Victory!
I was playing midgard which was a first for me. At first glance they didnt seem very impressive but I did some test games and found skinshifters to expand really well and later on in the game I would be really impressed with their mages versatility also. So i decided to skip vans and big blesses and go for a sleeping rainbow with great scales.
Expansion went well but then Marignon attacked and i thought I was in big trouble. Luckily he didnt seem very experienced and I could walk in more or less unopposed into his capital which sent all his armies scrambling back and allowing me to take more or less everything else and then killing him. I guess he had overestimated how effective crossbows would be against skinshifters.
Just as I had finished Margingon Pangea attacked me and I thought I was in trouble again. For some reason he got into a war with Ulm at the same time though (not sure who attacked) which diverted a lot of his forces and allowed me to counter attack. This war was probably decided by a bit of luck when my arena champion single handedly killed his gorgon which might otherwise have devastated my armies (only to get killed by some satyrs and an earth meld some turn later
). Pangea also went heavily for crossbows but by this time I had storm and mist up which allowed me to take his castles together with some thunderstrike spam.
Well as was becoming a habit by now Ulm attacked me just as I was finishing off Pangea. The situation again looked grim for a while and there was several tense turns when we manoeuvred 200+ armies around each other but somehow not triggering any large battles. Meanwhile my research finally allowed me to equip effective raiders from my vanjarls and they started doing their work in his backyard. When the big battles finally occurred I had arrowfend up so my skinshifters more or less ignored his huge amount of crossbows as they killed everything.
After this I finally got some peace although I ended it quite quickly by taking some cutoff Utgård provinces including a vp while trying to decide to do next.
I decided that Pythium would strike me next after finishing Man whatever I did so I could as well strike first. This went very well and I didnt run into any real heavy resistance until the old Man capital. Here I again got lucky when he didnt get his fogwarriors up until turn 3 which allowed me to kill a lot of his mages (ending several of his BEs) with a rain of stones. If he had gotten fogwarriors on turn2 he would probably have won this battle which in turn would have prolonged the war with at least 5-10 turns giving Gath and Patala plenty of time to strike me.
So the same turn as I took the Man capital I also had a second piece of luck when Gath decided to just scout the Utgård capital showing that it was nearly undefended and the walls where breached. So instead of starting a long slog up to the Pythium capital I opportunistically jumped the Utgård one with everything I had.
My first act as Pantokrator will probably be to build a statue of the dragon of a thousand wounds that involuntarily kept my western border safe from first Bogarus and then Patala. Or maybe I will just summon and petrify it, hm yes that sounds easier.