A great battle takes place. Seven stacks of troops participate, four heroes enter the fray, only one emerges. And it's one of the winged idiots, still surrounded by four earth elementals, only one of whom damaged! Their resilience has carried the day.

A new hero offers her services... An undead?! What?? I don't have any undead city and I am neutral. How disappointing!

I start to doubt this. It'd be impossible to dedicate the army later on to go back to the start and explore them, so I think that what I did was not so dumb after all.

Undead, Day 37.

We have reanimated a hero from days gone by. Perhaps he even made his way from the battle that is rumoured to have occured between Frostling and Dark Elf.

TS

The final reckoning draws near. Arachna's last stronghold is more manned than we thought but we draw near fearlessly. Being able to summon an earth elemental per turn helps.

TS

Arachna's sortie is a proud last attempt, if somewhat hopeless against my earth elementals. The fate of this Council seems to be sealed.

GG all. I really couldn't imagine that it'd have finished like this, during the first 10 turns or so. True, the alliance between Tempest and Nekron was instrumental to the outcome, I believe that the goblins would have carried the day with their tanky hero otherwise. But still the game was far from decided till very late, the goblins would just not stand down.

How did things go west of the mountains?

Agreed, good game!

I won't even grumble too much about getting tag teamed in the South. Goblin pride is too high for that and it was an effective strategy. :)

I was surprised that Yaka didn't get taken out and the North consolidated by Jyri after he removed the human roadblock. Look forward to hearing how things went over there...

Re: Goblin hero - It was a nice confluence of magic items and fortuitous leveling rewards that got my Defense up to 17 by Turn 8 or so. Obviously, it had nothing to do with random blind luck and was solely due to my incredible skills. Goblins have enough issues so it was good to have something go my way.

That alliance was pretty funny because I'd not done that sort of thing in a PBEM before. Sorry Mimo!

Right at the end of the Goblin rule, I'd beaten Mimo's forces. I had my wizard and my harvester left, so I move the harvester to take Mimo's tower, not noticing the archer standing just behind the central town hex. The archer wins. So I send my wizard and he dies, too. Sigh. If I'd sent them together I wouldn't have been so weakened as to be completely irrelevant while my frostling allies dominated the map.

Undead, Day 40

Let us hope our preparations, while inadequate, while at least not prove embarrassing. We declare war upon the Frostlings.

Mimo before you said "magic vaults are for suckers". What do you think now that the elementals have proven quite a strong card?

The spell in the vault was random. You got lucky to get a useful one... And the opportunity cost of sending your Wizard to his death four or five times in the first 10 days was high. Both the Undead and the Goblins were in a position to take the two available neutral towers and that could have relegated you to third tier status in the South.

In particular, with venom spitting hatchlings as your primary ranged defender you would have been screwed. Undead and Goblins are both immune to poison.

You won which always takes a bit of luck (both random and created), so it worked out. But honestly, magic vaults are one of those things where the risk almost never matches the reward except for solo games in my opinion. Suiciding a Wizard at it in the early game is a roll of the dice I'll leave to you. :)
I still don't understand why my Wizard and multiple troops retreated from a battle I did not want them to retreat from. There were no fliers and it was still a coin flip of a battle with me having more reserves available aftewards than you (due to location).

It is still very strange, yes. I think I saw it happen once before something like 2 and a half years ago. An unexplained retreat.

Completely random? I assumed that one'd get a spell of a decent level, if it's completely random then it's really a serious roll of the dice I agree. I guess it depends on where it is, if it's close to the capital it's pointless, if it's closer to action then it might be worth it as you'll have your army close anyway.

We don't know who these frostlings are but we receive a war declaration. After a short trip from Arachna's lands, surrounded by darkness we finally find Necron's fortress. His forces include now a grim reaper! But the concentration of earth elementals proves superior to this dangerous foe - quantity has a quality of its own. The only thing left to do is to clean up these lands from any remaining undead.

Good game all! Thanks for the experience. I'm still curious of how things went in the west before we met with the last standing one, Arachna.

Undead, Day 43

I would make a proper post, but I got demolished by a crowd of living rocks.