I RAN INTO THIS AGAIN AND IT MADE ME MAD AGAIN
Not via Vengeance of the Dead though. I've gotten used to that. But somehow the unforgettable loss of my most unkillable commander to that spell still didn't teach me that basically the same rules apply in normal battles too: If the battle is too big to be finished in time, then even the winners are liable to flee, and when trolls, fatigue-making spells, and Army of Lead are involved, there's a decent chance that it's gonna be that big.
So, even demiliches in friendly dominion will get scared and run away from the things that they are totally succeeding at killing (but not quickly enough). And then perhaps they will flee into an enemy province (maybe still in friendly dominion!) and invisibly, permanently die. I AM ANGRY ABOUT THIS okay I feel better now.
The simple solution is of course to prepare a good escape route. I kinda wish there weren't a simple solution, because these routing rules are really quite bad, and if they were truly game-breaking (instead of just one more subtle but extremely important detail one must learn the hard way and then remember forever in order to become excellent at this game) then maybe the problem would get fixed. (N.B.: My problem here, as with Vengeance of the Dead, is not that the painful lesson is painful, but that in these few cases it is ugly, nonintuitive, fiction-breaking, and seemingly easy to fix.)
Well, there's always the possibility that an eccentric billionaire will come along, purchase the source from Illwinter, and release it on SourceForge. Hey, with open-ended die rolls anything can happen.
