"Late winter in the year 3 of the ascension wars"
A rather uneventful turn.
Caelum did only attack the castle province where we expected them to attack and sieges it now with ca. 100 troops.
Noteworthy though is the 400 troop strong ermor army that showed up this turn on our border there.
Time for a "strategische Frontbegradigung". We have to give up that border province with Ermor since we cannot hold it with our insignificant border guard army there.
But fortunately the castle that is besieged by caelum currently is the only access for ermor from this route to our territory. Unfortunately this also means that we have to protect this castle at all costs because it is in a strategically so important chokepoint. These forces will be missed in offensive operations vs. caelum
.
Old age starts to take it's toll btw. Our mages start getting afflictions. Only 1 of the loremasters got the diseased affliction, the others have only stuff like crippled,lost an arm and the like, so nothing lethal
.
Kristoffer once said that death mages are less likely to get disease from old age, good that my necros all have death magic
.
I lost my patience, no S2 mage has showed up. I will empower a necro with S1 now. We have almost researched thaumaturgy 6 for wither bones.
Now we aim for conjuration 7 for earth kings as next target.
"Early spring in the year 4 of the ascension wars"
Not much happened. Ermor did attack as expected, but the bulk of their force there are only ghuls+soulless.
My break seige attempt succeeded, and i am besieging a caelum castle. I decide to counterattack ermor on the other front a bit, the key of this minor attack is to reach the chokepoint mountains there and then dig in there (=build a castle and defend ^^). I use my last reserves on the caelum front for another army group, ca. 5 necros, 100 x-bows and 50 blindfighters.
Because caelum has castled every province on their border with me my progress there will be slow and painful, like medieval siege wars.
http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/7958/4kz9.jpg
Army size report looks not too bad. We are ranked ca. as 5th place. 10% of those troops should be our umbrals though and 40% our ichtyids, which are only useful for underwater conquest and minor coast raiding, but for land warfare they have imho too bad stats. On land they are at best MI.
So all in all we are not as powerful as this graph suggests.
But we are in a comfortable position nontheless since we lead in provinces (unfortunately
).
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6584/5cg8.jpg
I am only in this comfortable position though because i was so lucky to find the ichtyids in a province with many resources and my corner starting position. At least 33% of my empire are sea provinces!
So normally i would be in a very challenging game by now, but because of my huge luck it seems a bit too easy currently. If i would generate this game 10 times i think i would at maximum be as lucky as i am till now in this game in 1 of the 10 games.