Sauron, Day 90

Moving in from all direction.

TS

Gandalf, Day 90

Turn sent.

Sauron, Day 91

Closing in on all my enemy. The world turns dark, just like their hopes.

ooc: Are we going to keep moving with this one? We have enough other games going and the end game is going to take forever... I'm happy to keep playing, but the turns take me a long time since I'm now going to enter the Underground realm of Chronos. He still has a never ending supply of Titans and Phoenix that take a long time to defeat.

TS

Gandalf, Day 91

One of my towns held off an attack by a group of demonic dragonflies. There are demons approaching from all sides but other than the dragonflies they can only get in through the passes.

Turn sent.

ooc: I'm fine either playing it through or ending it here. There is pretty much no chance of me doing anything but holding out and slowly getting ground down.

Turn sent

ooc: I'm fine with ending this map as well. Thanks for playing and good game!

Sauron, Day 92

I have Chronos down to a handful of Wizard Towers now. Just beat him in his central Tower. He sent an expedition to the surface and took my Ziggaraut for a little while. I've retaken it, but may not be able to hold it.

TS

Gandalf, Day 92

With demons approaching from all sides I am pulling back my forces to defend my home.

Turn sent.

Turn sent before but I didn't write it in the log so I resent Day 93 just in case.

Well played gentleman. It wasn't a fair fight since the two of you were on the Surface, no one was underground, and I had the entire Shadow Realm to myself. You two spent a lot of energy fighting each other early and I was left to build my infrastructure and conquer the neighboring Syron area.

Those damn Rocs were tough to fight against. Grasp is even better than a Dragon's firebreath! No buff to counter it at all. It's a good thing I had a million carcasses just to breed flies.

I like the idea of the map. Unfortunately, you two chose races that were nearly adjacent! There were four races in the underground that would have evened things out if one had been selected. Oh well. Onto other battles. No finishing pictures unless you want me to send the file around one last time.

Mimo

I like the idea of the map as well. It might have worked better if we had more players so that there was at least two human players in each zone to keep any one person from being able to expand without intervention.

Well played. The issue I had with this map in our game is mostly that the Shadow Realm requires so little movement points, which means it's much easier to get a good start. Then there was this Shadow shift ability that allows you to bypass all the Strong enemies at your convenience, a luxury we did not have, and I never saw Shadow Lock available and traded for it later. My halfling neighbor was always a threat, and the shadowshift ability that the Lord has has was a threat, which means I had to waste days to build defensive units, that turned out to never be used.

An interesting strategy is to quickly grab a hero from one of 5 parts of the map (with a flying unit over the hero, they can't get bad morale unless they can fight the flyer), and use them to grab an easy village which you could use to rebuild a tower town. Once that tower town has been rebuilt, you're given very strong units and can begin expanding. I realized this too late and only used 2-3 Eagles. I ended up getting the Dark elf and Human territory. It was close that I also could collect the orc territory if catermune didn't go there as well. The issue of course is that everyone could see what I was doing (reflectance pools). That's why Mimo could make precision attacks with Shadowshift.

With strong enemies all over the map, I think I made the right choice of building a lot of healers right from the start, allowing me to expand more quickly and keep the Roc and heroes alive. The mistake was to not build up more towns so they could build Rocs and then focus on getting more income to build them. Then my defenses would've been weaker of course, but Roc's are quite strong in numbers. I like Djinns too, especially when they get flying ability (20 attack with whirlwind and 2 attacks if opposite another unit, up to 5 damage each time).

Attacking catermune forces was of course a bad idea, plus all the silly mistakes I did, losing a good heroes when it wasn't necessary etc (retreating a hero on fire for example when I had Heal).

All in all, a fun map until I realized how inferior I was in power, hehe.

Haha! I was waiting for you to rebuild the Dark Elf tower for many turns. Once you rebuilt that, then I attacked so that I could have a magic footprint on the surface. :)

If I had not wasted 200+ Lords and all my good heroes starting a fight with Chronos, the game would have been much quicker... I only attacked the center of the map because I was not ready to visit the surface yet since you two were still throwing units at each other.