Earth and Magic Item strategy?

[Nerfix]

I think that early Mictlan, especially if played by a computer, is a paper jaguar. Their troops are weak (let's not talk about dualbless Jag Warriors, the chance of seeing those W9F9 monstrosities from comp is a small one) and you might even be able to out-dominion them.

And their castle towers use slings. IIRC.

Using cavalry sound good, and I *think* tramplers could be useful. But getting them is hard.

[Saxon]

Paper Jaguar, I like that. They were rather weak at first, but have toughened up recently. It is too late, as I am now seiging the capital and took out their nasty national hero prophet with a lucky arrow that sent him berserk. I am glad I did not wait any longer! Your comment on out dominioning them is also on target. I am going for a fairly strong dominion push, as Arco gets good scouting reports in areas with dominion. I have been able to generally roll them back. I assume that if they spend lots of slaves on dominion, they are not spending it on summoning.

On the magic item front, all my talk of boosting commanders to go into the front line has gone nowhere. I have instead been handing out a lot of missile weapons, be they fire bolts or bows. Getting your god killed in the death match leads to you recruiting priests instead of front line commanders… At least both of the gods died in the battle, I got some benefit from it.