[Valerius]

I took a sleeping gorgon pretender with some A magic, good scales and strong dominion. I used my national troops for expansion. I didn't expect to be rushed but if someone did get that idea I figured the gorgon would shut them down. My plan was to get a good share of territories and then turtle while I researched and developed a blood economy.

However, I didn't stick with my plan. I became worried about Arco, who seemed like he might turn things around and defeat Ulm after having made peace with Eriu. The thought of risk free mind hunts, soul slay and gifts from heaven really worried me so I attacked. I also really wanted those mystics as fire, water and astral would give me access to 3 of the 4 paths I lacked.

At first I used the gorgon and she destroyed Arco's main army. During this war I decided she was OP for these settings and shouldn't be used. Man attacked while I was still fighting Arco but Arco was in bad enough shape that my decision to just hold off Man while I focused on Arco was successful. But I think before I could even take Arco's cap Ulm declared war as well.

Unfortunately I staled at this point and that prevented me from getting enough troops inside Arco's cap to just hole up there until Eriu was ready to enter the fight. I decided I would fight for Arco's cap and basically lost my entire southern army.

Ulm suffered heavy losses as well but almost all of his approx. 30 mages survived (a fair amount of my mages survived as well). I never recovered from this and after that point my forces largely consisted of maenads and harpies. They were fine for dragging things out and making my forts difficult to take but they couldn't match up with Man or Ulm's forces.

The painful thing about having my pretender out of the mix is that it meant I had no A magic. I was of course aware that under these rules the one type of mage you couldn't summon was an air mage. When I was designing my pretender I considered both the gorgon and the phoenix and later I really regretted not taking the phoenix.

Something I really underestimated was the power of evocation. In that battle for Arco my troops were able to handle Ulm's but the magma eruption spam killed me. In the current version of CBM nature has options like flood of life but here I was completely outclassed and even if I had the phoenix pretender and had done a better job in choosing my fights I don't know if I could have stood up to a nonstop barrage of lightning and magma.

Also, since we were limited to level 6 magic I took drain 2 (I also figured it would help to protect against mind hunts, etc.). This proved suprisingly painful as it meant dryads were fairly useless as researchers. I think I'm the only one who never finished researching everything to level 6.