MP: Santa in the Chimney - no diplo mp game, 6/6, game ended, revenant - ermor wins!

[revenant2]

Originally Posted by earcaraxe

grats for revenant, and thanks for playing guys!

i would like to summarize the flow of the game a little, here are the beginnings from my aspect:

i used an awake dom9 F4B6 moloch and sloth/turmoil/luck scales, with the plan to start forging contracts by year one. Then build up a strong blood economy and go for a domkill. It was a routine and throughoutly tested opening for me, I had excellent expansion (got the most provinces under the least time), but ulm unexpectedly attacked me about on turn 10. i though it will be the doom of us, dragging down in a too-soon war again, he has no chance to finish me off quickly with my awake SC god. Im convinced i was right, but 3 turns later shinuyama attacked me too, and then ermor "came to the rescue" by putting my western provinces under his protection. so i was put in a hopeless 3 vs 1 battle within two years from start. Actually ermor didnt attack me, and his intervention hindered shinuyama. I managed to beat back or considerably slow down both my opponents, but finally i gave up and went AI. That was year 1-2 from my point of view. Why did u do what u did? Shinu? Ermor? What happened to TC and arco in the meantime?

The beginning of the game was a bit hazy for me, but I remember I needed an enemy to send my hordes against. I think that I initially went after Shin, who I underestimated, but I don't remember the circumstances. I did end up fighting Abysia, but I think that was when he was already doomed and when I needed to prevent his territory from falling into the wrong hands, i.e. anybody by me.

This is one of the reasons I'm writing up an AAR in the other game I'm in (noobaphobia) so I can keep track of what happened.

Anyway, I do know that I was very very close to being blown out by the combined might of Arco, Ulm, and a lesser extent T'ien. In one particularly bad turn, I attacked T'ien and foolishy used my pretender to mind-burn his capital (don't ask), which feebleminded my immobile oracle. In that same turn, Arco launched a major attack against me, destroying one of my armies, which was soon followed by an invasion by Ulm.

I was so convinced I was dead that I sent the bulk of my forces against Arco in a punitive expedition. I figured that if I was going to lose that I was going to take him down with me. But then something weird happened: I was able to fight off Ulm's Iron Angels after I discovered the glorious Soul Slay spell, and I was able to destroy a good chunk of Arco's invasion force, which left him nearly defenseless against my hordes.

I'm not sure if T'ien was in position to take me on at this point (he seemed more focused on getting SCs), but he probably could have done me in if he had been able to send a major assault on me.

I think I still would have lost at this point, but we had a new player take over Ulm, which changed the entire dynamic of the game. This allowed me to take out Arco in relative peace, who was a super-tough opponent, but had lost the initiative and had to content with multiple 1,000+ armies running wild through his interior. In one pivotal battle I had screwed up my communions and probably would have lost, but Arco cast a spell that bumped all my mages (and I had a lot of them) from astral 1 to astral 2, which allowed me to mass spam paralysis on his SCs.

And of course, let's not forget that eater of the dead, which managed to eat one of Arcos armies That didn't help him very much, either It gave me trouble afterward as well, but I managed to kill it with the help of one of my few SCs.

Arco, you were one unlucky dude in this game.

By the way, the only time I used an SC against another player was at that very last turn, and the only one that got within range of an enemy got killed. I'm not sure if this is normal or not, but I thought it was kinda neat that you don't necessarily need SCs if you have the right nation.