Aquarium - Started - FIGHT!

[Bananadine]

From my perspective it seemed that while Ulm was pushing me back into Pythium one tiny, bloody step at a time, sometimes losing large armies of expensive infantry for no good reason, Mictlan was rampaging over Bandar Log and the former Vanheim with relatively little trouble. I don't know why in the world Ulm chose to attack me instead of the monkeys--I would have been glad to make peace with them and go after Pythium or R'lyeh! But I didn't have a totally clear view of what was happening in the east so maybe I missed something.

[Bananadine]

More history, for those interested: T'ien Ch'i and I, early on, decided to split up Marignon, may they rest in peace. Marignon, partway through, fought back against my main army by teleporting in its pretender, a Sacred Statue with strong air magic. I was totally surprised by this, and my great goblins and slowly dehydrating kappas were mostly torn to bits pretty quickly by the statue's Shock Wave or whatever that close-range electricity spell is called. But then... some of the routing kappas lost consciousness due to dryness. And the statue frantically tried to mind blast them away, but the 50-round limit arrived, and it routed! But it still couldn't move, being a statue. So then 25 more turns passed, and pop! No more Sacred Statue. My surviving kappas just slept through it all.

Unfortunately, Ulm very cleverly took this opportunity to march in and sweep the capital of Marignon away from us. This was the beginning of Ulm's domination, and a lesson well learned for me!

[sum1lost]

My take on the history: I hadn't expanded a huge amount before I ran into Jotunheim, Arco, and bandarlog. I signed an NAP with bandar log, and didn't do much with jotunheim. After a bit more expansion, and a bout of fort-building, I ran into Eriu as well. And Arco was composing large armies on my border, though they were going heaven knows where. Ulm, of course, was becoming enormous. A war started with arco which was rather drawn out, due to his SC pretender and some solid troop compositions featuring elephants and communions. After some time, Arco started to buckle, at which point Bandar attacked.

Thankfully, at this point I had enough momentum to pin down arco easily, while containing bandar. A few turns later, I had bandar routing much more quickly than I expected, due to his phyrric assault on Vanheim's capital, and collapsed invasion of two of my provinces. It culminated with my blitz taking his capital and slaughtering his mages, while seizing Vanheim's former capital with an army originally mopping up Arco. After that, it was a mop up on both of those fronts, as I reconsolidated.

A little bit of negotiation with Ermor and Jotunheim had nailed me sweet deals with both, mostly involving taking certain provinces to hit jotunheim on another front (ermor) and cut off ermor's assault (jotunheim). This netted me a number of gems and a capital, while I had enough troops stationed there to prevent a serious assault by C'tis.

Then, I noticed that I was getting a number of messages about spies causing unrest. I tried mindhunting, but it was taking far too long. So, I cast eyes of the god using an enchantment site for only 35 ish gems. That, with patrolling sky preists, allowed me to discover that Ulm was behind it all. And so war began. Ulm began dropping golems on me, which was allowing him to slowly win. However, by leveraging minddueling nahualli, his golems began to disintegrate. Once I hit alteration 9, my ultrabuffed armies simply rolled over him and his thugs at a much lower cost to me, and crumble allowed me to take the forts quickly, so my buffers and armies weren't tied down. My first tartarian (Pallol) tore the army and mass of amges defending his capital to bits, as his mages spammed spells like iron blizzard and magma eruption on the swarms of guardians surrounding Pallol.

From there, I split my armies via a number of preists and sucked up his lands very, very quickly.

I then engineered a blitz takeover of Eriu, using a number of buffs, summons,flying/sailing armies, and lightening immune, MR 27+ SCs to take half of his lands and crack his forts in one turn, and the rest in the next few. I believe Eriu went AI the first turn.

From there, it was simply more rollover.

It is my opinion that Eagle warriors are by far the best per gold unit in MA. I would have bought them at twice the cost, no lie. Size two, flying, and blessed makes them absurdly dangerous

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by sum1lost

It is my opinion that Eagle warriors are by far the best per gold unit in MA. I would have bought them at twice the cost, no lie. Size two, flying, and blessed makes them absurdly dangerous

And 2 attacks. Well played!

[LDiCesare]

A war started with arco which was rather drawn out, due to his SC pretender and some solid troop compositions featuring elephants and communions. After some time, Arco started to buckle, at which point Bandar attacked.

I don't think the beginning of the war was drawn out. I had the impression I got run over quickly. Arco's armies were worth nothing against Mictlan's blessed infantry, be it jaguar or eagle. Eagles are particularly vicious with (hold+)attack rearmost. My elephants couldn't do much and only my SC was able to do anything but she managed to get paralyzed too long and get killed. Once she was banished, there was little I could do and didn't have enough research to get a communion do something useful. I should have kept lots of units on guard commander to try to protect the mages from eagle warriors but even then, the many forts Mictlan had set up early on made it spew more cheap strong sacreds than I could set up troops of any kind. Well done.

[Bananadine]

Haha some of those teleporting, flying golems came after Shinuyama too. But by then I had some earth spell from Alteration that destroys constructed units (Shatter?) so I just told my mages to cast that a bunch of times, and the next golem that tried to attack them was torn to pieces.

It seemed that Ulm did very well until he became rather big, and then he flailed a bit while others stayed strong.

[AreaOfEffect]

Just studied the wrap-up. Nicely played there sum1lost. I think that's the first official win for MA Mictlan. I'm very pleased to see that.