Short recap of the game:
45F gems a turn + Conj 30 site = drown the world in Zmey
Longer recap:
That was a good game, guys. It had a nice pace and everyone stuck out to the end. I really liked the no indies aspect as it reduced some of the micromanagement for me (remembering which province has that nice indy, which one has the scouts, etc). I think the no diplo aspect of the game probably helped me as it made it harder to coordinate ganging up on me when I started taking a lead in the graphs. I kept expecting to get ganged up on, but it never happened.
My strategy was to use a good bless (with bad scales) to do quick early expansion and then to break into blood, even though MA Mictlan is not really a blood nation. I was going to use my pretender to do this but got really lucky on the second turn and got a blood hero and a blood random Nahouli (2.5% chance). So, I was able to break into blood before my pretender even woke up.
With that early expansion I was able to put up more castles and started cranking out Nahouli. They only gave me 4RP (with the drain scale I took), but are pretty cheap at 110g. Once I was able to build up a large number of these, my research really took off. Finding the Conj 30 site was another huge lucky break. Actually I also found a Conj 20 site in the same province as the Conj 30 site. For a few seconds I thought I was going to get a 50% bonus, but alas, they do not stack
I was then able to crank out the nice Mictlan national summons to get some diversity and got the two Kings of elemental fire to become my Zmey factory.
I think maybe Zmey are a little OP. I know Llama has mentioned possibly nerfing them a little in the next CBM (maybe upping the path requirements, though that wouldn't have mattered in this game). Maybe making the Lycanth amulets more expensive may help a little. For 5N they turn Zmey into Kamikaze death machines.
Thanks again everyone for a good game.