Zywack: don't underestimate yourself, you've been playing quite well. I'm quite sure that you'd be doing significantly better if you'd had a chance to design your own pretender and play the early game for yourself.
You can reach certain elements of the end-game if you focus on it. I wasn't initially planning to go death-heavy, but modified my strategy when I realized that it would be advantageous for me to do so. And since Bandar benefits greatly from conjuration research anyway, I recruited large numbers of mages and focused the vast majority of my research efforts on it. It's not difficult to generate a huge number of research points if you recruit mages out of most/all forts each turn, I'm discovering. You were, regrettably, handicapped in this effort by needing your mages to fight. Shinuyama, though, is a potentially excellent research nation with their Bakemono Sorcerers being recruitable anywhere and sacred, with a large number of research points each.
And your research is getting better. I haven't missed the number of zmeys you have flying around, and I'm not looking forward to dealing with them!
And legowarrior, I agree- this is a good game, with good players.
