Whoa! Another game I'm having great fun with ... I have to say that I rate the replay value of "Master of Myrror" considerably higher than that of vanilla Civ3. I rarely play more than two games of Civ3 in a row, after the second game I always get the impression that the game starts to repeat itself. It doesn't matter that much who's across my borders, I'll probably meet some horsemen, spearmen and archers, and I know how to deal with them. MoM is different, with four different types of magic and several racial resources, you can never be sure what awaits you beyond your borders. You will be surprised more often and have to adapt more to the different strategies of your neighbours. I like that very much.
Back to topic...
4. The age of peace
After the last report, my game went on for rather uneventful 50 turns. Lo Pan and I both rebuilt the cities that we had taken from Rjak and upgraded our military. I was leading in score, had the largest empire (or so I thought), and I had the advantage of many racial resources, so I didn't want to start wars. Instead I built life trees and monoliths throughout my empire, fisheries in the coastal cities, and dwarven fortresses in border towns. In my core cities I started to produce hammerhands and giants. I figured that I already had an economic edge and that this edge would only grow the longer the peace lasted.
Tlaloc was holding still, concentrating on building wonders. I traded him my only men resource for more than 60 turns (at the moment he still has it) for between 55 and 75 gold per turn, with only a short pause to start building fisheries in my coastal towns. This way Tlaloc basically financed my military, I had exceeded my free unit support limit a while ago. Raven also didn't make any moves against me, he probably realized that he was weaker than me, and my main army was near his borders also.
The only one who broke the peace was Oberic. For reasons I don't know he apparently developed a grudge against me. Two times he sent several ships across Tlaloc's territory and along my border, to attack one of my weaker defended cities on the eastern coast. He couldn't harm me much this way, and his island was too far away to mount an effective attack against me, but his diplomatic actions paved the path for further changes.
One of this actions was that he made an alliance with Ariel in his first "war" against me. Ariel was already reduced to two cities, only one of them on the main continent, seven tiles away from my largest army, and I don't know what she was thinking. I took this city without much effort and made peace with her again. However I forgot to look after the defenses of my coastal cities, and I also forgot that Ariel had amphibious units. So I lost one city temporarily to her, which was no big deal (I regained it one turn later), but still bad because of the lost buildings in that city.
This conflict was solved easily and didn't interfere with my build-up efforts. The next one wasn't. But something else happened first: I built two sunhawks and tried to find a way to the eastern part of the map. The distance from the eastern tip of Raven's peninsula was just short enough to cross, and so I made contact with Vlad.
Vlad was
big.
He started on a smaller continent together with Sss'ra and totally defeated him. Vlad had more territory than me, amassed culture with astounding speed (he had about the same amount of culture as myself, but his culture grew faster), and he was leading in score. I bought his worldmap and saw that Mordja owned another, slightly smaller continent to the north, fighting a war with Tauron, who had been reduced to four cities. Mordja had already defeated Merlin, who fled to his last city on a small island. During the next turns, Mordja took all of Tauron's cities.
So much to the difficulties of death mages.
It seems that I continued my trend to play games that run against the trends.
Luckily, Vlad and especially Mordja were trailing a little in technology. I also didn't have anything to fear from them, because neither of them could cross the ocean between us.
5. Teaming up
Around turn 250, Oberic again declared war on me. He shipped a hellspawn, sorcerer and champion onto my east coast, but I was prepared because I saw him coming along my coast, an defeated this ... erm ... "invasion force". Again he couldn't harm me much, but his diplomatic actions became important: MPPs were available now, and Oberic made one with Lo Pan. A war between Lo Pan and me had seemed inevitable for quite some time now, and I was prepared, but I didn't want Tlaloc to grow stronger undisturbed while Lo Pan and I clashed. I also feared that either Oberic or Lo Pan managed to bring Tlaloc into their alliance. Fortunately I had finally gotten ahead of Tlaloc in research. So I bribed him int an MPP with me by giving him Life IX.
In the next turn, the world war broke loose. Within a single turn, Oberic attacked me, and Tlaloc declared war on him and attacked him, which of course prompted Lo Pan to declare war on Tlaloc as well. In the next turn, Lo Pan attacked Tlaloc so that I had to declare war on Lo Pan also. So now it's Oberic and Lo Pan against Tlaloc and me. The spirit of war even seemed to be contagious - Mordja declared war against Vlad at the same time.
It was a good thing that I had made contact with the two. I traded technology to them for 1000 gold each, which was enough money to upgrade my military (I had just researched Dwarves III, and against Lo Pan's chaos ettins every little advantage mattered).
I'm right in the middle of this war now, and things have been going well so far. I captured two of Lo Pan's cities (Ariel's former capital and one of Rjak's former core cities). I was close to losing a city in the northwest, which bordered on one of Lo Pan's roads, so that he could throw lots of chaos ettins in a single turn against it - but despite losing some dwarves, my defenses held. Tlaloc also helps me, his forces in the north bind a portion of Lo Pan's military.
Lo Pan attacks with chaos ettins and an occasional chaos knight and defends with beholders. He also shifts tons of beholders around in a way that I don't understand. About 20 beholders are running circles in my territory near one of my border cities but cant do anything against the city defenses. Lo Pan also has a fleet of 9 galleasses and 3 cogs swimming around in the southern sea (where I don't have any ships, I'd have to get around Raven's peninsula to get there), but merely drags them around, only occasionally unloading two to three units on my territory. I've seen the "dragging-ships-around" before, but I'm a little concerned about Lo Pan's usage of his beholders. It just doesn't make sense to have them run around one of my cities when I attack another city in the vicinity. I don't think I have seen such behaviour in vanilla civ. I don't know what's causing it either. The beholder isn't flagged as offensive-also (I suspected that from its behaviour and checked that).
Okay, back to playing now. Lo Pan emerged as a winner from two wars before, let's see whether he can do it again ... I doubt it.
The picture below shows the stuation before the start of war, in the meantime I've taken the two cities in Lo Pan's southeast.
I noticed that Paladin's graphics had annoying noise in them and as I tried to fix it with no success, I finally axed the unit and replaced it with Seraph. So nothing big.
