My plans for expansion were to use mostly knights, backed up by either pixies or Autumn fays to make ennemies sitting ducks (pixies have MR resist attacks to “paralyze” ennemies with False fetters, autumn fays an MR-resist earth melding ranged attack). Also in some cases using the flying Wee folks to attack the backlines was a viable strategy.

However, the indies were not very favourable, in particular with heavy barb provinces in the south. Things weren’t smooth and by turn 12, I had only 10 provinces, which was far from ideal.

However, by then I was starting to have a decent amount of knights and autumn fays and could start expanding well. I also had a few pixies but they didn’t work as well as in test games and given their price I didn’t use them that much.

My pretender would also soon come online and I also started to prepare to get UW asap, as there were no less than 6 UW provinces around me that looked like easy picks with thugs or my pretender. In the end I got all of them for a good amount of additional ressources.

Finally, I got a Cynocephalian province that became very important as it would be my first source of S mages and the bulk of my army afterwards.