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**Pine Needle** · 03-18-2021, 04:01 PM

Victory By Lion's Share Is The Illusionist Kingdom!
Game End Status Points

Place Kingdom Player Results-40 Grand Total

1 IL Pine Needle 60,940 88,304
2 HA Senior Tactician 38,685 62,943
3 CI Eregnon the Black 38,055 60,883
4 RD Acererak 33,100 58,023
5 DU AlatarTBW 26,211 44,813

Write up to follow. DU and CI stopped me from victory on turn 35, but massive economy came through at the end.

**Pine Needle** · 03-18-2021, 04:52 PM

I started in Zanthia with the Illusionist. The biggest concern was the big bad Red in Triumvia lead by the able Acererak. Rangers in Krynn and Halfling in Sword Coast.
My plan was to hunker down in a relatively poor region, bounty it repeatedly and avoid war. I gave my sea town in Sword to the Halfling, but taxed it a turn late (from my agreement) so relations were tense early. I offered to trade a bounty spell for gold to the Red, hoping he’d prefer trade to roast Illusionist soldiers. I screwed this relationship of trust up, too, using my bounty field trip to his region to try to nab some artifacts.
Luckily, however, both the Ranger and Halfling decided to take on the Red, so he overlooked the etiquette breach, not without threat to roast my nascent economy should the incursions continue.
I pretty much chased artifacts until turn 30 or so, using the High Priestess and the Oracle nearly every turn. Pretty good list at the end:

Black Owl Totem
200 Artifact Based on Item: Oracle of the Old Gods
0 Artifact Based on Item: Valyrian Steel
400 Artifact Based on Item: Anglakel, Sword from the Sky
100 Artifact Based on Item: Axe of Farin
200 Artifact Based on Item: Crystal of Seeing
400 Artifact Based on Item: Elan, Flaming Sword of the North
100 Artifact Based on Item: Golden Spear of Lerix
200 Artifact Based on Item: Great Axe of Hurblind
200 Artifact Based on Item: Morning Star of Torag
400 Artifact Based on Item: Narsil, Flame of the West
100 Artifact Based on Item: Palantir Phonis
400 Artifact Based on Item: Ring of Spells
0 Artifact Based on Item: Valyrian Steel
400 Artifact Based on Item: Orb of Anti-Magic
400 Artifact Based on Item: Crown of Anzu
100 Artifact Based on Item: Palantir Ambalar
0 Artifact Based on Item: Cloak of Disguise
200 Artifact Based on Item: Guardian Talisman
100 Artifact Based on Item: Knowledge Totem
200 Artifact Based on Item: Onyx Amulet

I also built my agents until I had three level 17s- a couple died, but I still had great agents at the end.

In the midgame, I moved on Pellinor and the Demon Princes, taking Stormgate then legendary castling it to lock up the region.

I went for the victory on turn 34 or turn 35, with Zanthia, Stormgate, Pellinor, Untamed Lands and Nyvaria. Druid contested in Untamed and the Cimmerians in Nyvaria, and I failed on the victory. The Druid overwhelmed Pellinor with emmisaries, and the CI armies bloodied up my main group pretty good (though I did steal Narsil from him) to kick me out of Nyvaria.

I didn’t think anyone had a real chance at Rex now, so I focused on capturing legendary castles and building temples and castles.

The Druid and I had one more big battle, but he decided a loss was coming, even in the forest, and teleported his wizards out before the battle (29 Druid brigades destroyed.)

Fun game. I enjoyed diplomacy and war with all the surviving kingdoms (Red and HA early, and CI and DU later.)

03-18-2021, 07:29 PM

(RD) Congrats to the podium players! First time playing the Red in a long long time and boy is it fun early on. The Ranger was stubborn and talked a big game on the forum but the outcome was never in doubt. The big issue I learned early mid game with the Red is if you don't go for the win early- you slowly start to fade as you become a victim of your troops voracious appetites in gold and food, insane expensive magic with crappy spell lists but most of all (and what this game devolved down to for me), your lack of ability to do something...ANYTHING against someone with a water capital. It's the biggest weakness of the position and one the Halfling really played against well. For the last 20 or so turns after I had burned every Halfling pc to the ground I could only just follow him by one turn and take back what his invisible, teleporting groups would take from me. Never able to do a thing to his capital in the water which was completely impregnable to me. Thus, while at peak strength 1 RD had I think 260K value vs PC and I was able to easily take back two towns in Triumvia the Halfling thoughtfully built up with legendary castles, great temples and mage towers I could never do much else against him. So it was a slow trickle of death by a thousand cuts of his agents sniping me, groups popping my pcs invisibly and acting with impunity from his water base.

Honestly, not much fun at all to do that for 20 turns with no other recourse. I probably won't play the kingdom again because the weakness in this area is so bad. Taking nothing away from Halfling, he played it well and backed up his smack talk knowing I could never really hurt him too bad.

Congrats again to all of you.

**Senior Tactician** · 03-18-2021, 09:00 PM

Congratz Pine, that is a very impressive artifact list.... its a good thing Harry five fingers didn't take notice of you! Well, Ace summed it up from our perspective pretty well. I was certainly wrong (in another thread) when I said that the RD can't conquer legendary, he certainly can, and pretty easily it seemed. I found 3 wizards in the wild and man, having 12 of them was a lot of fun. I got a bit of a late start on agents, but ended up having a bunch of fun with those as well.

I suspected the IL would have a strong game from very early on, because everyone around him, (me, RD, RA) were all focused away from him. I considered diverting some of my attention to him, but decided I would never be able to wrest first place status from him, so I worked hard on raising my status and keeping the RD down, hoping the DU would eventually challenge the IL to keep him from winning before turn 40, which he did. The CI were not on my radar until we both went for region 1 when the Elf dropped.

Trading PCs with the RD built elite troops and warlords (for both of us), and the RD and CI political core supplied prisoners, the RD also supplied a good number of artifacts. Even so, the CI almost snuck into second place ahead of me mostly due to the RD capping 2 of my legendary castles complete with great temples pretty early in the game. A surprise to be sure. But the RD plundering my sword coast PCs actually ensured I would get max status for tight control every single status turn and my 12 wizards had created a capitol on the water that supplied all the food and gold I would ever need.

The game did seem long and tedious at times, and I was not as focused as I could have been because of that, but overall, I did enjoy the game.

Important learning point, you actually can train an elite brigade attacking a town, even a normal town with no fortifications.

**Pine Needle** · 03-18-2021, 10:41 PM

Elite halfling brigades! Hear me roar!

**Pine Needle** · 03-18-2021, 10:54 PM

Those were the adept twins you nipped from me in Zamora?

**Senior Tactician** · 03-19-2021, 12:21 AM

(03-18-2021, 10:54 PM)Pine Needle Wrote: Those were the adept twins you nipped from me in Zamora?

Yep, but that was in Krynn. And I got the level 3 in my region. Funny that the first time I have managed to get 12 wizards, it wasn't with a wizard kingdom.