>>535408526
Final lineup after retreats/deaths is 8 Dis, 3 vanjarls, a PD vanherse, and a rainbow pretender with fuckhuge paths (A4S4G6D9 and 3 in everything else) with 3 reinvigoration from their bless on advance and cast against an unblessed monolith with an amulet of resilience. SCBM adds a spell called Necrotic Bolt which is a bad version of lightning bolt for A1D1 so every single dis had access to 40 range 9 lightning damage. Instead they spent 20 or so turns standing in front of it casting slumber, fascinate, paralyze, weakness, etc while slowly dying to soul vortex.

Something went fundamentally wrong with the casting AI in that battle because the pretender had access to shatter, soul slay, air evos, bane fire darts, visions of death, horde of skeletons, illusory army, but ignored it all to cast false fetters, slumber, paralyze, etc every turn. Even if it was some kind of MR check bias why wasn't Soul Slay being cast? I'm pretty sure disables don't even prevent innate casting so all my mages were literally just spamming invalid spells against their target.

>>535409640
I royally cocked up my midgame so no. All the raiding kept me from doing much site searching and used up a lot of my gem income and I started to fall behind in research, so I went for a throne rush. I chose bad research targets because I wasn't familiar with helheim and I underestimated how big the inability to kill forts would be (mainly the inability to stop the constant flow of cap onlies in a game where every player has some kind of strong cap only sacred and incarnate). Frankly I had never seen that much wealth in a dominions game before (I had 5k a turn at one point I think) and managed my resources really poorly, in part because right at the peak of that province graph badmin threatened to AI me for playing too slowly.

Eventually I did realize I could make 120 siege power a turn but the game was wrapping up by that point.