[Tryfan]

Aaaand there's the domkill. Eriu capital withstood every attempt to capture it, from Vanheim's turn 4 or 5 rush to the huge toad and snake armies later on. Might have held on longer but the god was killed by something silly (a horror maybe?) because she was scripted for large battle fighting rather than a one on one fight and that was a big dominion hit.

So, postmortem for Eriu:

The situation was realistically hopeless from the fourth turn on. Abysia rejected the NAP offer and took Utonshire on turn 3 (with its construction bonus), and Vanheim took the NW province to my capital on the same turn. I think a lucky provincial defense random event helped defeat Vanheim's rush attack because Eriu's regular troops certainly aren't capable of doing so on their own (Eriu was at 53 PD in the early going).

Vanheim stopped its attacks to concentrate on Abysia but the damage was done. Realistically I HAD to be the one to fight C'tis, no one else could even reach him, and severely crippling me with an early game double rush while failing to actually finish me off effectively should have handed the game to him on the spot as he had something like 20 turns or more to build up unopposed. Failing to kill me, a reasonably close second option would have been to finish off Abysia fast too; by that point Vanheim would have been at a disadvantage, but not a decisive one. But Abysia held out too. I never saw the battles at Abysia's capital, just the results, and they were flabbergasting; it must have occurred to Vanheim at some point that they needed to start using anti-mage tactics rather than just throw army after army of shapeshifters at it but I never saw it.

I'm happy to have held on this long but after C'tis declared war I should have been dead a dozen turns later at most. C'tis's armies moved very, very slowly. He also had an incredible reluctance to take my outlying territories; at one point I held territories inside his own island area with no defense for something like six or eight turns. I made a bad tactical mistake early on when the four thugs I had available moved in front of his main army; they routed because the PD routed and one died the rest scattered. I was careful not to let them fight in provinces with that much PD after that but that was a costly defeat. Luckily for me it was also the ONLY defeat any of my major forces had and that kept me in the game.

Twice, huge armies were butchered at my capital. Winds of Death won the first one while two thugs and the elemental summons held the hole in the wall. Wrathful Skies won the second though I forgot to script my mages for defending from it and a half dozen or so died.

All in all it was an entertaining game even if I was reduced to role of spoiler. I don't think I would want to play Eriu again, though. I dunno if I mismanaged their strategy but they played like a weak version of Vanheim to me.

That game might have been a LOT different if my capital had been just one or two provinces removed to the east...