I suppose it's late enough to give some rundown on the game without giving away too much war secrets.
I'm playing Kailasa, the monkey people ruled over by the Yakshas. I started the game with a Nataraja pretender, with Fire-4, Earth-5, and Astral-6 for magic. It's a bit of a multipurpose god, useful for discovering for magic sites, potentially for melee fighting, and for forging items and casting spells (most importantly it can forge the Ring of Sorcery and Ring of Wizardry, which boost all the magic levels of the person holding one, allowing me to reach a ton more different rituals than I otherwise could, and summoning up various national summons), and it also adds a light bless effect for my sacred troops and commanders (increases their attack skill, makes them reinvirogate, and ups their magic resistance). It starts the game sleeping for the first year before coming into use. This might sound very good but in practice you have to keep in mind, that the guy can only do 1 thing per turn so by aiming for so much stuff, I have to carefully decide what to do when with him.
I won't go too much into my expansion strategy, basically it's the sacred Yavana warriors led by a Yaksha mage-priest, and a armored ape warrior to decoy enemy archers.
I start a very early war with Ur, when they expand right into my face, had I not started a war at some direction my territory would've been quite meager. I have some decent success taking out the outlying provinces, and then a big battle at Gnome Peaks - which I will show here.
Formations at the start of the battle. There's the Ur-ian god wannabe, the moloch Cockroach, surrounded by his pet imps, a troop of basic Ur Spear Guards, and their archers armed with longbows, and some provincial local warriors. The Moloch doesn't have any items, nor awe (which pretenders always get if you buy your dominion score to 9-10 at design), so it's relying only on its high natural protection and its heat aura for defense.
On my side there's a good amount of the sacred Yavana warriors, 3 Yaksha mages, and some Bandar swordsmen for distraction purposes. The Yavanas have awe, which means an enemy must pass a morale check in order to attack them in melee. Now, the Moloch is such a good leader that the Ur troops have very high morale here, so this helps me much less than usual. They also have 2 attacks per round, kicking their enemies on top of the falchions they have.
The imps fly in, and fight against the Bandar apes. The yavanas are holding in the back still before advancing. Both the imps and the bandars flee the battle very soon. The moloch flies forward, and gets caught on its own a bit ahead of the main Ur battle line.
That's not a healthy place to be.
Then the troops reach their beloved hellspawn, and strike down a decent amount of Yavana...
But are then held in place by the Earth Meld spells cast by my mages. This makes them unable to attack, and lowers their defense score so that practically all blows against them hit. They have to pass a strength check on their own turn in order to escape this, which is easy enough for the strong Ur troops, but they still miss that rounds attack.
Two rounds later, the Moloch succumbs to the falchion blows - which also brings the Ur troops back to their normal, more cowardly selves. And the yavanas win the day without too big losses.
Only the archers escape.
This is of course, a small battle still. But it's only turn 12, so nobody has very big armies available yet.
Alas, the game is swiftly turning against me overall...
A big army from Mictlan has just invaded the other extreme of my territory, and alas instead of pursuing the Enkidu menace further to the east, I decide to turn my troops back in order to be able to halt that horde somehow. Also a plague has struck my capital hard, killing half the populace there so I'm unable to recruit as many new troops, or put up new forts, as I'd like.
This was on turn 12 - now the game's going at 19, and quite a bit has happened then (i put up a somewhat pyrrhic victory against the Jaguar Warrior horde, but lost all my provinces on the east side of the river to Ur, and even Yomi jumped in to briefly occupy some land of mine before being driven back. Now in the process of reclaiming my lands from Ur again, with a monumental victory against them again on the latest turn - but more on that later.