I graciously and humbly accept ultimate rule for the One Monkey God: ooo ooo OOO! (sic). Even though he did not live to see the eventual victory for his chosen...uhhh....people.

Its my first victory in Dom3 mp and (not sure about this one) maybe a first for Bandar Log too?

Let me give a quick ARR:

I started off with a simple s9 bless and crazy good scales, s9 because its cheap but also because it would later help protect my mages/communions from those nasty first shots. And of course the pretender I eventually got easily turned the tide several times in the many back and forth wars fought by the monkeys.

The main key to this game though (more than any tactical move I made) was diplomacy, fast and aggressive diplomacy. I quickly took out Eiru with my tiger riders, (easy to mass with a cheap blessing) and secured NAP3s with all of my immediate neighbors. Two of those four early NAPs were never broken the whole game; Ctis and Machacka soon became my allies and played a vital role by keeping my backyard secure.

At that time Ermor had expanded like crazy and built an insane number of castles, talk went around of a joint war with him, but in the end only my dear ally Jarko (Machacka) joined in. I would say our combined might more or less equaled Ermor's when the war started and we slowly won battles and gained ground.

However, Ermors strategy was quite clever, IMO, ignoring research, using his grandthams to create hordes of undead horsemen and b-lining it to nether darts. Oh so many monkeys are to this day feeble-minded, jabbering fools....hmmm...sounds about right for a monkey, actually.

At one point I was getting seriously worried that Ermor would wear us down, and indeed it looked that way; he could summon a nice army of horsemen at his cap every turn. But eventually Graeme (Ermor) committed a large army to invading Machacka, which got bogged down by wrath of god and eventually became a liability (I think). That army became the predecessor of Calahan's current fiefdom. I also managed to efficiently smash his armies with solar-rays and some dust to dust spam from those indie-1D-Raptors, lucky break for me there.

Eventually things started to move quickly and, before I knew it, I had inherited Ermor's giant, castle-laden empire. I felt bad that Machacka couldn't reap the spoils as well, but had to keep moving as there was little I could do to help my ally anyway.

Then came a critical moment, Abysia sent me a message imploring me to attack Ashdod, my new neighbor, since the two were bogged down in a war far from my borders.

That got me thinking, I didn't have NAPs with either of my two new neighbors, Ashdod and Ryleh, both of whom were involved in bloody wars. The icing on the cake was that Ryleh didn't even have PD in many of his provinces. Though I new it would mean war with everyone, I had to take what I could get; I reasoned that I would never have such a chance again.

From there it was brutal warfare with Ashdod and Ryleh, accompanied by some nasty little scrapes with Mictlan. It was at this point that my pretender carried the day, easily winning several crucial battles with master enslave (for Ashdod) and arcane domination (for Ryleh [more efficient]).

Graeme put up a hell of a fight when he took over for Ryleh and even pushed me back, some very interesting thug/anti thug tactics were involved in that showdown. There were some mean fights between his reverse-communion-thugged starspawn and my white ones + celestial thugs, very cool.

Ashdod also tried like hell to push me back. He had me worried too for a minute. Indeed our battles sea-sawed a bit just by the shear mass of his forces. In the end, however, he just kept feeding me more of his Adons with lots of gear. The real problem was that his research was not up to snuff. But one piece of advice I would offer is not to accompany your SCs with so much chaff when you know a master enslave is on the way, the chaff just worked in my favor every time: they became MY chaff. Funny side note: at one point I enslaved, healed (Chalice) and GORed his Adon prophet, I went overboard on that one

During the whole period of the three-front war I had only one goal in mind: conquer territory faster than Mictlen could take it from me. In the end though, Mictlan and I ended up staring down the barrels of each other's guns, each waiting for the other to blink. I think we both blinked a few times and suffered for it; Mictlan managed to wipe out an army or two of mine and I killed a few of his thugs.

By the end, I felt fairly secure in eventual victory (good Artifacts, Tarts, and a least one fresh Ruhdra per turn, a mage recruited in every fort) but the task of organizing such an outcome proved herculean, especially since every single battle I had to fight relied heavily on communions and various teleporting assets. When my laptop pooped out, well...that just about settled it.

So thanks guys, that would have been a long grind (which I wished I had time for) and I'm glad we could agree on victory like true gents. I look forward to playing again with all of you.