The interim period was mostly spent summoning ghouls, building up the cities economically, and exploring more of the land. The scouting cavalry eventually came in contact with three wizards, but nothing much came of it...yet. Eventually, I had amassed enough ghouls to attempt assaulting this lair. It consisted of three hell hounds and fire elementals each.
Hell Hounds are Chaos realm's Common summon, and are essentially light cavalry, dealing decent damage with their attack and fire breath, and having high speed, but lacking in defenses. Fire Breath works sort of like First Strike, dealing damage before regular melee combat begins. It only works on the attack, much like First Strike. Fire Elementals boast a variety of resistances, but are most notable for their unique attacks, relying heavily on their fire breath and immolating touch. The latter deals damage to all figures in a unit, meaning they're very effective against high figure units, like most regular units trained at cities.
Anyhow, the key to handling both of them is fighting them at range, which my army is thankfully well equipped to do. In addition, I cast Darkness to boost all of the ghouls' stats save HP by 1. This may seem like a small buff, but is actually quite strong, considering ghouls have four figures and the game has each figure execute an attack while fighting an enemy unit. Further, each point of resistance actually helps a ton, considering they effectively raises resistance against curses and such by 10%, each. Basically, Darkness, despite looking rather paltry and simplistic, is actually a considerable buff, and will continue to remain relevant in any fights involving my Death creatures or the undead they raise.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that the battle was easily won, and the ghouls raised two undead hell hounds in its aftermath. The fire elementals sadly can't be raised, as they are non corporeal, and undead magic requires having a physical body to manipulate.
Turning on to political matters, one of the three wizards, Kali, took a liking to my wizard, as she shared a deep taste in Death magic. To display her admiration, she offered a pact between his empire and hers. Wizard pacts are an agreement between two wizards to not aggress against each other. Additionally, the player is forced to evacuate any armies within a three tile radius of any of the signatory wizard's cities to maintain it. The upside is, the pact improves the player's standing with the signed wizard, and can eventually grow into a full fledged military alliance. Which itself has some perks and downsides of its own, but we'll get to that later. Having a guarantee of no aggression is itself great however, considering how opportunistic MoM wizards can be and how devastating an unexpected attack often is.
To sweeten the deal, my wizard also acquired this spell by trading with her. Yes, spells can be traded for, and many smart players use and abuse this to get strong spells far earlier than they normally would. Spells can also be learnt from lairs, and indeed, my wizard did learn one other spell from vanquishing that lair, Blur.
Anyhow, as you can tell from the spell description, this improves the player wizard's standing with all other wizards. And by a fairly solid measure, at that. My friend often says that it can cool wizards off "even the worst of behavior", and that is, as far as I can tell, essentially true. Naturally, I make my wizard cast it as soon as he gets it.
Which is ironic, because I soon made him invade Merlin's territory. I did this because he was pretty close, lying directly west of the current empire, and his disposition made it clear that he was getting aggravated by my wizard's books and would eventually attack him, sooner or later. His empire is mainly Klackons, a race of extremely productive, though asocial ants. They're often not very well liked by players because their military is thoroughly mediocre and limited, and their economic potential is hard to exploit with other starting races, thanks to their asocial tendencies making them prone to rebellion when controlled by other races.
That aside, this was a bit of a tough battle, as his soldiers, while looking unassuming, had two buffs pushing up their defense considerably, making most of the ghouls' shots do pitiful damage! Luckily, I had hired a unit of gladiators, and their resistance was still rather pathetic, despite all the buffing. I took advantage of this by buffing the gladiators with Cloak of Fear, which frightened their attackers into not dealing damage in melee! This let the army pull through, turning what would have been a close shave a victory.
After that, the war took a bit of a backseat as my wizard spent his time getting Aura of Majesty up. However, I ferried over some undead troops and combined them with the newly raised soldiers to capture a second city, and with some griffin riders, extremely powerful flying fighters, joining as mercenaries, Merlin knew his time was up, and quickly asked for a reprieve. The funny thing is, I had trained precisely no actual soldiers for fighting yet, relying solely on ghouls and their raised undead, with some choice mercenaries occasionally thrown in. Goes to show how powerful they are, I guess.
And with that, I end this session. Depicted here is the state of the land explored so far. Kali, to the southeast, is marked by purple, and is currently a staunch ally. Merlin, to the west and roughly within the centre of east, is marked by grey. The pink wizard in the west is Ariel, and is going to be my next target, actually. All of the colored bits of map were filled in by me, as the vanilla map is rather hard to read. Our empire is doing pretty well, having occupied three new cities and cut an enemy empire in half. But it's still the early days, and there's still much to be done - the game doesn't end until either all wizards are defeated, or a special spell sealing all their powers is cast. And we won't be seeing the latter for a LONG time, if at all...
Let's hope for the best! Thanks for reading!
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