Part 53: Pangaea - Turns 48-55

Okay, we left off with Turn 47, which marked the beginning of the mass invasion of Mictlan. You all already know basically how this goes (builds suffers some minor losses to his own silliness and otherwise we steamroll until Lilli checks out), so I'll just toss up a few pictures of any highlights that amuse me, and the map so you can see how borders changed - there weren't really any battles of note. If you'd like more detail on anything, as always, just ask.





The campain against Mictlan began with economic disruption and attacks on almost every province I could reach.





At this point the province connecting the northern fort I have under siege to the rest of Mictlan's empire has been stolen from Lilli by native vampires. This was very convenient.







Lilli finally musters some resistance to head off my advance in the south, and tries to end the vampire uprising with a bane lord thug. The bane lord is torn apart before it can inflict a single casualty.



I set up traps in two of the provinces adjacent to that mass of jaguar warriors in the south; if they try to push into my territory I'll dismantle them, or they can sit on the fort and my forces will meet to crush them there.





Yep, they tried to push. 70 maenads/revelers for 80 jaguar/eagle warriors is a trade I'll make any day, but the battle isn't very interesting to watch since the jags have no mage support.



So, I've stormed the northern fort (formerly Lilli's Circle Master province), pushed into a gem-rich province beyond it, and liberated an Arcos fort in the south which I'll be storming next turn. This is the point where Lilli subs out, and peace is negotiated all around.

Throughout these turns I've been massively overpaying builds for a variety of magical items I was in a huge hurry to get so I could do complicated things to beat that stack of jags. I was going to stack up darkness and curse of stones and maybe fog warriors and let maenad chaff fatigue them all out then slowly overwhelm them. All of this turned out to be dumb and pointless because I ended up just punching their faces in when less than half the force I'd earmarked for them came into contact. Oops.

Important long-term thoughts at the time of Lilli's replacement: Now that there's a pause, Mictlan's territory and gem income are in line with other major powers, and we all know about the construction site, in order for anyone not-builds to win the game at this point the correct course of action is for me, Schneeble, and Incy to ally and attack him immediately. I think about this while builds checks in to make sure I'm still on board with the idea that he, Schneeble, and I will be the last three powers. I talk to Schneeble briefly and develop the sense that he is definitely not going to go for the grand anti-Hinnom coalition, so I never even bother floating the idea; I resign myself to trying to keep up on gemgens (even though I know this is impossible) and hoping that me/Schneeble get more of the map than builds in the coming minor wars. This was not a good plan, but I saw no possible alternative - builds wasn't going down without Schneeble on board, and I was confident they were closer to each other than Schneeble was to me. And, besides, I *did* still want Feinne dead. There was a certain allure in the idea of taking advantage of the ceasefire with Mictlan to finish that project. So we did. I'll cover that next time.