By David Crane.
I’ve always wanted to play a gunboat game to turn 50/52 and I achieved it in this game. True the game started with only 10 players, which made it easier to survive to the end. In the event my nation ended with the most points. The events of turn 14 contributed significantly to my success in this game. A group of my characters with emissaries and agents, by chance, came upon a group of Sherwoodborne agents. My emissaries doubled them, and my agents assassinated them and found they were carrying the Robes of Aman (30 stealth), the Rat Gauntlets (15 agent) and the Ring of Curufin (30 agent). Realising Sherwoodborn must have been looking for artefacts, I sent my agents to their capital, assassinated the characters there and acquired a lot of artefacts, many after they were eliminated.
It was a little difficult to attack other nations because, with only 10 players, there was a fair distance between each of us. I think I had a hand in eliminating 3 other nations but they must have been attacked by others as well. My nation had a mid to end game duel with my relatively near neighbours The Ghosts of Koz. I killed a lot of their characters but overall it was fairly even.
I spent the last six or seven turns just trying to build up points by stockpiling gold, training character ranks, recruiting loads of troops and capturing pop centres from eliminated nations.
Some of the numbers got a bit silly towards the end of the game. My nation was selling 400k gold’s worth of products each turn, finished with 2,823,559 gold and had over 59 million gold’s worth of product in store. Food was selling for 13 and mithril for 4,943. One of my agents stole 150k gold one turn and my nation finished with 10 major towns and 11 cities, and 9 characters with a skill rank of 100.
