In order to get my research goals as soon as possible, the plan was to pump 1 research mage per turn and keep them on research until I could summon dragons.

For early expansion, this meant that I couldn’t recruit normal commanders, and would rely only on independent ones to lead the troops (apart from the very first commander, which became also my prophet).

Also, I needed to build a fort with a lab as soon as possible, and for that I needed the gold. That meant that I wouldn’t have much more than 1 expansion party for several turns, lacking the commanders and the troops.

However, the first scout of Dragenheim is also an assassin and I so sent him to try to get a few provinces by himself through assassination.

The first conquests went rather well and by turn 4 I took a high value province with a lot of gold income. And just next to it, what I couldn’t even dream of : a crystal sorceress province ! My decision was quickly taken to capture it and build my first fort and lab on it. Indeed, not only the sorceresses would help me to research the dragon spell, but I also planned to use them in battles later in the game. If you read my other AAR on Helheim, I had a very bad experience with a thunderstrike communion and it was my opportunity to do that myself.

So on turn 5 I built the Lab and on turn 6 started to build the Fort, and then only on turn 7 started to recruit new troops for a new expansion party.

That same turn, I also met my 3 direct neighbours : Ochreil on the North West, Ermor on the West and Abolethive in the East. I quickly managed to share the land with Abolethive. Also, before the game began I knew that Ermor was one of my worst possible enemy : all his troops have high cold resistance and as such are impervious to the breath attacks and dragons. I knew these attacks would contribute in a large part to the efficiency of my strategy, so I didn’t want to let them live for too long.

As a result, I immediately made a defensive pact with Ochreil : if one of us was ever attacked by Ermor, we would help one each other.

Then on turn 8 I lost both my assassin and my first expansion party (though the prophet survived) and slowly crawled to keep on having a 1 province per turn expansion. As such, on turn 12 I managed to get 9 provinces aside from my capital. A pretty bad expansion, but I expected it : if I wanted to get my dragons ASAP, I had to sacrifice my early expansion and that’s exactly what happened.

However, my economy was decent enough and I could gather an army with some of my sacreds which are monsters. I could then take and claim the Throne of Fortune as soon as turn 13. Just in time to give it as a present to Metahedron that had awokened …