Mictlan Pretenders ideas request

[Nagot Gick Fel]

The Panther said:
Taking a death scale means that you are relying on expanding into your neighbor's territory who took growth. This is not a very pleasing strategy to me.

Uh-oh... expanding into your neighbor territory, not a pleasing strategy to you? I guess everyone wants to be your neighbor in multiplayer games!

Just kidding, there are a lot of solid arguments in your post. Although I've never played long enough games for a death scale to really hurt me. And it should be noted that Mictlan has no real need to push its dominion, beyond what is needed to avoid extinction thru lack of it. Morale is not an issue to demons fighting in adverse dominion. This may not be true if you're playing with GEs like Gift of Health or themes like Water Cult, of course.

Actually, playing a low-dominion strategy with Mictlan might be an incentive to go with Order-0, maybe pick a Fortified City to somewhat make up for the income loss in the capital, and sacrifice just what you need to stabilize your dominion here? Since you won't reap the benefits of an orderly scale in most of your empire, you might as well want to save some design points. Maybe pick Luck instead, since the number of events doesn't scale up with the size of your empire beyond a threshold? Not having spending gold on fortresses and too many slaves in sacrifices, that should be appealing enough. Building temples as needed in captured or special site forteresses (taking advantage of the winged demons' high ability to siege and storm). Etc. Not sure it's worth it, but maybe someone will give this idea a try? This will definitely require a very agressive mindset, though.

[The Panther]

This was some interesting points in your post, Nagot.

I guess the reason I was so intensely focused on dominion spread in my only MP Mictlan game was that I started right next to a 10 dominion Ermor, who proceeded to spread death and decay into every single border province I owned. I went through heroic efforts to keep the ugly dominion spread from going past one row of border provinces. Perhaps if I had been luckier on my starting location, I could have done things differently. Or if I had been strong enough to take him out at the start. But I didn't because of my poor scales due to taking the VQ. And she is a horrible pretender against mindless Ermor troops who do not rout.

In fact, I still think that my biggest error in that game was spending far too many design points on the VQ before the game even started. Had I known I would start next to Ermor, I might have tried a fire 9 red dragon instead.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

The Panther said:
I guess the reason I was so intensely focused on dominion spread in my only MP Mictlan game was that I started right next to a 10 dominion Ermor,

Ah, damn, as bad a start as one can get, then. Hopefully it won't happen everytime you play Mictlan.