POST MURTEM INCOMING:
There were three major factors in Ur's defeat.
1. Farmer Brown
2. Enchantment 5
3. THUNDERDOME!
Let's break it down.
I had a number of pretenders made, but the one I ended up using (to my eventual regret) was a N9E4 bless strat. Regenerating, reinvigorating recruitable dragons are pretty awesome, right?
Right. But that's more of an early-game expansion strategy. The problem is, once you run out of indies, then what? Sirrushes can't win wars by themselves. Switch to Enki's Chosen and Ur Guards? Sure. But then you have to have
A strong dominion to pump out the holy points (remember, you're also buying Sirrushes and holy mages) and
B resources.
That last was the problem. I took Sloth 1 to pay for everything else, which meant I couldn't recruit hordes of hairy Mesopotamian analogues. This meant no large armies. This meant I didn't have the numbers to take on Marveni, who did have large armies.
Were I to travel backwards in time, and somehow have nothing better to do than to instruct my past self on Dominions, I would tell him to pick one of the other pretenders. Either an Earth Serpent or a generic scales build would have done much better.
But that wasn't the only problem...
Ur has crazy mage power in the form of Shamans. Like, sure, just have N3 to start with and a chance of getting an E3 or an N4. No, you don't need a temple or slow-to-recruit or anything, we're good.
I saw the easy potential for N5, or even N6 mages, and I decided to rush Enchantment from the beginning. It didn't help that I found an enchantment bonus magic site. I got to Enchantment 5 just before the war began, and... couldn't do much with it.
It's just not got that much battle magic.
What would have made much more sense is to rush Evo 5, then spam Shamans 'till I ran out of upkeep. Any Shaman is a perfectly serviceable Blade Wind caster with a Summon Earthpower, and one third can Earthquake, also with a Summon Earthpower. That's some serious battle magic. It might have been enough.
But no. I got there just last turn. The reason I attacked instead of waiting for Marveni to storm is...
THUNDERDOME!
OK, really, it's because I was running low on gold. Since there was so little space, Marveni's first attack took a cap circle, and next turn he besieged Ur. ): No more dragons. Some time later, he besieged my other fort and no more income. People were deserting, and I had to attack before my one E3 mage left. Still killed over 170.
Had there been time and space, it's possible I could have gotten my act together before the end. But there was neither. This kind of map is like a knife fight in a phone booth, and if you don't have your knife, you're not going to be in the phone booth much longer.
BONUS TIP: Ur has stealth troops in swamps. Had I known this, I would totally have been recruiting tons of them.
BONUS TIPx2: Whether or not you're playing with story events, the description of the priest king/queen is not fluff. I found this out the hard way.
Worst luck: When a fire destroyed my laboratory in one besieged fort, making all researchers therein useless.
Best (weirdest) luck: Getting a vampire via a random event, then prophetizing him. A regenerating invulnerable flying immortal with life drain is a pretty decent thug. I didn't know if he would keep items after death, but I never made any items, so it was a moot point.