The Aurum robbery

After the Azarien and Nemeton wars, I had a large border with Aurum. At the time they had large armies on the borders, but they got attacked heavily by Khora and started to move those armies to face them.

At some point, I figured they were losing and launched turn 58 an alpha-strike taking 11 provinces in 1 turn. Then I settled the border with Khora, with which I almost made a NAP (but I decided against it in the end). I bumped with a large demon Khora raiding force with my Heroic Quickness queen and it was a beautiful massacre to witness (some Anime would picture this battle very well I think). There’s also one such battle against aurum turn 58 prov 440 and this one against khora turn 59 prov 418.

Also, I couldn’t help but view Khora demons as monstrosities that I HAD to wipe out of this game. And the strategic situation pushed me to do that : they had a throne and he hadn’t completely finished Aurum yet.

So, after beating the one big army Aurum had sent against me to say “you won’t have those lands free” (destroyed by my pretender, surrounded and routed, turn 64), I prepared for Khora.

Now a 72 provinces nation with 167 gems per turn. I had also started to make-up for my late RP, and had unlocked Alt-9 for an every-battle Army of Lead.

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The Khora purge

When I decided to launch my Alpha-strike, Khora had 2 armies besieging the 2 last Aurum forts. 1 big army on top of his cap, and 1 medium army on top of the other fort.

I launched the attack so that his armies were entirely surrounded, and thanks to my extra-mobility in my dominion, I could gather quite sizeable armies against them. They stood no chance and were entirely annihilited, meaning he lost probably more than 80% of his sacreds and all of his best mages in 1 turn.

After that, the player didn’t know what to do and I conquered the rest almost unopposed until I got his cap turn 72 and he went AI. In the end I lost more against the AI than against the player … there were several things he could have done to make my life hard, but he didn’t (put S1 mages in provinces to spam his national S1 charm spell against my thugs, use more of his seducers given the low morale of my mages (he used them against my higher-morale knights which were also males when they were made to seduce females…)).

It is interesting to note they got vultured by Fenrel and Markgrafdom only very late when I had already taken most of his 50 provinces.

This campaign was such a huge success, on turn 75 I had 120 provinces, 10.000+ gold per turn and 298 gems per turn …

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The last march

After taking Khora’s Throne, I was 2 thrones away from victory. There were 3 potential targets : 1 throne that for all purposes looked like it should be Tortuga’s. I decided not to risk a bump or a diplomatic argument. The other ones were one west of Khora in Diamedulla’s territory, and one south-west of Aurum in LA Edranor territory. Given the positions of my armies, if they went 1 prov per turn, both armies would mostly arrive on site at the same time.

Also, given the time-table, they would both arrive in Autumn, when my Autumn queens would be the strongest (E4, H3). H3 meaning able to claim thrones.

Finally, when I reached Const 8 I was surprised to find the Horror Harmonica was there, so I forged it with my 2nd Ether Lord, and it would be useful later to counter-raid and disperse armies poised to stop me.

So now let’s talk about Diamedulla which was one of the most powerful nation in the game. This is a bit of a diplomatic mess. I had first promised Anthikythera to help them against Diamedulla, so I sent a NAP breakage message ….. one of the turn they stalled. They didn’t get it and I resent it just before it broke. I asked for 3 provinces in return to keep the NAP …….. they accepted (I took the said provinces turn 65). So I didn’t keep my word to Anthihythera.

So I sent some gem and gold support. Anthikythera did a very good job holding him off (he had had a very aggressive RP strategy and had already unlocked every single spell), while I was carving a huge territory in Khora. And I was starting to make plans for the last thrones. So after only 6 or 7 additional turns I finally broke the NAP for good. A little after, the player disappeared, probably both fed-up with losing against the robots and having to fight the now most powerful nation (first attack occured turn 73 as the NAP came to an end).

And so began the march for the thrones. Markgrafdom had started to vulture Khora and had cut off the way to the Diamedulla throne. I didn’t hesitate and striked one of his army, killing half of it and most of the mages there (battle Turn 75). I also started to raid Edranor to open the way for my army there.

Nothing really tried to oppose the Last March. I did a few Horror Harmonica golem raids on Markgrafdom to put pressure on him, but by turn 78, I was sitting on both thrones and had them cracked.

Meanwhile, I also captured the 2 diamedullan forts closest to my border and went on taking his cap, because why not, while starting to flame from the sky everywhere (Markgrafdom, the Edranor throne, a big Diamedullan stack, …).

Also, I asked tortuga why he had left this throne neutral on the north of Khora. Apparently, the pirates were too drunk to see it and it was labelled “uncharted territory”. So I decided to take it just to ensure I’d finish this if one of the other thrones failed. So I sent a full magical phase attack. I tried to make it fun : summon 500+ insects, put Army of Gold, Fog Warriors and Will of the Fates on them, and look at the poor defender of the thrones trying to stop these hordes.

On turn 79 came the last battles, in particular that neutral throne (province 149) and a big battle over Diamedulla and the 2 others thrones. On the battle against LA Edranor in (373), we see the power of the Sword of Aurgelmer against storm demons. Killing 54 storm demons for only 10 deads, that’s pretty cheap. Also to note on top of the Diamedullan throne Markgrafdom tried a magic phase Wind of Death attack, but failed thanks to my Faery Dragon, using one of its random spell attack and webbing the mage till he got murdered …

The last turn has 1 last massive engagement on top of diamedulla, and a lot of random raiding …

And with that came the end of the game and the Ascension of the only One and True Goddess, Oooolooo’Ma, Mother of All !

Sadly the final score graphs were bugged out, so I retrieved some from Fenral that extracted some from the end of the game. First, graphs of the main actors of the AAR. Click to enlarge and browse :


And the full score graphs (it’s a mess, but still …)

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Elphame end-game spells

I had an expensive spell I could have used against Markgrafdom given their low morale, but didn’t have the opportunity : Myterious Lights. When cast, all units make an easy morale check and if they fail, disappear immediately from the battlefield (considered as retreated). It was my plan to use it to fend them off in case they tried to stop me.

I had another expensive spell to gem burn armies and use lance charges twice (or more). This spell restarts the battle from scratch, with whatever is left in both armies. Pretty deadly. Never had the time to use it.

Also another spell for assassination : just sends a commander to the Void, or Inferno or Kokytos. Quite difficult to use (need high Luck scales in the target province, and the target province must be where the commander is at the end of the turn), I never really tried to use it, but could have come in handy to hurt armies wandering in my lands, or against ennemies with luck scales (like Diamedulla).

There’s also the Wicked Hex alt 5 spell. I could have used it a lot, but in my tests it appeared that it made ennemy armies stronger, tranforming weak units into elephants … I believe executor will fix this and limit the transformation to size 3 animals.

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Some thoughts about the game

There were monsters bathing in blood, undeads roaming the country, dark elves lurking into the night, robots seeking the destruction of all living things, pirates dreaming of plundering the world, lost druids that came to worship a freak lord, ugly demons deceived by their false power, and so many other corrupted, doomed nations.

And there were the Fairy Queens and the Fay people. The pure, the untainted, worshiping the Great Mother of All, Oooolooo’Ma. They showed back the druids the True path, and made them join the crusade. They taught the robots to respect them, and they did. They cornered the dark elves in the deep of their forests that they should have never left. They taught the gold-worshipping humans the futility of their lives, and then erased the demonic monstrosities of Khora from this world.

And now, All bow to Her. And now, All rever Her. Oooolooo’Ma, the True One, is now Goddess to All, and the Fay her guardians. Praise her, now, as there’s no one else left to praise…




As in BiggestDeGame, another game where I ended up having huge ressources, I built my armies with a mage core heavily equipped. All important mages had a Kaithironic pelt and a Coral blade. This was designed to protect them from battlefield wipes and remote attack spells like flames from the sky, reducing a lot their chances to die to such shennanigans.

In the end, I also added a Dragon Helmet to the kit, to reduce the Fay morale weakness and add additional protection from Flames from the sky (paranoïd about that spell even though I’ve never been targetted by it). In BiggestDeGame I also had a tendency to add an antimagic amulet, but here I never had enough pearls and forged those items mostly for special thugs.

In the end the commanders in my 2 main armies in Khora each had about 400+ gems of gear on them …

Also, all armies had a pretty heavy script using most of the time something like 30+ gems. I had to supply them with gems all the time, and tried to have enough scouts with gems for 2 additional turns of gems. This meant that during the last march I had more than 200 gems on scouts with my 4 active armies (the 2 for the thrones, and the 2 for Diamedulla). This was very expensive, but ensured victories with very limited losses in all battles.

You may have also noticed I had built a lot of assassins. I almost never used them to assassinate. Their main purpose was to use their special national ability, which is that they have a random movement every turn, ranging from 16 to … 100 ! So I used them as courriers to bring in stealthily gems or items where I needed them. It spared some headache for the supply of armies and was a good support to thugs wandering into the wild.

However, I used at some point an assassin with a Charm-mirror to artificially seduce/corrupt commanders. It gave me an indie Succubus that I later used a lot to seduce stuff. That assassin died himself stupidely because I forgot to remove “retreat” from his script during an assassination … so I lost him along with the about 50 gems-worth gear he was wearing.

I also prepared special immortal killers to be used against diamedulla vampires, with a soul slay crossbow, a Charm-mirror and a life-long protection. Sadly, I never got to use them.

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