Game 154

[Lord Diamond]

Game details attached.

[Cloud]

(DA) Well, no one’s kicked off this Valhalla thread, so I guess I’ll do it.  Our story is kinda boring, but here it goes.

Eviction
Our team (WI DW DA) was neatly positioned in the NE corner and we had a problem.  RD’s starting position in the Talking Mountains made our position a little less neat so getting rid of them was job one.  I used agents to focus on R3 instead of my own region.  Excess gold was funneled to the WI to get him to P6 and Domes as soon as possible.  I had the good luck to find the RD capitol on turn 1.  On turn 3, DW dropped all his troops on the capitol and the RD was effectively evicted.  We were able to see that RD groups were heading south, so we breathed a sigh of relief and got back to the business of building our kingdoms.

Isolation
We spent the rest of the first 10 turns just building.  DW was amazing at artifact hunting.  I put a lot of effort into agent development.  WI focused on wizards.  It took WI and I longer than expected to gain our regions, largely because of our early focus on confronting RD.  DW and I teamed up to fully explore R9 without the use of High Priestesses.  The good news for us was that the battle was joined basically everywhere else.  It seemed that no team was immune to losses except for us.  It wasn’t really apparent to us immediately but we could see of course that BL had gotten ganked pretty good and lost the region to RD.  We started looking around to see where we would expand.

Expansion
Fresh from having gotten all our ESO’s, the early version of the plan was that DW would go for Amberland, WI would attack Synisvania, and I would go for Arcania.  My initial recons of Arcania, though, revealed a huge mess.  AN emissaries and RA, RD, and BL groups were everywhere.  I had an agent who had reached max training level (12) and DW had found the Ring on Invisibility (+4 levels) and the Ruler Eliminator and WI had discovered Ancient Annihilator.  We consolidated all that into my one Agent and I started icing stray targets in R8, including a Consul.  On the eve of attack, we changed the plan.  R8 was just too chaotic.  We would focus on the other two targets with me taking on Synisvania and WI playing a support role first for the DW in R5 and then for me in R9.  In relatively short order, we took each and were in clean up mode while WI went to the Southern Sands to secure our victory.

Resolution
We almost got to six regions before the AN/TR/BL team came after us but ultimately they were able to knock WI out of control in R2 before he could claim control of R10.  I was mostly done with my part of the plan, so I focused agent fire on the AN/TR/BL emissaries streaming into R2.  WI solidified his hold on R10 while DW flooding into R2 to retake the region for our team as DW holdings in R5 came under fire.  I planned to send my emissaries into Torvale to upset TR control, taking the southern route through R8 to cross the board.  When I tried to enter R4, most of my politicals bounced off of GI or TR groups.  Realizing that GI clearly had that job in hand, I moved into DW holdings in R5 and R2 to issue Status Quo orders.  On the final turn, it was possible that DW would retake R5 or WI would take R8 so we went ahead and tried for the win.  DW was the one who did the trick, retaking R5 for our sixth region. 

Chancellor – (WI) Jumpingfist, like he needs it.  As the de facto team leader, JF was always selfless and focused on the best for the team.
Iron Willed – (GI) The Grey Mouser.  No one else had to soldier on without allies.  His dropped on turn 12.  In the final stage of the game, his efforts in R4 were very helpful.
Infamous – (RA) Acererak.  He kept protecting his King and emissaries and group leaders, making it difficult for my agents to truly rack up the kills they should have.  Shame on you, really.