I think, is that it was a learning experience.