[chrispedersen]

I don't actually have a problem with FFA, it just magnifies the issues in the game.

Early on in the game, the usurpers put pd in place - due in large part to being attacked by caelum.

Machacka and shinuyama have good search mages which only arco has on the usurpers team. But due to the pythium, arco, mictlan caelum war (pd) arco searchers were unavailable to search other teammastes.

As for being perfectly safe, I had removed all the equipment from the targets (except one hammer) expecting retribution - and I had recruited like 20 or markata on there.
Markata have a diminished ability to make you safe - as they die in one hit as opposed to 2.

But more to the point, it was a calculated gamble at that point. The usurpers (and the other teams) had a number of weaknesses - it was only a matter of which one were you going to exploit.

1:1 there is a limit to the number of fire gems; ergo flames from afar is not that effective. In a team game fire gems can be pooled, which makes domes more important.

As flames are level 3, and domes are 7ish - there is a huge window where they can't be countered.

Like I said I don't mind ffa - but it just fed into the other issues in the game. You were the death nation - and you were buildling 3x as many clames as we were as the astral nation.

Consider every aspect of the game:

Military force
Remote Attack spells
National mages
SC availability
Thug Availability
Research
Pretenders
Dominion push
Gem generators
Forts
Gem Generators

I'm not taking away from a great strategy, well executed. But if you rate each team on a 1-2-3 scale who *wouldn't* find an advantage for the supplicants. As ano suggested with an 8 vs 4 arrangement.