Hmm, I didn't have the same experience. I found that having, say, more than 20 thanes doesn't significantly increas the chance of winning a battle. I still got myself wooped at fairly regular interval, despite being having pretty good morale, blessings, etc., and having very good warleaders. Alas, outcomes of war seems very random.
As for late-game progression, yes it can get quite boring. In early to mid game, you have an interesting event several times an year. But towards late game you can easily go on a few years without any significant event or challenges.
However, I've ran into a situations where significant food shortage hit all of Dragon Pass in late game. At this point the game became almost unwinnable: I quickly ran out of people to trade with, and eventually died of starvation. This happend to me maybe maybe twice or thrice on Hard.
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> I don't think blocking this trick would be worth the effort. And yes, I do this quite often, especially in early years in peace clans.
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> I do find that the number of weaponthanes can matter, especially when you don't have a lot of war type blessings active yet nor heroic in combat war leaders. In other words, sometimes in the short run it is easier to build up weaponthanes than those longer term investments. Once you have all of those in place, you'll lose so infrequently that a few more warriors doesn't seem to matter as much.
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> Actually, something that I don't expect to get changed, but I'll mention it....if you play fairly well, the long game gets boring at the end. Typically I find that by the time I'm tribal king, my clan has a couple of years supply of food, hundreds of cows worth of goods, large herds, good amounts of land (have usually displaced a neighboring feuding clan by then), solid defenses, well trained leaders, etc. I suppose it should be possible to win the long game without such excess, but at the same time it would be nice if you faced things that actually stressed you more....like perhaps if the golden horde were more apt to actually pillage you severely? Or if there would be a (less than totally apocalyptic) attack from your enemies near the end, one strong enough that you would be bound to lose resources in some manner?
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> --- On Tue, 8/31/10, Edward Bornstein <button_at_...> wrote:
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> From: Edward Bornstein <button_at_...>
> Subject: Sleazy Weaponthane Tricks
> To: KingOfDragonPass_at_yahoogroups.com
> Received: Tuesday, August 31, 2010, 6:18 PM
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> One thing I was just reminded of was a gamesmanship trick for getting a
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> As I recall it, how many weaponthanes was you could recruit was restricted
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> by how many you already had, because people resisted getting the clan
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> But I found that if you sent most of you weaponthanes off on a mission,
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> you could then recruit a bunch of new ones, and then when the mission came
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> back you'd have a huge number of weaponthanes.
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