After several games on 1.5x Extreme (4 opponents) (as hard or harder than 1.3 Impossible), I've found Life Draconians one of the most powerful non-11 book strategies.

What makes Draconians so good are two main things: 1) Flying (duh) and 2) powerful early units.

I've tried it a few different ways and concluded that the strongest way is 5 Life books, Warlord, and Alchemy (no huge surprise).

This does limit your Life books and research potential, but you can still have good chances of getting a lot of the powerful spells by taking encounters, which is a faster way to get spells anyway, and with this approach you will be able to take a lot of encounters.

The goal early on is to be able to quickly take out the other enemy Wizard on Myrror and to take any Neutral town opportunities.

What I typically like to do is shoot straight for Doom Drakes. However, if you find a good Neutral town opportunity you can take early with 2 or 3 Spearmen and/or Bowmen you could g for that as well.

For starting spells I like Heroism, Just Cause, Healing, and Endurance.

To start you want to put all of your Magic Power to Mana and use keep converting your Mana to Gold to rush buy buildings ASAP. This is one of the main benefits of Alchemy - letting you develop your early economy much faster.

My typical build order is Granary > Marketplace > Farmer's Market > Sawmill > Forester's Guild > Stables > Doom Drakes. At some point you will want to lay off rush buying to get up enough mana to cast Just Cause, which should prevent the need to build a Shrine before Stables, but building a Shrine first isn't too bad either. Either way is fine really as I typically like Shamen early anyway. When to build a Miner's Guild will depend on the situation. You may do it before building a Stable if there isn't much need to troops right away. Otherwise I try to get out my starting force before the Miner's Guild.

The real power of Draconians, and most Myrror races, comes from Adamantium. You do want to find a good Adamantium spot early (assuming you didn't get blessed with Adamantium in your Capital). Once you get a force good enough to take Neutral towns and possibly as capital, you want to build Settlers and get them on the Adamantium.

Solid early force composition is 2 Doom Drakes and 2 Shamen with Endurance. This gives you a good mobile force with 3 movement that will heal itself quickly on the move. I've found I can often take enemy capitals with this force, depending a little on their magic. If they use Counter Magic that could be a problem, but otherwise you should be okay.

Early on send out Doom Drakes and Shamen solo to scout and find the enemy. Once you find the enemy capital consolidate your forces and attack if possible, or build more if needed. Doom Drakes are really powerful early on, especially with Heroism (Ultra-Elite) and Alchemy.

Once you've taken out the enemy capital now you need to focus on building up your Adamantium town. There is no need to develop your capital beyond the starting buildings. The only thing to consider is building Air Ships. Assuming that your starting capital doesn't have Adamantium, Air Ships work better than normal Bowmen, so if you need ranged attackers beyond Shamen go for Air Ships in your capital.

Now focus on rush buying buildings in your Adamantium town. The first goal in the Adamantium town is to produce Bowmen. Adamantium Draconian Bowmen are the Slingers of Myrror, but actually much better due to their mobility. You want to get an Alchemists Guild of course and may want to build a Fighter's Guild before pumping Bowmen, but mostly you want to just get your big production buildings going, like Miner's Guild, etc.and build just the bare minimum needed to pump Bowmen. Once you start producing Adamanitum Bowmen you can stop producing Air Ships typically, and your main Draconian forces will be Doom Drakes with Adamanitum Bowmen and 1 or 2 Shamen. Endurance on the Bowmen and Shamen so the stack can use 3 movement.

At this point I like to have at least one group focused on taking nodes and other encounters to try to get as many rewards as possible, and of course you're looking to pop spells like Lionheart, Prayer, possibly even Planar Seal.

When using the Bowmen, always advance before shooting. Once they hit Ultra Elite they will be pretty deadly on their own, but if you can get Lionheart on even Prayer they will become vastly more powerful. They can one shot high-end units. A favorite target with them is encounters with Great Wyrms , which they can easily kill at high levels for great rewards.

Eventually you'll want Adamantium Doom Drakes as well, but the priority is Bowmen at first. Typically a good mid-game group is a full stack of 2 Doom Drakes 5 Bowmen and 2 Shamen. You can mix in Heroes and other units as well, but I like having an all Draconian all Flying group that can just go anywhere, and then use ground troops from other races in other stacks mixed with heroes, etc.

Depending on how things go, you may want to start setting Myrror with your own Settlers or if there are a lot of towns to take just go on conquest. If you can get Planar Seal it can be worth it to get a group on Arcanus and then seal the planes while you build Settlements and fully takeover Myrror. Getting as many Draconian towns on Adamanitum as you can is always good. Multiple town pumping Adamanitum Bowmen and Doom Drakes gets really powerful really fast.

What makes this so good is that you don't need highly developed towns for this. The main military buildings you need are just Stables and a Sawmill. If you don't get Alter of Battle you may want to build out to a War College in some Adamanitum towns, but its not a priority, and better to wait and see if you can get Alter of Battle first for a while IMO.

I'm playing one last game with this setup and man, it's good, but what a difficult match.

I had Ariel on Myrror with me. She cast Just Cause literally on turn 4. I had not that great of a starting spot, no specials for my capital and 1 block of tundra, but I kept it. I still rushed to Doom Drakes really fast. I got a group of 2 Doom Drakes and 2 Shamen to her capital faster than I pretty much ever have.

She was Dark Elves. It was really early so I was expecting her to be garrisoned with like Halberdiers and maybe some Priests. Her capital was on Gold, Food, and Adamantium, and was already really big. Well, in her garrison she had 2 War Trolls, 1 Minotarus, 2 HE Priests, 2 Warlocks, 1 Golem and a hero. I was like, are you kidding me?

Turns out she had Charismatic & Famous + Divine Power.

So I wasn't able to take her out, but I did contain her and keep her from expanding and was able to keep her down to just 2 cities. But she still had insane power. Still, I was able to keep her at bay and put up two Settlements on Adamantium pretty early. I started taking encounters and popped Alter of Battle from a Wizard Tower. I put that on both of my Adamantium Settlements as soon as they could make Bowmen and started pumping Bowmen. The first town has nothing but the basic economic buildings, Granary through Miner's Guild + Alchemist Guild and a Barracks, with Alter of Battle on it so it was pumping out Ultra Elite Adamantium Bowmen pretty quickly. The second I built a Shrine in, and a Stables and started making Doom Drakes and Shaman in it, as well as Bowmen.

I eventually build Ship Yard in one and made Air Ships as well, as they hold up better against ranged attackers, which I was facing a few of.

The Arcanus Wizards are all over the place. I've taken out Rajak, but Oberic has put Chaos Rifts on almost every single town in the game so its made taking enemy towns and real pain. I've got to get rid of Oberic. Also, Oberic and Raven are a mix of Klackons and Gnolls, so their towns all suck anyway. The place is getting overrun with Beatles, which is a pain.

I also popped Stream of Life, so now I'm setting up two new Settlements on Adamantium with Stream of Life on them, They are now almost ready to build troops too. I've got a few Troll towns and some Dwarfs, and 1 Beastmen, but its the Draconian units doing all the real work. I'm putting Troll guards in some towns with Chaos rifts. Once I get all 4 Adamantium towns pumping out units I'll be swarming everyone.

Raven has got some deadly combos on me. I can't take him on with heroes or small armies. The only way to battle him is with swarms, because he's got Psionic Blast against heroes, and on my flying units he'll use Web then Phantom Beast. Against large numbers of Bowmen he'll use Phantom Beast + Guardian Wind. He also uses Cracks Call. So it's good that Draconians have a good mix of troops.

I really think Dracoians have by far the best overall troops selection. It's funny because it seems that many people are underwhelmed with Draconians and don't know what to do with them, but they are by far the overall best IMO. They don't have a single super-unit, like Paladins or War Trolls, etc. but they have the best mix of units IMO that you can actually make a mobile army with.

Right now I'm running full stacks of 2 Doom Drakes, 2 Air Ships, 4 Bowmen and 1 Shamen. Works really well, except I keep having to replace the Shamen because it seems they are a favored target (I'm not sure why as they are the least threat). With Endurance on the Bowmen and Shamen you get a highly mobile stack that can go anywhere and hit anything. Even against Guardian Wind the Air Ships can still hit at range.

I haven't gotten Lionheart yet this game, so I'm hoping for that, but even without it the Ultra-Elite Adamantium Bowmen with Prayer are really powerful. As I'm starting to expand more, I'll start probably putting Adamantium Spearmen in towns to garrison them as they make a nice cheap, but still effective, garrison. A few Spearmen and some Bowmen are typically all it takes to defend against most stuff. I'll put Trolls or 1 unit of Doom Drakes in a town if it's really in danger.

I haven't even built an Armory in any Draconian town. That's the way to do it. The real advantage of Dracnians is you can build all of their best units without even building an Armory. Without a doubt they benefit from Alter of Battle more than any other race. You have 4 solid units you can make with them without having a make an Armory - that's huge and makes it really possible to quickly pop up new towns and get them making useful troops quickly.