I've won a long medium game this way. You'll make mistakes and do your best. It helps to have another game saved in a position that you can go back to and attempt a quest in order to avoid silly mistakes, but no matter what Lhankor Mhy followers might say, we all know that in dragon pass the right answer isn't always the right answer.
For some time now I've tried off and on to finish a long/hard game without ever doing the save/reload shuffle. I've never managed it. Since Bryan says he's never tried it, I suspect it has never been done. David Dunham freely admits that the hard game is probably a bit too hard. When I asked him, he was not able to say anybody at A# ever did it in playtesting. Note that I don't mind that. I think it's kind of cool.
I had two clans that I was able to approach the goal with.
The first one joined the Colymr in our third or fourth year of Dragon Pass. They came to raid and we were in shambles. We asked to join and gave as large a gift as we could. We were shocked that they accepted. We fully expected to have the gifts be accepted, our request denied and have them continue to raid us till we all were thralls. They accepted us into the tribe and after a generation or so we rose to a kingly reputation, had completed all the hero-quests and were tribal king. That game went on a couple hundred years without triggering the end game. A# squashed a bug in tribe formation that was the culprit. By joining the Colymr instead of forming a tribe, the game had become invalid. Since the patch, you can win the game this way from a start, but ... not from a save game.
I had another tribe trigger the end game and things went wrong in the building of the city.
Those were the only two clans I've had on a hard no-save game that managed to survive tribe formation. Surviving the first 10 years is the tough part. Surviving a lost heroquest is the other disaster that starts a downward spiral.
A couple times a year, I'll whip out kodp and try a game like this. If I ever manage to win it, I'll crow about it here.
dfs
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