998YK Winter

Autumn Equinox

Only the Storm Lords have an army in the Capital and are able to cast magic.

They get Innundation of Blood, and use it on the Sulatar main army (banner 1): 120 points of casualties inflicted and render that village unable to produce revenue this winter.

Winter Quarters

All banners on the map have to return home for the winter. Only Hammerhead banner 5, stuck out beyond the river, is unable to get home — and they roll a 2 to try to find a path home, causing the whole banner to be destroyed.

Winter Events

Hammerhead Clan: They roll a 9, Special Tribute: they get 5 extra revenue this year.

Sulatar: 11 = Treachery; fortunately they have only one fortress, and they do not roll a 6 so it does not defect to the Storm Lords.

Storm Lords: 6 = Raids; this is one of the worst. Actually the Storm Lords have done all they can to minimise the effect of this, by rooting out all those independent settlements. But still, having a 50:50 chance for every border settlement to collect no revenue is very bad. I roll a bunch of D6, and the result is that the Storm Lords lose 7 revenue.

White Fang Clan: 5 = Plague; their only army outside of the capital is destroyed, and they lose the revenue from that village as well. That is a terrible blow that they cannot really afford.

Wow, the anti-Hammerhead alliance of the White Fang and the Storm Lords are having terrible luck. The Hammerheads now almost have both more revenue and armies than the two of them combined.

Diplomacy

Since I am soloing this, one of the big elements of Mighty Empires — negotiating alliances with the other players — is missing.  I am determining the alliances by dice rolls each year. I also add a rule that empires cannot ally if they would have more than half of the revenue and armies. So the Hammerhead Clan cannot ally with anyone right now.

And after a few rolls, the answer is: the alliance between the White Fang Tribe and the Storm Lords is broken! They rolled a 1. That is bad news for the orcs — without allies, and with half their army dead to plague, they are finished. The Hammerheads should conquer them entirely next year. No new alliances are formed.

Construction, Recovery, Recruitment, Baggage

Here is the summary of spending over this winter:

	Storm Lords	White Fang Tribe	Hammerhead Clan	Sulatar
	Human	Orcs & Goblins	Duergar	Drow
Diplomacy	0	0	0	0
Troops	14	14	29	6
Baggage	8	4	7	4
Espionage	6	1	7	2
Construction	0	0	1	0
Total spend	28	19	44	12

Items of note:

• the White Fang are buying troops and baggage, readying themselves for the inevitable siege. They are also aware that the Storm Lords might try to invade while they are besieged, so hopefully they can afford to place a small banner to try to defend their city down in the south.
• the Hammerheads are building a bridge over the river in the north — to avoid any more unfortunate incidents like the loss of their army in the east during the winter retreat this year. (I played with a home rule allowing bridges to be built back in the day, which I have not been using for this campaign; but I have also switched to using the Warmaster edition rules for ME which do contain bridge building, which the version I played back in the day did not. Had I noticed this before, I would have built the bridge last year.)