[Micah]

Atlantis: A study in frustration

So, time for the glorious AAR of the bottom-dwellers. What a game.

To begin, I looked upon the mighty forces at my disposal. After about 3 seconds I realized that the only thing the entire nation has going for it is the basalt kings, especially given the ability of my neighbors to rain down poison arrows or lightning evocations into the ranks of my painfully slow national troops. So, Basalt kings it was. They have painfully high encumbrance for a unit that really wants to be quickened, and obviously they want regen. So, a bless was in order. Looking at the national "magic" it was also painfully obvious that I would need a rainbow pretender, and thus my only choice was the lobster archmage.

I decided that I would need an explosive start to the game to leverage my early SC potential before counters were in place, and thus I settled on an awake pretender to speed my research to construction 4. There was a slight design point shortfall at this point, since I needed order since I wanted to make a king a turn from about turn 5 onward, and the gold was important, and I had gutted my other scales already. I was forced to choose to take death or drain. Drain won out since I didn't see the wisdom of nuking my nice underwater breadbasket with death scales, and I figured I would not be too impacted by magic scale either way since all of my researchers were high cost/high RP mages, so the magic scale was less important than with nearly any other nation. I was banking on using my pretender's early research to quickly bump up to construction-6 for lightless lanterns to offset Atlantis' abysmal research anyhow, so I figured that getting lanterns researched sooner by having an awake, 30 RP pretender would largely offset the drain penalty. This all went as planned, except for not having any F income to speak of. This would be my undoing.

The game opened as planned. I researched straight up to cons 4 with my pretender, popped out some gear, site searched the water with my basalt kings, lucked out and got a nice 1500g event and some pearls, along with the amazing luck to get the national nature magic hero with my misfortune-2 pick and rumbled on into the crippled Agartha (which had been my plan from the beginning, rush Agartha, kill his assumed SC pretender with 5 quickened BK's with fire brands and then get into the water on the far side of the map.) I start site searching in the water with my hero and get some nice income, but no free forts.

Agartha is crushed, as planned, but I had been planning to recruit traitorous pales ones in the caverns to siege the walls, as they are incredibly good at it and extremely low-resource troops. Luck was not with me in this, though, and all of the indy troop types in the 5 cavern provinces I had crossed were completely worthless for sieges. I was forced to recruit troops from back in the water and begin marching them eastward, ever so slowly.

At this point the endless, pointless harassment of my nation began. Arco tried seducing my attack force with several orieads, killing off many of my kings and losing one or two seducers himself, with nothing to show for it as far as I could tell...there was no followup attack or attempt to take over Agartha, just a large-scale screwjob.

Sauro decided to sweep into Agartha after I lost my siege from arco. I had no choice but to attack him, although I really didn't want to start a fight. Without Agartha and access to the water in the east, as well as a way to pay arco back, I knew the game would be a loss. I successfully mopped up sauro's army with my second wave of BKs, as the shields of gleaming gold I had outfitted them with shut down his poison archers almost completely, and the bless regen finished the job. I crossed my fingers and hoped that he would write off the loss as a failed poaching effort, especially since he had little to gain by attacking me (just two coastal provinces and the tunnel to agartha) and I didn't kill anything particularly valuable.

After re-securing agartha I took my revenge on Arco, pushing him back to his cap in short order, but then not being able to finish the job for ages since I already had one siege too many on my hands with Agartha's cap. I ended up getting gate cleavers before mustering up enough of an army to successfully bring down Agartha's walls. Just as I was about to break through Sauro attacked me, pushing me off the siege AGAIN, from what I recall. Things looked grim for the Atlantis timeline, although casualties had been light, only losing kings to the great Arcossian massacre thus far.

More to come in part 2.