I'm playing against eleven A.I.'s on the Twelve Cities map. No cards.
Every player starts in the command seat of a capital. I really want to beat the map with magic and have played several games. Magic is just really disadvantaged. It has such a slow start.

Anyone try this? Any suggestions?

I did it!!!

I don't know how many tries it took but I finally did it.

I had to use a lot of strategies which shouldn't have worked. For over half the game I was lagging behind the two biggest nations by a lot... they each had at least twice what I had.

One thing I'd do to keep them off my back and reduce their income was ball up a few hundred troops and have them run around in their territories. Never engage, just blaze a path and cause mischief so they could waste tons of guys chasing them.

Also, choke points were a MUST.

And since you can't compete until WAY late game in the whole area of acquiring land, I didn't bother. I only grabbed Xarial (the country of the city of Beauty.)

I mostly went for cities. I grabbed Beauty first because Beauty always has zero income. The A.I. doesn't like that city.

I had to attack the cities of Science and Evil first. You don't even take all of Science, just grab the Path of Logic and everything inside of it, then stack about 800 on that path.

Since Evil has a chokepoint you can eventually have that whole city.

I also had to attack Equality and Plunder (doing the same thing as with Science.) At that point I had enough of a foothold to begin conquering Evil's whole continent.

I think it took 91 turns. And it didn't look like I was going to win until about turn 56. The whole time before that it was like a balancing act. I couldn't harass one nation too much or they'd get too weak and the other superpower would just wipe the whole board. Crazy.

Well, just so you know, it is possible.

Science is such an easy start!!! I'm twenty-three turns in and there's no way I'll lose on my first try.

Ill try it multi day