The Game From Ctis Point Of View
I was really fed up with getting Ctis as a nation pick, it just totally put me off this game straight from the start and really I totally lacked any interest which I did not shake off until Pythium attacked me.
My pretender design was crap, I should have gone with the exact same pretender in the game that just finished but wanted to try and spark some interest for playing Ctis so went for a vampire queen. I had some vague idea of getting into blood, for mass vampire spawn and making sure I had earth access for hammers and even a drop of air for gargoyles. I normally put alot my thought in to my pretender, design but this time I wasn't interested and knocked up my vampire queen in under a minute ( you can catch horrible diseases doing this
). I was really sulking and hoping someone killed me quick.
Of course the early game went well, I got my designated area of provinces plus 1 or 2 more, typical when you want to die quickly!
The bad news however, was my neighbours were, Jotuns, Mictlan and Pythium. Still with my high dominion everywhere I doubted wether any of them would attack me, what with my miasma dominion. I crossed Jotuns / Mictlan off my expansion list, I could not hope to match there blessed troops this early in the game. Pythium offered my best hope for conquest but they weren't exactly weak and I would probably get crippled, so opted to build up and see what developed.
Would you believe it Pythium invaded me! I perked up abit for the 1st time this game, did they not know about miasma dominion? I let them wonder around my kingdom for a few months getting diseased, killing PD, I just took the occassional province back. They had a fatal flaw which Ctis was probably one of the best nations to exploit, they had no nature magic and thus no defense vs posion. It was easy for me with posion slingers, posion vapours and mass skele spam to completely destroy Pythiums invading armies. With Pythium fatally weakened, I marched in and took his entire kingdom, adding it to my own and doubling Ctis in size.
The only negative was putting up with swarms of seeking arrows, Pythium must have launched hundreds at me during our war, killing dozens of my mages. Thunder strike and later astral fires took hundreds of lizards lives but the Ctis war machine was unstoppable, as far as Pythium was concerned.