>>533506835
Expansion as a giant nation is not all that hard, you recruit as many giants as you can and recruit a priest commander to lead them every other turn.
Sadly my expansion was rather slow because i had a coastal cap and from my four land provinces one had barbs, one lizards and one had something like 3 bloodhenge druids forcing me to leave my capring until i had a good number of giants.
After expansion was done and i had a good number of indi scouts ging i had a rather good idea of that was going on in my surroundings.
R´ley was fighting atlantis and was not interested in annoying me.
Ctis in my south west had heat 2 and would have been a great early war target but we had a realy awkward border that i did not want to fight trough, in addition ctis and hinnom there already fighting and i would rather fight ctis later than help hinnom win that war and then have to deal with him myself.
In my north was Tir na n´Og and my border with him was worse that my border with Ctis, i got a quick nap with him because i did not want to get elfed and then ignored him.
This only left my with lanks as my early war. He has had the best expansion and was already building multiple forts, but while he was investing his gold in in infrastructure and mages i did not even recruit mages in my cap all my gold was going into more giants. I simply rolled over him and got my first palisades by conquering his right after he build them. He went ai after i caped his cap, but that just moved the war into an annoying direction as the ai immediately bought all mercs it could buy and started raiding.
With Lanka dead i got some more neighbours, but while i would have wanted to also kill Kailasa and Mictlan because they had at that point in the game no answer to firegiant stepping on their cap i instead started to invest into my Research, to get to my answers to the Ubar i now bordered.
Ubar was grabbing all the provinces he could and was at that point by far the biggest on the map.