1v1 Duels... what are fair nation matches?

[Maltrease]

Alex and I played our duel (actually two) yesterday. The Air 9 blessing did not prevent a significant problem to Caelum. Primarly because he couldn't get out enough Niefel Jarls to make use of it.

For general Caelum strategy that I used see this thread
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

The hurricanes were particurarly effective.

For the first duel I used order3, sloth3, cold3, death3, misfortune 2 and magic 3. My pretender was a vampire queen which "interesting". She was great for expansion after hitting Alt-3 but was not as useful as I hoped vs his giants (at least until the final battle). While I knew that she would be easily killed by a Neifel Jarl I was hoping that she could kill his normal troops and perhaps be positioned in a way where a Jarl couldn't reach her. Most of the time this didn't work out in my favor but few times it did. Immortality was great in that I didn't have to "risk" anything to try it out (compared to a ghost king or other stat superior pretender).

The second game I went with the same settings except production3 and a sage pretender. I was going to beeline toward huricane and thunderstrike but some unlucky events delayed it a few rounds. The production 3 was actually a huge help because I was able to field twice the number of archers compared to sloth 3. That helped a lot in the early expansion and later having a great meat shield against his forces. The second game ended quickly after the hiring of 2 heavy mercanary armies, 100 archers and 5 eagle kings destroyed the majority of his forces in one big battle. The 60 heavy infantry mercs played a huge role.

So besides Neifelheim who can challenge the mighty Caelum.

[alexti]

Yeah, those hurricanes are a game winner. There's nothing Niefelheim can do to prevent hurricanes as early as Caelum can cast them and they work on non-coastal provinves too. So after the capital is shutdown Niefel's can't recruite their Jarls anymore. In a second game I just tried to go for rush which might have worked if our starting locations weren't too far apart (mayba around 10 provinces apart). In the end I couldn't really attack Caelum lands because of supplies (and I took growth 2!) so I had to split my armies and try to build fort in the middle which slowed me down and let Caelum gather forces. I'm not sure what would happen with luckier start, Caelum can still summon hawks to slow down the siege, but at least he'd have to spend gems he'd spent on hurricanes otherwise, and it wouldn't be good for his income either...