New game - The Art of War, Fight!

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Well, I do think perhaps this is a bit unfair to say that Dragar quit at the first sign of defeat. Only he's really in a position to say but maybe he's lost his pretender and all his mages. Maybe his castles are all sieged. He's certainly lost almost all his provinces and some big fights, and apparently made the call that Man is crushed...we obviously wouldn't ever find a sub for this position. Sticking it out is one thing, but it's hardly like he just abandoned a nation leaving a big power gap. Believe me, I'll be the first one to get annoyed at people ditching a game leaving a largish nation for all their neighbors to gobble up - but Man had 1 province left when he dropped.

That may be true, but the graphs show Man were still researching when Drager went AI, so there must have been access to both mages and labs. And mages and labs mean you can summon stuff, forge stuff, and maybe good stuff as well considering Man are riding high on the research graph. And as Agema pointed out, with Mother Oak and Gift Health up, Man could easily have pumped a load of Nature gems into stuffing their two forts full of summoned creatures. Serpents, Dryads, Lions, Animals Hordes etc. All would have slowed their foe(s) down a bit, if not a lot. Every little helps as they say.

I'd love to give Drager the benefit of the doubt, but at first sight it looks like an early bail to me. Also consider that Caelum were certainly in a worse positon by all accounts when the Caelum player bailed, but WingedDog worked his magic to find a sub for them. That was several turns ago now, and Caelum are still with us. And at this stage I'd put money on Caelum outlasting Man as well. No position is ever hopeless enough to give it to the AI IMO. As even scripting one mage to cast one useful spell means doing more than the AI ever would.