[Squirrelloid]

Honestly, I think the fact that this was vanilla really tilted this game for one reason and one reason only: domes are too hard to research to.

At Ench 4-5 (CBM), i'd probably have made them an early priority in a team game. But at Ench 7-8? I'm not sure I'd have had the research to cast a dome and the boosters to do so early enough.

The game basically ended when like 10 fires from afar dropped on BL's capital on turn ~20. There was nothing I could do about this, and it killed a large number of valuable and irreplaceable (can only hire 1/trn) Rishi, plus whatever gear that went down with them. Even if I had dedicated all my research to enchant, I would have *just* gotten to domes, and I needed boosters to cast any of them (and thus constr 4+ research). As BL was the research arm of the team, this was absolutely devastating.

And this ability to nuke a key capital is more pronounced in team games, because there are fewer targets (both because some targets are actually your teammates, and because each team is going to have one target which it hurts more than the others to have it nuked). Add to that one team was actually AI, and there are only two priority targets for a team to go after, which makes remote spells really powerful.

Vanilla's late (and hard to cast!) domes horribly biases the game. Should i play in another vanilla team game (not likely), i know exactly what I'm doing. Choosing a nation with great remote spells, beelining them, and dropping 15-20+ on select capitals in year 2. Instant game over.

This is really lame gameplay. Just another reason CBM > vanilla.