I'm very confused by some of these replies. For example:
An ogre event?
I chose Espona (spelling?) and immediately explored, while building a worker and a settler. I discovered some frostling lairs and took them out, since the mod mentioned that they can randomly generate monsters. I quickly took over the first barbarian city that you encountered, and connected a road back to the first city.
One of my scouts eventually got promoted enough to be able to tame animals, though I can't say it ever really helped me defend. It did really help out with exploring the map though.
Eventually Espona came upon the free tech building, and I got the Sorceress upgrade. After that, plus with all the promotions she had, she pretty much took out the Doviello civ by herself (having heal-on-the-move helped a lot too). She's insanely powerful!
I didn't let the Doviello's surrender, I took them out completely -- I needed their cities after all
I kept on exploring, and moved north-west where I bumped into the Illians. Espona took them out, one city at a time. By this time I had Longbowmen, who are great at defending. I would have expanded faster except that I couldn't produce Longbowmen fast enough to keep up with Espona.
By this point Espona's fireballs were killing Ice Giants.
I did eventually bump into the Eagle, who attacked Espona and died, but I didn't realize it was so special. I saw the Stag once, but never again.
I guess that's related to an event as well?
I found a very lush green land to the very north, kinda middle of map, and took over that town as well.
Is that the Giant city? Otherwise, I have no idea what people mean by that.
I figured I might as well take out Illian completely, and moved up and took out the last Illian city all the way in the very north-west corner. Eventually, at the very end of the game, the Ice Giants took it back.
It was only about 3/4 of the way through the game that I realized that animals could be used to benefit a city. Silk from spiders, dancing bears from Bears, mammoth camp from Mammoths. That's all I noticed... wolves and panthers didn't seem to do anything.
I only saw Drifta (spelling?) the dragon once I forged the sword.
Is it possible for the dragon to come out before then? I was cocky at first, and was going to fight it with the Kyorlin and Espona. Had to reload once I realized it was strength 80! But then I prepared better and built 30 longbowmen before forging the sword. They each did 1% of damage with their Artillery attack, and after 3 or so rounds I just rushed the dragon with some archers. After 4 or so of them attacked it the dragon died.
After that it was just a matter of wandering around and discovering stuff. The Illian guy stuck on an island disappeared on his own -- I guess when I wiped out the Illian civ -- so I never really saw what happened with picking up the orb. Though I realized afterwards that I shouldn't have moved the orb -- my Illian-conquered cities quickly became snowed over.
I did find an ice castle eventually, in the south-west, but it just had animals in it.
There was one event where a Doviello priest wanted refuge or something like that. I burnt him
I thought the text for when you burn the priest was really well done!
I can't believe how many things in the game I missed. Not sure how I'd play the game without Espona though -- being able to attack twice a turn, once at range with no chance of getting damaged, and being able to bombard and also do artillery damage, is just so powerful.