(damnit, time to roll out the meta artillery)
Perhaps this'll sound less objective coming from me, but I don't agree with this "LA Ermor, R'lyeh & Pangea need to be eliminated as fast as possible" sentiment. Yeah, their dominions kill population, but it's more of a liability for at least R'lyeh and Pangea(though Ermor needs forts too, not to mention a steady supply of corpses). With passing time we get less and less income, while being saddled with hordes of chaff units that in my case also need to eat. We still need to buy and pay upkeep for our mages, you know.
As for the pop-killing dominion, it's very easy for other players to keep it at bay with your own, unless somebody was irresponsible enough to choose very low dom strength for their pretender. A temple near the border, a couple of cheap priests. That's all it takes.
So the longer you wait, the easier time you'll have, as the economies of R'lyeh and Pangea go down the drain.
But somebody, somewhere started the scare, wrote some opinion piece on some forum that caters to that primal fear inside every one of us. The fear of being taken out of the game without a fight, with some slowly incapacitating, passively acting trick that the pop-killing dominions fit so nicely.
And now people mindlessly keep on repeating the mantra, turning it into a self-reinforcing "common sense" that nobody even considers challenging.
I mean, what the hell? It's not like any of the three nations is so unbalanced that if you let it survive to the endgame then you're screwed. I saw a several thousand strong Ermor army being decimated by a few hundred Man archers. I saw games well into their eightieth turns with R'lyeh confined to their lakes and unable to become a threat for anybody.
These are just nations like any other. They have their strengths and weaknesses, and the popkill dominions are not the trump-all ace. These are merely there to give some flavour and perhaps help put all the LA nations on equal footing, what with every other LA nation having recruitables vastly superior to the dom summons of any of the three nations.
So when you are considering the decision to gang up on somebody, don't buy into the cheap, self-perpetuation mythos. Chose somebody you actualy feel threatened by. And most of all, don't start the game with a pre-set decision of eliminating some nation.
And finally, think of other players. When we chose to play Pangea, R'lyeh or Ermor, we want to have a go at actually playing, with all the diplomacy, power struggles and backstabbing it involves, and not being singled out from the start for no good reason but some ill-founded perception of a threat to people's views on how the game should and shouldn't be played, our feeble attempts at reasoning with the aggressors shot down without as much as a second thought. "Because you're Ermor/R'lyeh/Pangea" the only explanation given.
What you're all doing here, is basically saying that choosing any of the three nations is against the rules, and we should be kicked out for our crime of defying you.
Just think about it. Don't be a bully.
Poll
5 (13.5%)