Elphame can summon 1 different high-quality mage queen per season, each with different crosspaths. You can “Break the Cycle” to limit yourself to 1 of them all year. I believed it was possible to break it with all seasons and had planned on it (but it shouldn’t have been the case and was only partially possible due to bugs in the mod).

Due to a bug related to the game being too big, I could never recruit Spring nor Winter queens and so my plan was thwarted. In the end I only broke the cycle in Autumn and Summer.

This brought me good and bad things : Autumn queens (E4/D2) and Summer queens (F4/N2), and both sites providing 4F2N4E2D per turn + 5 PR and 5 FR in my bless … but also +3 Heat to my dominion (not a problem) and +3 Death (nullifying my Growth 3).

It also made my cap not so interesting to capture, as those getting it would get the +3 Death and +3 Heat…

However, the first throne I got was the Throne of Gaia that gives +2 Growth. So it compensated part of it, in the end.

Also, the Knight in Shining armor spell was buggy, and using it on a province with an enemy scout would transform it into an ennemy knight that would attack the provice the following turn. This happened 4 times, all during the Nemeton war, meaning I lost 40N for nothing and had some additional problems to handle… I made it possible that Edranor and Diamedulla could get the said knights, and Anthikythera got one too (though not peacefully). The last one, I just killed it before knowing to whom it would belong. In the end I was lucky to have a province where no one sent scouts and then things got smoothly for a lot of turns (1 knight per turn).

This is also the reason why I rushed Alt 5 to get Mother Oak, which I got by turn 24 and kept till the end.

I also twice-borned all of my Autumn queens, but was disappointed when I saw they got (very) old age in their wight mage form, coming with various penalties, in particular a significant one in MP. I still did it though, because E3D2H2 mages are still useful. I believe Executor will fix this in the next version.

Finally, there’s a spell to revive heroes into knights in shining armor, even dead knights. Given I got a lot of hero slots, this meant those were almost immortal. My very first hero with heroic toughness got revived that way, and even if he was dead for many turns, he got the heroic toughness bonus from is ability boosted as if he had been alive all time (meaning 70+ HP). I used this spell 2 others times by the end of the game as I went reckless with my thugs.