now for a challenge

Mostly won the day with chariots and axemen. Those dirty dwarves were the first to fall without too much of a squeal. Their northern cities were light defended, so I raced chariots to their countryside to take those while I moved catapults slowly towards their capital. By the time the chariots had captured their northern cities my axemen had broken thru at their captial and it was all over except for the beers.

The Tasunke bothered me next with their haughty attitude. A quick push into their territory and a couple of their border cities were mine. Then they shoved back and took a couple cities of their own. Chariots don't seem the best unit for defending a city with. Fortunately I evacuated with minimal losses, and then it came down to jungle warfare, and who had the best withdrawl chance. Eventually I wore his armies down enough that I could move my axemen and catapults from the safety of the trees and properly capture his cities.

Next Tebryn passed away like a warm summer's breeze. Elven archers just don't cut it, when faced with a veteran army. Although they managed to field some large unit stacks, the extra mobility of my units meant I could concentrate attacks and obliterate them.

I never had to fight the Ljosalfar. Their main contribution was to ferry settlers over and try to squeeze in new settlements in. Since I was going for a domination victory I didn't raze that many cities and built culture in newly captures ones first in the hope of shutting them out.

Never challenged the red dragon; he spawned on a modest sized island, and he had to have had fifty or more skeletons and other barb units wandering around on it.

Using what I learned from the end of my first game (I've never played this civ before either and usually play on Prince), I decided to 'rush' adventurous meteor-slinging archmages. Mwahahaha.. Can anything stand in their path?

I finished a domination victory on turn 244 with a normalized score of 94,467 (base score of 4189).

I had some issues in the end with a strike (should'a built courthouses and such) and losing/retaking several of my captured cities because of unexpected barbs appearing in the newly unexplored territory (I don't play much.. never come up.. doh..). Anyhow, what are a few lost workers when I still have my three original unstoppable archmages?

It crazy just how deadly these archmages are when they're created from your initial adventurers. Three 100+xp archmages slinging 6 meteors each per turn taking out anything that approaches them or otherwise laying waste to cities are pretty slick. They weren't even working together through most of it.. they're independently godlike until they have to go up against the 13str city defenders, and then it takes a couple unless you get really lucky.

Too bad none of my other adepts had time to reach archmage.. got a bunch of them barely up to mage level but they're not so useful with just one fireball per turn.