[triqui]

Well, that's a good reasoning, but it's completelly wrong in this case.

As you could have noticed from my income, my economic scales aren't that bad. I have sloth 1, death 1 and cold 1 (which should had been heat, as there was a Jotun and no Abysia). That's all. The rest of the points came from Drain 2 instead of Magic 1. That gives me a small handicap in research. However, I went straight into construction 4. I was going to build 10 skull mentors this turn, and I could even build 4 more if I wanted to. That would had made for the gap, and I could had built a nice midgame strat, with a very decent income (28 provinces and only slightly worse than average scales), and a decent research (Edit: with 10 skull mentors, I'll probably be the fastest researcher next turn)

If I would had wanted to jump early against a country, I would had done with Tien Chi when he was battling Marignon. That would had made him an easy target. Although I respect Shaetner ability a lot, facing 2 differnet countries, one of them triple blessed, with a country with 9 provinces and 700 income is simply impossible. I was not thinking about early aggression, was planning more midgame.

My mistake was not building solid NAPS, with at least one of my neighbours. Assuming those NAPS would had been respected, I would be facing an easier midgame and my plan would be working better. However, it didn't work, so I will have to change my way to fight and face both of you, struggling to survive. That's life.