MP: ANDalusian Sun: Lolomo wins after more than 2 years of gruelling competition!

[LoloMo]

Around turn 80 onwards, Mictlan, Bogarus, and Tien Chi got into a brawl that would last the next 40 turns. During this extended period, Tien Chi got Arcane nexus, Gift of Health, and Misery up. However I took my time before attacking TC, as I had such a difficult time countering Mictlan's dominion, and didn't want to deal with a victorious Mictlan. Although Mictlan was loosing provinces, it didn't look like he was loosing his fighting capability.

At this time I started making plans to take out R'lyeh. Between Mictlan blood sac and my juggernauts, R'lyeh dominion was constantly in danger of being snuffed out. I used possession to make lots of sea troll commanders, and made lots of piercers for them. My plan was to march them over to R'lyeh capital along with juggernauts, and hopefully just take his last candles out. It was going to be a massive investment with high risk of failure, as R'lyeh had a massive mage army.

I didn't get to implement this plan, as Bogarus fell (became AI), and Mictlan was at this point suffering from low morale as he had been fighting TC for so long and was steadily losing ground. I turned around and attacked TC and Bogarus.

[LoloMo]

War with TC was a lot of prodding attacks and back and forth land grabbing. Both of us were hesitant to commit a significant amount of power into any single battle, as a loss would be catastrophic. I had the advantage of being able to make a fort in one turn with 3 red seconds, so I made full use of that, creeping steadily into TC lands, and moving juggernauts into my border forts. TC had lots and lots of SCs - Zmeys, Wendigo's, Tarts, Grendels.

I had terrible luck with SCs, so I stopped making them after I lost the first 5 to the silliest of things. I think one died to TC province defense. TC had super huge income and just piled on the PD everywhere.

I started making assassins using vamps, fiends. At first success was limited, and many attempts resulted in expensive assassins dying or retreating to their deaths. Breakthrough for me was when I realized that the vine whip didn't need to hit to entangle. Took a few tries to finally got a combo that worked reasonably well: vine whip, piercing or armor negating second weapon, berserker pelt, horned helmet, messenger boots, black heart, water bottle, and 30 blood slaves. I had a few infernal hell assassins also mixing things up. With this set up, I was able to check TC's raiding SCs. Speed boots was a good counter to my low hp vine whip assassins, but then you get hit by an infernal hell assassin instead.

[LoloMo]

Sometime during this period, someone cast armaggeddon. This was quite a blow to me, as a few decked out juggernaut summoners were killed, along with quite a few astral window casters too. This caused me to become paranoid that multiple armaggeddons are on the way, so I unequipped everyone and put stuff onto my sea troll commanders. The turns after really became micromanagement hell as I have to keep moving items back and forth between my sea trolls and other commanders.

This put a halt to juggernaut summonings until I was able to make stone boots for my casters. I also put up astral corruption so my casters also have to be able to contend with horrors.

Eventually, Mictlan gave up, as he was getting the brunt of TC attacks. I think TC hoped to get Mictlan capitals and win, as he needed only 3 more to win. TC capitals within my reach were fortified with thousands of troops. I was always afraid of TC astral 9 pretender coming in and enslaving my army, so I never commited more than 10 percent of my total power into any battle.

[LoloMo]

I was doing a lot of sneaking vamp armies around to make them as unpredictable as possible. I hoped to make the illusion that any seemingly empty fort could actually be holding a legion of vamps. I might have been successful with that.

The last few turns were very intense. TC made a strong push for the win, and at one point was only 1 or maybe 2 turns away from getting the necessary victory points. Luckily, R'lyeh saw this also and attacked one of the capitals, while I was able to teleport an army plus move a hidden vamp army to take by surprise a small sieging force on one of the victory points, and take another capital under siege by surprise the next turn.

Ok, sorry my my short summary that turned out to be very long!

Wraithlord, I salute you for hanging in there till the very end even if your nation had low chance of winning, and making it really difficult for any leader to get ahead.

Mockingbird, there were days that I thought of nothing but what to do in the game to eek out a small advantage against you. This has been an exciting though often tiring match!

Now I need a break!