Test games played

[Seravy]

What were all your retorts? Personally I think nature is an awful realm for me to play, so my normal experience with inquisitor may not help.

Archmage, Sage Master, Artificier and Inquisitor.

Good retorts on their own, no so much if 3 enemy wizards have Spell Blast.
Huge map+Inquisitor is bad enough, but having TWO chaos+sorcery wizards which I consider the highest threat in the game is worse. (and the other two were Death+Sorcery and Death+Chaos)

The game pretty much went like this :
Summoned creatures got spell blasted or killed with Confusion, Banish or Mind Storm+Banish.
Paladins were generally watching enemy flying units shooting at them while various Chaos spells were raining down on them - I could only web one enemy unit at a time so a stack of 9 flying units meant 9 turns of ranged attacks and direct damage spells.
Magicians did pretty well until midgame but they are useless when I need to do attacking and when Flame Strike came into play they stopped working - but they still did better than Paladins for garrison even then!
Inquisitor was a huge burden - hitting a city with 9 magicians inside costs a lot of resources but I get nothing to replace my losses - no city, but I'm still stuck with land I have to defend, otherwise the enemy will rebuild it in no time.
I was also forced to fight 2-3 wizards at a time for most of the game, with some gaps between wars when I was able to get peace from someone I already weakened, which allowed me to focus on someone else but they grew back while I did so, negating every progress I made.
I tried pushing settlers into conquered territory, but most of these settlements couldn't hold, as the enemy had a massive advantage in production capacity and unit tier in their own territory. Even buying units plus summoning every turn, 1 city can't keep up with 10 others, especially when I also need to push out attacking stacks to do something about the situation.

[Nelphine]

Hmm. I would expect with 8 nature, archmage, and sagemaster, I would have tried to push strong summons early (like you said, a land linked basilisk can cause massive havoc; get a few gorgons with a bunch of bowmen supporting them, and you should smoke everything.

But it is highly dependent on getting a strong early start. Late game you won't have any chance to cast very rares.

My guess is its all about the first...6-8 years. You need enough cities to be able to keep up; and I have a feeling because you aren't used to inquisitor you were probably unconsciously making choices with the plan to be able to gain from conquering cities - inquisitor works when you embrace that you don't conquer new cities and plan for your core empire to win the game (for instance, 1 or 2 beastmen adamantium cities, with 5-9 more cities whose sole job it is to provide enough food for the halberdiers, and enough mana for 2-4 combats per turn - as long as I can keep that core, everything else is basically bait to give AI something to waste time attacking) Pure nature against triple sorcery? I know I don't know how to plan that. I'm bad at nature. Maybe if you had alchemy instead of artificer for early summons..

[Seravy]

My guess is its all about the first...6-8 years. You need enough cities to be able to keep up; and I have a feeling because you aren't used to inquisitor you were probably unconsciously making choices with the plan to be able to gain from conquering cities

I was able to fully colonize two large continents, my own and the one right next to it. But not even a dozen cities were enough. I avoided attacking the wizard playing my own race first to not rely on conquest and also because I wanted to focus on those Chaos/Sorcery wizards who were at war with me anyway.

I did get good summons early, but casting them was not viable. When it takes 6-8 turns to cast the spell and a Maniacal enemy has Spell Blast - which they randomly use every 2-3 turns - it's not possible to cast them. I needed to rely on Spiders until my skill reached 100+.
Then I had a small timeframe for Great Lizards - only until I fixed the AI which used Vertigo all the time due to a bug - afterwards, Confusion started eating up the lizards, and the other wizard already had Banish and attacked from the tower on the continent of my target.
Land Linking everything was also not an option - Maniacal Sorcery AI spams Dispelling Wave like there is no tomorrow if I put multiple buffs on all units in a stack and I needed Resist Elements and Elemental Armor against magicians more.
I was able to summon a single Gorgon - this took a lot of effort to pull off, as I had to get rid of all the Detect Magic to prevent Spell Blast. It worked well and won several battles on its own, but eventually it got overwhelmed (not sure but probably got hit by Mind Storm).
Before I could get more Gorgons, I already had Colossus and Behemoths researched so I switched to using those instead. Colossus worked well against the Death wizard but not the one that developed into the real threat by then - Doom Bolt killed them and it wasn't affordable to lose even 1 per battle as it took about 3-4 turns to summon them (every time Detect Magic was cast, I lost about 3 turns of progress.)
So I used Behemoths against the Myrran wizard (at that time I had to ignore the other two as the units leaking from the Myrran plane already took over several of my cities) which again worked for some time - I razed about 6-8 of their cities - but some of the Behemoths got used up through Mind Storm+Creature Binding - and then I ran into some 28 armor hero and lost the rest of them because the remaining amount was not enough to kill it (heck, I couldn't even damage that hero)

Oh and my early plan was adamantium paladins and orihalcon magicians...but maniacal enemies with Raise Volcano and Corruption said no. I could make like, one stack of each. (3 out of 4 wizards had Chaos)

...and while it's not much, losing a stack of War Bears in the early game probably didn't help. The wizard on my continent was Guardian and I noticed that too late.

I could have had a chance if I was able to attack earlier...but Inquisitor forced me to build a dozen settlers before stuff that could fight.

And the funny part is the AI still had been hosed by bugs in this game - overuse of Vertigo and Shatter, and not seeing terrain outside my scouting range.

[GermanJoey]

I don't have time to watch your whole game, but one thing that strikes me as odd from your text description is that you talk about razing a lot of their cities... do you attack lots of enemy wizards' cities with their fortress still up? That's just asking for trouble, its very difficult to attrition an AI like that because they have so much more resources than you. It's likely that you'll lose more forces in taking a city than they'll lose defending it even if you manage to wipe them out and raze it. It's much more efficient to try to eliminate their fortress with a doom stack and then rush down many of their cities at once with smaller stacks (including splitting apart their doom stack) while they are banished.

Of course, if you banish them late enough you might only have a turn or two to deal with them unhindered, so you've gotta plan for that.

[Nelphine]

That is very true too. Beeline for the fortress, wreck it, then mop up what you can. It's worth losing 8/9 units in your doomstack to banish them, as long as you have another 3-5 stacks of garbage units to mop up with. Spells make that much difference.

[Seravy]

I don't have time to watch your whole game, but one thing that strikes me as odd from your text description is that you talk about razing a lot of their cities... do you attack lots of enemy wizards' cities with their fortress still up?

I wouldn't say lots but I didn't have much choice. I didn't even know where the Myrran wizard's fortress was, at the very least not on the continent with the two towers that were broken - I could have tried finding it with Earth Lore but...Inquisitor. If I knock out a city in the middle of enemy territory I have no way to push settlers there. So I preferred to hit anything as close as possible. (and my units were busy defending those settlers and outposts - setting up 5 stacks near enemy cities was not an option)
For the nonmyrran Blue/Red fortress, I don't remember, probably the units in the garrison were too strong? Like, 8 fire giants with soul linker hero strong or better - he was sending 4-5 giants in each of his dozen stacks coming my way.
The one on my continent was easy, except the fortress. I attacked if after I already taken out the outposts, but I lost the battle there - 8 ghouls with Guardian are no joke. Took me like another 100 turns to beat it but the wizard didn't do much meanwhile since it had no other cities.
The last one, I didn't attack for a long while, and when I did, I attacked the capital - not first but about 4th, her spells couldn't do anything to my Colossai so I wasn't in a hurry. I was able to steal her entire continent - unfortunately she had another dozen cities on the Myrror plane and while I could have taken them out, the Myrran wizard's presence made me stop as I had no means to defend cities there (yes they were cities on my race) and razing them would have only helped the Myrran wizard even more.

(I think I wasn't in a rush to find the Myrran fortress because the wizard already had Efreets. I was nowhere near strong enough to take out 8 Efreets and a linker hero which is the most likely garrison in this case.)

[Domon]

Oh and my early plan was adamantium paladins and orihalcon magicians...but maniacal enemies with Raise Volcano and Corruption said no. I could make like, one stack of each. (3 out of 4 wizards had Chaos)

and this is an inherent problem of raise volcano: when there are a couple of wizards, you can very well consider it a zero-resouces game. it warps the game a lot, too soon. best option is to corrupt your tiles or leave them corrupted till you defeat all chaos wizards that have it. another warped strategy.

[Nelphine]

That's part of why I started playing poor minerals games. I hate losing my adamantium. This way I wouldn't have any anyway.

[GermanJoey]

You had trouble with fire giants and ghouls with nature? You had no elemental armor, spiders, or even resist elements?

[Seravy]

You had trouble with fire giants and ghouls with nature? You had no elemental armor, spiders, or even resist elements?

They only have 3 ammo but high enough melee so I didn't even consider Elemental Armor useful for this (I did use it against the cities with Magicians). I had petrify which killed them at a 60% chance. Maybe it wasn't fire giants in the capital then. I don't remember.