Best way to lose a battle...

[MaxWilson]

I agree with Maraxus that it's one of the poorer design choices in Dominions, particularly because it's so jarring to your suspension of disbelief. I think I would prefer to see the 75-turn limit work more like the 50-turn limit: at turn 75, all pieces are removed from the board. All the defenders live, and remain in the province. All the attackers flee, and die if there's no province to retreat to. It might be annoying to some people that your Enc 0 Morale 99 berserkers packs it up and goes home after 75 turns of combat, but it wouldn't feel quite so gamey.

RE thejeff's point that this is easy to avoid: yes, but there are still a ton of other surprising things that can kill rookierookie in surprising ways. I would still avoid taking a 4-global pretender into combat until I was pretty sure I'd seen most of them. Of course, maybe I'm just cautious--I typically avoid taking pretenders into combat at ALL unless they're immortal.

-Max