I believe at this point it's safe to say I'm going to lose.
(videos up to part 15 are up)
Gained almost nothing on the graph in the past 5 years, while blue doubled, purple tripled theirs.
My attempt to take the blue city failed - Fire Storm did wipe out the magicians as planned but the single berserber was enough to kill all 13 of my pegasai trying to get the city. Due to Uranus's Blessing, I couldn't kill it with Warp lightning, and due to Cloud of Shadow, my Pegasai were to weak to fight it. (It had Guardian Wind so ranged wasn't an option.)
The doomstack shown in the previous post took out my elf city, so I can't produce pegasai anymore.
All of blue's cities fly, so klackon units aren't going to work. I have Doom Mastery for research, but relying on that for flying Stag Beetles...doesn't seem viable with two enemies having Spell Blast and AEther Binding. For the same reason I never summoned a Gorgon, and never researched Survival instinct.
Currently researching Apocalypse, which should at least allow me do deal massive damage to enemy stacks in combat - problem is I don't have Chaneller, and my power income isn't that great, only 270. And it'll be another year just to research it, if I don't produce mana which I most likely won't be able to afford.
Meanwhile, the Myrran wizard finished Enlightenment, so I expect them to overrun Arcanus in about 3 years from now. Nothing stops trolls that have all the Life globals supporting them.
I think there were 4 contributing factors to this loss :
-I wasn't pushing enough into research. Should have considered I'm playing Chaos more. I didn't have that good spells though - Blazing March is bad with Stag Beetles, Earthquake, Survival Instinct, Doom Mastery, Gorgons all on the spell blast list, Elemental Armor is...not really useful against Sorcery/Life/Nature wizards, and Gaia's Blessing...is good but the game is lost before it starts to matter. Oh and I also had Chaos Spawn, but nothing to support it (no guardian wind, magic immunity, mystic surge, invisibility, etc) so I didn't go for it.
-The AI simply had too many units, and while they weren't a big threat individually, in these quantities it kept me busy defending myself and left me with no resources to expand. Which isn't how it should be when I'm playing Klackons and hold more cities than the AI (well, less than the two AI together, but more than either of the two alone).
-I couldn't cast enough spells. First half of the game there were too many random spell blasts (as I only adjusted priorities halfway in the game), later it stopped me from using good spells. Yes, "dispel detect magic", but cheapest disjunction costs 375 and doing that twice (on two wizards) when skill is only 60-120 is not very viable. If I had those extra 10-15 gargoyles or lizards that were blasted, I could have had an offensive army while dealing with all the incoming enemies.
I have to say the AI's "doomstack" tactic (and other overland movement changes) make it a massively superior threat - while the red player never got ahead of me in army strength, dealing with their doomstacks was costly enough to prevent me from building up enough forces to launch attacks myself. It also prevented peace - I had to regularly attack and take out their doomstacks to retake lost cities, which kept reducing their peace interest - I couldn't afford to let them go around and kill them on defensive battles because I needed specific "counter" stacks to stand a chance.
This is how things look like...anything thinks there is a point continuing? I can't use overland spells to win due to Spell Blast, and I'm not rich enough to afford spamming spells in combat to beat everything that way. My 120 casting skill is not enough to be able to dispel detect magic from both wizards and cast rare spells in enough quantity to win. I'm literally the weakest wizard (not counting the one I knocked back into Myrror) to the extent that the "losing" BGM started playing already, which requires the human player to be below 33% of the strongest wizard's power on the graph.
