Caster of Magic playthroughs

[Anskiy]

After various bad starts with Life + Chaos, mostly thanks to not having ways to get my settlers onto sea, I built this wizard:



Nature spell: Water Walking
Chaos spells: Flame Blade, Warp Creature
Life spells: In the screenshot above
Race: High Elves

My plan was to boom using the extra power of the High Elves, which would both help with casting skill and with getting more spells in my book. I got my second city up, and reinforced both of them with longbowmen. A four longbowmen stack with Holy Weapon cleared four lairs for me, though the only notable treasure was Reywind. I then seized two cities from Jaffar, since he was the weakest wizard, being a pure Sorcery wizard with Warlord. He attempted a few counter attacks, but Holy Weapon and Flame Blade on my halberdiers stopped him dead.

Soon after Rjak declared war on everyone. His spellbook and retort choices were mildly scary: he had Conjuror, Channeler and lots of Death books. However, he picked Gnolls, and that was his downfall. He sent stack after stack at me as I began building a buffed Elven Lord army, and I kept repelling him with Earth to Mud and Magicians, with only minor losses. Once my army was ready, I started tearing through his stacks, then launched an offensive towards his southern cities. The first city was captured easily, but it was quite worthless, so I abandoned it and marched on to the second city, which fell easily. Change Terrain showed up in my book, so I decided to spread my Elves down below, since I could now fertilize the desert and make the place livable. 



Unfortunately Raven got a settler there before me. I destroyed it and settled there. Understandably, this pissed him off, and he declared war. Normally, I wouldn't have risked a two front war like this; however Rjak had stopped sending coordinated offensive stacks for quite some time, and I know that anything he could send would be defeated by my defenses, so I was not worried. I built another Elven Lord army and was going to get it to Raven's nearest city, but after launching an attack that got thwarted easily, he sued for peace. This was fine by me; I wanted to use my Lords to hunt hard lairs anyway. It was about time.

The game as of now:





Sharee has descended and taken out Rjak's capital, causing him to lose any momentum he had remaining. Raven apparently is a decent match to me on paper, but I doubt it will hold in practice. My plan now is to take on nodes and lairs, get the rest of Arcanus explored, and hopefully get some of Life's amazing enchantments going.

[Anskiy]

I headed west with my scout, and met a few of Sharee's stray units. It turns out she was actually handily winning against Rjak, but more worryingly, she was at war with every other wizard. Could this mean yet another ruthless wizard seeking complete planar domination? 

I built a stack of buffed Pegasai to clear what lairs they could. Unsurprisingly, Sharee declared war on me by then, stating that I was too weak for her. I ignored her since she was still fighting Rjak and other wizards, and found some decent treasure, including Life Force from a Demon lair. However, this turned out to be a sore mistake. Sharee collected the undead she reaped from her battles and slammed them straight into me. My Pegasai stack was pretty worn out at this point, so I had to assemble a new stack to deal with her fast. Elven Lords worked out well at first but they had troubles dealing with undead Sprites, especially since Star Fires wouldn't deal enough damage sometimes. This allowed Sharee to cut them down to size with multiple Lightning Bolt casts, then finish them off with Wave of Despair.

Frustrated, I decided to try that again, but with Pegasai mixed in with the Elven Lords. That worked a lot better, especially since Sharee seemed to like warping the arrows of the Pegasai more than casting dangerous spells. I started pushing her back successfully, however she started chaining Power Drains on me which made fighting her rather frustrating. Eventually she casted Chaos Rift on my core producing cities, and at that point I gave up in frustration. While I could win the game, it was obvious I had ignored Sharee too long and now she had a decisive advantage in casting skill, while giving me little opportunity to raise my own. This would lead to me fighting a long uphill battle, which would especially be worse as I had to decide between buffing my armies or clearing my cities of Chaos Rifts before they could damage something vital like a Wizard's Guild or Fantastic Stable.

[Fringe]

Hi. I check in on these posts from time to time, I appreciate them. Had a thought: when you start a new game, post your first save file.

I don't watch a lot of the playthroughs -- the old "i'd rather play than watch" idea -- sometimes I'd like to have the same start as someone else and see where and when we diverge.

I watched some of Sapher's videos last year and thought I'd make different decisions early on if I was playing the game, which lead me to think about having shared start files. Since I don't speak his language, I could only guess at why he was doing things. He plays at a much higher level than I do so I'm sure I could have learned from him.

[Anskiy]

Thanks for the kind words. I will definitely make sure to include starting saves from next playthrough onwards.