At long last, managed the long/hard/no cheat game :)
I did a couple of times go back to correct finger mistakes (that is sending the wrong person on the mission, or one time clicking on the wrong heroquest(!), and immediately deciding I was going back to fix it, before seeing how it turned out. Also two times my laptop locked up, both timew when things were going badly, so losing a couple of seasons back to the last save was a blessing those times.
I found the secret was patience. Anytime I started to get the urge to "just do this and see what happens" I made myself quit playing (or a couple of times save it, make it the last save of the evening, then play out the what the heck let's see what happens just to see what would have happened, and the typical results indicated that I was right not to play when impatient. The game only ran 50 years, not really so long, but I spaced it out over a long time because of that no playing when impatient rule.
The clan had its share of problems, including ongoing issues with chaos (right at the end a Storm Bull came by looking for chaos cultist, but we didn't let him question--I didn't want to know if it was the tribal queen! But I wonder if in fact we did have a chaos worshipper on the ring with all the problems we had). We also went most of the key years after tribe building with no trickster, the early years without an Ernaldan chief, and the last part of the game with no LM worshipper. We ended up with our Uraldan tribal queen being our best fighter (heroic in combat as well as leadership). We lost a LOT of war leaders and explorers, I've not gone through leaders so fast.
On the other hand, we had two big early strokes of luck. We absorbed another clan in 1331, giving us a temporary cow shortage but making us much stronger, then a couple of years later we got the Uralda priestess wanting to marry one of our weaponthanes event, and got him to do so, gaining 50 cows and an ally. Because of those two events the clan was much stronger early on than most, giving it more ability to roll with the strokes of bad luck which happened. Also managed both to steal the silver dragon and kill the wyrm for its treasure. So it was a very fortunate start.
Mind you, I'd started off and given up on a few clans before getting lucky with this one.
Just for reference the clan was Ernalda, battle of extinguished field, adopted as family, worst enemy was Valind/winter, balanced, awakened Chalana Arroy, hostile and fought against dragons.
So it is possible to "win" the long game on hard without fixing fate by going back in time to avoid bad fortune. But I don't think you can assume it is possible with every clan.
--Bryan
Powered by hypermail