[Squirrelloid]

I'd play again.

I wouldn't say Agartha didn't fight to the death. It was hard fought and he was totally out of material when he set AI - as in, not a single unit left or province left to his name. I just had to finish breaking fort walls.

And I don't know about mindhunts being too powerful. I think I lost more mindhunters to becoming feebleminded than I actually killed units. Now, admittedly, it did have a plausibly big effect on your tactics, but if you had raided you would have decreased the number of pearls I had available for other uses even without the astral mage to feeblemind my hunters. I wasn't exactly overrunning with pearls, and your (Calian) seraphs weren't exactly easy low MR targets to whack.

I think the really big thing was I was the only nation that took order scales whereas everyone else took turmoil scales. This let me support a larger force of mages and rely on recruitables for chaffe more regularly. And while I'm sure I saw fewer total events because of it, O1 opens up a lot of cash events, so I may have seen relatively more cash events than the T3L3 nations.

Enslave mind also got me into death via an Agarthan Oracle. Because yeah, I didn't take any D on my pretender (and stupidly enough, was pulling in 2d/trn from my home territories - death income I had absolutely no use for except the possibility of turning it into pearls until i managed to enslave an Oracle).

I am entertained that 3 of the 4 pretenders I saw generated gems. =)