[aaminoff]

It really is a bummer that Pythium punted. Dean and I were really concerned right around the time that the first war vs Arco/Van was wrapping up. Dean's predecessor left him with a not great situation, including in particular no research, and so in some respects I would have had to fight 3 enemies simultaneously.

Researching Construction to the max is actually a pretty good strategy in a team game: One nation can focus on that while the other does other stuff. Then Pythium could have been feeding you gems to forge lots of cool stuff with, some of which would have gone to equip Pythium's thugs, others you would have kept.

The other problem with this game was that the map is not balanced. I started with nothing but farmlands all around me; so did Ctis to some degree, whereas the north of the map is all wastes and mountains. Very realistic no doubt, and presumably true to the fictional source material, and undeniably prettier to look at than many other Dom3 maps; but, does not make for a good game.

The disease dominion does work. Once I have 20-30 mages besieging various forts, most of them are diseased, and will die off eventually. I have to keep feeding in a steady stream of replacement mages; the situation reaches some steady state where N of them die per turn and I need to send in N fresh ones.

I'll send you my last turn to see if you want. What is your email address?