All is ok for the moment. There's a scorpion in the area of where I want my next future city which will likely kill some of the warriors that escort it. The map is fairly resourceless (which I like) and the enemy is on a small reverse inland sea mirror map which means that they're on the other side of the lakes (also good in my opinion)
There aren't a whole lot of enticing places to put a city on the water for. Because of the distance between myself and my opponent, I'm trying to tech up as fast as possible
Demographics wise we still seem to be ahead. These svarts are less scary because they're not Volanna.
FYI, I won this game. Final play was summoning Basium. EITB is broken and you cannot switch to summoned Basium or Hyborem. However, Basium will give me his Iron. I built Paladins from Basium's Iron and sent them with my Wood Golems to the enemy and defeated the Svartalfar.