[Zywack]

You don't seem to be terribly Zmey-deprived yourself!

I scratched my head for 10 minutes wondering how the **** your tartarian escaped. I rechecked his equipment a few times, went through the entire spell list in the game and couldn't figure out how that was possible... Until I finally noticed that my province actually had a lab: An abandonned lab site that I probably missed when looking through site-search spell result list. That sucked, but at least the mystery is solved!

Regarding the "main event"... I wasn't sure if it was mechanically possible for that plan to work so I figured I'd at least give it a try to know for future games how viable it is. I kind of overdid it a little, but I have to admit it did work even better than my best expectations... It's good to know! Upon seeing what Ulm and T'ien Ch'i are bringing to their war and just how badly we are clobbering each other, my current prediction is that neither of us have a snowball chance in hell of winning this game. Doesn't make it any less fun, though!

Regarding Bakemono Sorcerers and research... It's definitively a mistake on my part, but I have a huge dislike of Old Age mages in general. I did hire some Bakemono Sorcerers for research early on, but all of them beside one got Diseased in the first winter after my takeover, and they quickly catch feeblemind and mute and other things making them useless. I know that they are blessed, but I figured that Ubas were much more reliable and didn't need replacing each year at 300 gold a pop... It's most likely been a big mistake, but what's done is done. That's also the reason why I highly prefer to play nations that don't have Old Age for main mage.

Regarding having my own god instead... I'm no expert, but it would at least be better than this one. You've seen my borrowed god in "action" this turn. 3 Fire (on a nation whose mages go to 3 fire already) and 7 death (on a 3 death nation) isn't exactly the best usage of design point I could imagine!