[DragonRider]

Oh man. I'm really sorry I disappeared for so long. It's kind of a long story...the short version is that my computer was crippled and I needed to reformat, but it turned out that somebody misplaced or threw out my Windows XP disk for some unthinkable reason. Cue days spent frantically searching for it, giving up, paying far too much for a new one online (from some tiny outlet, because XP hasn't been manufactured for years), it takes forever to get delivered, I wind up so far behind in my work that I need to spend all my time catching up with that for a while, and a bunch of other obligations crop up on top of it.

Maybe it's for the best. To be honest I don't think I had much of a chance at this point. My original plan, such as it was, was to take the six or so death mages I had acquired through various means, give them all Communion Matrices and as much penetration gear as I could fit on them, and spam Control the Dead like crazy in hopes of getting rid of those vampires permanently.

The problem with this was twofold...one, it would have been trivial for Jotunheim to cast Antimagic and render my success chance negligible, and two, forging all the equipment and summoning all the troops I needed was taking FOREVER because of all the extra precautions I needed to take due to Astral Corruption. A bunch of key tasks could only be safely performed by a single mage, who could only cast every other turn because I kept getting forced to cast Returning and then trek out to another province so I could cast it again. By the time I was finally nearing completion on all of this, Jotunheim had whipped up who knows how many hundreds of Devils, who benefited from Darkness, were immune to fire, and who obviously wouldn't be affected by Control the Dead. I had a couple of side plans, but I don't think my odds of winning the upcoming battle were very high even with Demon Cleansing up, especially given how disastrous all the previous ones were.

In the end it was the combination of Darkness and Claws of Kokytos that got me. No troop type that I could mass could match either Vampires or Devils under Darkness. I couldn't just send in over a dozen darksight Ember Lords in to hack them apart because no matter how many I had they could all be trivially banished inside of two rounds due to the irresistible Claws of Kokytos cast by recruit-anywhere mages. The bulk of my own mages, in addition to not being able to hit the broad side of a barn under darkness, were one-trick ponies whose fire magic and MR-negates astral magic were easily countered (Jotunheim never even needed to bother casting Warriors of Muspelheim, which I know he could have on at least one summoned demon). For all my advantages in gold and gems, there didn't seem to be anything I could spend them on to solve those two key problems. I spent most of the latter half of the game searching for some magic bullet that would hopefully negate my biggest current problem (Warriors of Niefelheim for frost evocations, Storm and extra fire magic for vampire suicide waves, elaborate Control the Dead shenanigans for a committed battle against vampires, etc.), but by the time one was prepared Jotunheim had always come up with something worse, all while his territory and blood economy kept growing due to gains from weaker nations. I needed a shift in momentum to get anything done and every attempt to turn things around failed.

My only real regret is that I was curious as to how much damage a dozen or so Rocs could do. They seemed like the most useful air-gem sink I had (it was going to be Draconians until I remembered oops they're cold-blooded) and I had no shortage of them due to having used Gale Gate to prevent the recast of Burden of Time, and I kept trying to decide what they could best be used on. I was thinking about either doing a sickening amount of raiding (map move 5!) or sending them to battle, having them fly through the storm and all spam Shockwave in hopes of thinning out the enemy lines. I doubt either would have really saved the day, since they couldn't beat a blood hunter (the only kind of raiding that would have really mattered) and the defense penalty on Darkness would have probably gotten them swarmed and eaten before they could cast many spells, but it would have been interesting to see nonetheless (if only there had been a summonable, flying, air-immune troop more cost-effective than worthless Spring Hawks to serve as bodyguards for them the kamikaze wave idea might have worked, but I lost all my royalty-summoned air elementals when they proved unable to retreat from my last disaster).