Devnada: Dark Castle: Turn 1

There isn't much here now, but if I don't get killed this event page will soon be overflowing with messages. In previous AARs I would need to use Photoshop to stitch them together into a single image, but I might just post multiple images this time around.

It's super important that I'm able to get my Lictor production going ASAP, and to help facilitate that I'm going to need to craft Black Laurels, which requires construction 2. Black Laurels allow two extra Lictors to be summoned by the summon Lictor national spell, which makes them cost effective at just 1 death gem apiece instead of 3.

Another approach to acquire Lictors is to summon Arch Bishops and use them to animate. This approach is more efficient in terms of death gems in the long-term, but it takes so long and you pay such a high opportunity cost by not having the tools to deal with early aggression that I don't think that makes sense.

Another approach is to prophetize a starting commander (most likely the starting Censor) immediately, and then use the prophet to create a small pool of Lictors, which could be very helpful to mitigate early rushes and might allow time for the Arch Bishop production to ramp up. Still, using Laurels allows you to summon even when sieged so I'm going that route, and and as an added benefit it allows me to bring an H4 unit online more easily. This is helpful because it gives access to Power of the Sepulchre, a battlefield spell that buffs my units with +4 attack and increased movement speed.

Not starting with an H3 commander does complicate my ability to bless my army, but I think I can still pull this off by using Acolytes, who are H1 commanders.

I summon one of them immediately and sit tight in my capital. There's not a chance I'm going to blindly expand without knowing what I'm facing.

Bone Daddy thinks he's a good diplomat and knows that the other pretenders might have a dim view of him, so he sends the following friendly greeting to everyone with the in-game chat.

Greetings my tasty morsels. Everyone is looking so delicious today! Except for R'lyeh, whose strange alien flesh and suckers do not look tasty. I've always said if it doesn't have a face you shouldn't eat it. Am I right? Anyway, Bone Daddy wants all of you to know that he's not running your father's apocalypse and that contrary to popular belief we do not intend to kill everyone -- maybe just most of you. Anyway, if anyone wants to trade us death gems -- even those smug Marignon bible thumpers -- we're very open.

If this game is similar to my other MA Ermor games, I'm going to be dog-piled on early. It's important that I gather intelligence about my opponents and understand what kind of pretender they are fielding. This is far from perfect but one method that can help is to look at their pretender epithets. Fortunately, there's a handy website at https://epithets.illwiki.com/ where you can input the name and get certain minimal values builds. Below are the results: