[Zywack]

First of all, congratulations on your win! Regarding going on until you get your 8 capitol... Well, I had the mighty moose version 2.0 army setting out from my capital, and I was itching for a fight with your 140 devil army to see how it would go mostly for science and entertainment purposes. That's the only thing I was looking foward though: I had enough units on standby ready to get back pretty much every single lost territory, but that means that nearly none of them would be ready for the following turn, and it would mean that I would be fighting a purely defensive war which is a losing proposition. I expect about 2-3 turns before all my battle capabilities beside my two main armies would be destroyed and that my territories would permenantly switch to you.

I'd be willing to play for 2 turns until it's officially over if you decide to do the devil vs the invincible moose army. It should be possible for both army to meet at province 126 by two turns. Whoever wins that fight doesn't change anything since you reach the winning condition at that time anyway... It's really to see the effect of a pile of spells I never got to play with ever before. No biggy if not.


While I had a ton of fun, man am I glad it's nearly over. I never thought it'd last that long, and while I had a good time, I'm definitively not going to join a new game until October at the earliest. I'm sorry for being so pushy for it to stop lately!

Regarding the game, I really didn't have the best of time early game either. I figured I needed an awake god since it was a crowded game and that Patala has a weak early game so I picked a Deva with 4 Death/ 5 Blood, 8 Dominion with nearly no scales (3 heat, and 3 positive ones but that's it). The awake pretender was really a waste, since she got Limped in the first battle by losing an handful of hp, and she pretty much spent the rest of the game site searching, forging or researching.

I had practiced my opening strat like 8 times until I had a pretty much lossless and quick expansion, but in the real game I lost some elephants really early on which hurt a lot. The only supposed high income town was garded by 80 troops, and it took me a lot of time to be able to grab it, and there was a 15% unrest site on it so I couldn't tax it more than 40%, and the troglodyte pop blew up a large part of what I had. When I saw how hemmed in I was, I figured that fighting T'ien Ch'i was the wisest option even though the odds weren't good, but when I saw R'Yleh's capital I panicked and decided that I had to fight them no matter what... They had Dominion 10, with 3 Cold, 3 Death, 3 everything negative on top of their dreadful aura.

I quickly learned that Poor Amphibian Cold Blooded units in 3 Cold provinces spell disaster... I lost some of my few mages very early (which was devastating completely devastating for research) alongside with most of my fodder. The only effective spell I had was ice elementals, but I needed them desesperately so I turned out having nearly 0 research for a long time... While I'm not sure R'Yleh could have actually beat me on land, the only reason R'Yleh got beat was because Fomoria managed to kill off most of their troops, and me sieging down their capital was a looong process since they had hundred of troops protecting around 20 mages spamming Soul Slay. They broke out once, and after they got contained, they nearly managed to break out a second time and were only barely stopped by a few courageous Gandavara supported by Shark Attack and that friendly current thing: All my fodder were dead or running, and even my nagas were mostly gone... But they held, and R'yleh was finally killed... The gem income was nice, but population had dropped to under 3k due to their scales and aura so my income was still around 500 gold around turn 35.

As soon as R'Yleh was destroyed, T'ien Ch'i declared war on Fomoria. It was my golden opportunity to get some more valuable territory and head toward the safety of the corner. By the time my NAP was up, Fomoria had destroyed a few of T'ien Ch'is army, but was occupied by other enemies. In order to be able to face T'ien Ch'i, I had to rely on Gift from Heaven, so my research was still going extremely slowly... The first castle felt relatively quickly, but the assault on their capital failed but I had enough surviving troops to hold the siege but not to attack (Most of my losses were mooses or spiders to T'ien Ch'i's mages)... So the siege on T'ien Ch'is capital turned out to be around 20 turns long. One of T'ien Ch'i army went rampaging in my homeland, while a newly created army (with mages) tried catching it with little success but it still wittled it down slowly. All four armies merged together at T'ien Ch'is capital, and the war was finally won.


In the mean time, there was the Scythe farming which was much more beneficial to Fomoria than it was to us, but Fomoria was pretty much stopping and distracting potential enemies while we were claiming T'ien Ch'i land so it felt like a fair trade. At that point we offered Fomoria to side with them against Marignon, which Fomoria always refused: It did make sense considering I would be fighting on Fomoria's territories mainly, so even if we were to win, I would be the one gaining most of the benefits... And at the time, a Fomoria victory was certainly a possibility, so we instead concentrated on finishing off T'ien Ch'i and mass-researching to finally get our research to par with the rest of the world.

My best chance for victory seemed to be by feeding Fomoria gems and equipment so that the Marignon-Fomoria war kept dragging on with no benefit for either, while I would take on LA Agartha in the mean time. Winning over them might (which was a longshot I admit) would have put Patala closer to the top 2 nations, and maybe even eventually have a shot at winning... But Fomoria went from going well to folding in a few short turns, and everything went out the window. I brokered peace with LA Agartha so that I could fight Marignon before it was too late, but... Yeah, it was too way too late probably even when I kept offering Fomoria to send armies to help.

So I did a poke on Marignon so that I could have a clear shot at their counter-raider with my own elite units kept in reserve, but they just destroyed my poke with pretty much no resources and took 3/4th of my empire in a single turn... Which brings us to now.


So here's the story of the world from the Patalan point of view! My biggest mistakes were a bad early expansion, and nearly inexistant research throughout 2/3rd of the game as I had extremely low gold income (Only got fixed after taking T'ien Ch'i's lands which were quite rich), and that I kept using the majority of my mages in battle from the beginning of the game. Oh, plus a relatively bad pretender (A good bless would have been soooo nice), and the most retarted plan:

I thought I could enter Blood extremely quickly. Blood 3, Thaumaturgy 4, voila! All I needed for super cheap blood hunting... Except that for some reason I thought that my main nagas had 3-4 points in NATURE not Earth. So, my super early blood hunting actually required Conjuration 5 (Naiad), Construction 4 (Nature booster), Blood 3 and thaumaturgy 4. That's suddenly quite a bit less quick...

The thing that did annoy me most though is that during the entire game, I faced armies of 15+ mages protected by hordes of fodder. It's what I kept facing every single battle with R'Yleh, and the same with T'ien Ch'i... And the only counter I had against their mages was using my own plus Animal Horde to take the magic damage while Gandavara and naga did the clearing... But that required me to have mages everywhere to fight, which was annoying and so hurtful to research.