Chapter 1

 

We started out square in the center of the world.

We quickly sent out scouts and engaged in diplomacy and sharing of information to figure out the lay of the land.

We found that we would be bordering Marignon to the south.
Arcoscephale and Ermor to the east.
Ind and Bandar log to the west.
Ashdod to the north.
Phaeacia could sail to our coast aswell.


Our initial analysis was that the only problematic nations in our vicinity was Marignon and Phaeacia.

Marignon had a bless of blood vengeance and exploding death, both was effective against our Eagle warriors.

Testing involved seeing how our troops would fare against theirs, here there is a couple of examples:

 

Flagellants
This approach was us doing wooden warriors and fire resistance on our eagle warriors, against a horde of flagellants.
Flagellant matchupThe result versus the knights of the chalice was even less appealing.

 

The answer
After many eagle warrior configurations, we started looking outside our national roster and found the gelatinous cube.
Buffed with wooden warriors and etherealness, it performed admirably against knights.
Cubes

 

Even better against Flagellants:
Flagellants versus cubes

 

Phaeacia on the other hand, only had the advantage of being able to attack us, without us being able to retaliate, we started out resolving that challenge.

Phaeacia had gotten up in alot of players faces, not significantly so, but enough to be an eyesore and feel threatening, as a result establishing a coalition was reasonably easy.

I led the charge, Phlegra did most  of the heavy lifting, Marignon got paid off in the form of 3 provinces and Ys got the pearl, in the form of Phaeacias capital, which has a site generating 150 extra gold.

 

Our next problem was Marignon, they had expanded against Agartha, working together with Ind, we initially started dissolution of our NAP with them, to halt their war against Agartha, which we needed alive to deal with Ys.
Ys was a problem, because a subset of their roster, in particular their Morvarc’h’s had sailing.

A couple of turns after the NAP had been dissolved, we started our attack on Marignon, the goal was to cripple them, so their bless advantage could never be turned towards Mictlan, as we feared what a major fight would do.

 

Initially we put them on their backfoot, by locking down all their forces inside forts, which we put under siege with large amounts of flying turkeys summoning insects!

We used this momentum to siege down a fort, which had a small but significant force inside, our aim was to destroy this force before the war got started in earnest.

The battle that happened inside the fort, did not go according to plan:
Fort battleA lone Will o’ the Wisp got in my backline and killed 11 of my mages, still the fort was ours and provided a major strategic advantage going forward into the battle.

The second fight, involved me surprising a Marignon force, that was moving out to reinforce the Marignese main army:
Pretender vs MarignonMy pretender was a center piece of my strategy, this fight happened in hostile dominion and only succeeded because my opponent did not expect such a risky maneuver.

The final fight happened 5-6 turns later, and went much more favourably:
Final fightThis fight was won off my secret weapon, foul vapors, a spell that Mictlan can’t nationally cast, so my opponent had little chance to predict that the spell was available.

Peace was established soon after, giving several provinces back to Marignon.
We did this because I was convinced that Nazca were about to attack me, aswell as knowing that sieging down Marignons forts would be a protracted effort, while facing off against assassins, we could have taken their forts, but we would have lost the game doing it.

Here ends chapter one.