First of all; sorry for the stale turns. I thought I could manage to play from a cybercafe but the one I found was, well... enough said I couldn't. Sorry. Now I'm back home so I'll be able to play normally.
TURN 17:
R'lyeh is taking my province of Pirenna.
I should have raised the taxes, I knew it.
My provinces are all being taken one after the other. I won't be able to finish my fort in the mountains. Even spending some gold on PD would be useless. I alchemize some gems to get gold as I'll soon need to pay troop upkeep.
TURN 18 :
Abysia took the province R'lyeh took from me. They are surely allied or have some deal. I send my stealthy monkeys back to check what's happening there.
R'lyeh lost another water province to indies.
I have no province left but my walls stand firm. Abysia capital is besieged by Arco. This was a great idea to attack me with map move 1 troops and all his mages.
Also, I got a "lucky" event which created a lab in the province R'lyeh took on same turn. Way of giving him 500 gold without my being able to do anything to prevent it.
At this point, eveerything can only go better. Looking at the situation, we have: Arco attacking Abysia. Abysia having committed absolutely everything to attack me and having both crap research and no chance to break my walls, Abysia is effectively dead at this point. R'lyeh is profitting from my weakness to grab some land, which is bad but I really can't do anything about it. The good news is they will take out the indies for me and I'll get them back later.
The situation in the rest of the world is largely irrelevant to me now, as my only plan is to hold the abysian forces in place until Abysia dies. When the abysian capital is taken, I can try to dom-kill them. However, until this time, I'll be lagging way behind everybody else in terms of research.