[Hereward]

Also one of bandar's main strengths is the mobility of its top tier mages, who can teleport around and so join a battle all the way across the map in 1 or 2 turns from the capital.

As for the newbie element of this game, players who haven't played many mp games could still be way higher in ability than other 'new' players because of the strange learning curve of this game and the almost infinite different strategies you can employ. Although many of the players, especially agartha and ermor and me, and ulm before he left, are very competent in decisions and compositions, they still seem to me to be many levels below the upper tier of players - I have been playing one other game, my second, where there were some upper-tier players, and I was facing many SCs in the 30-40 turn period, and facing such strategies as small stealthy forces attacking many of my provinces each turn which I could hardly defend against. This game in comparison is much easier and 'standard' in that it consists of large areas which are very defendable through a few choke points, which encourages more standard large army vs large army play.