I cleared a second sky island stage in Ogre Battle on PlayStation, which was also fun, and now it's back to the slog of the overly large stages. I'm currently very slowly chipping away at the City of Malano map. I'm losing Goth with every day that passes, as the expenses for my troops are greater than what I'm bringing in with tributes, but every time I try to press forward to liberate more towns, more enemies pop up out of the middle of nowhere. Then I scrap my plans to take more cities, as that would spread my troops thinner and leave me with more locations to defend. That's another thing about this game that drives me nuts, that enemies can seemingly appear anywhere with no rhyme or reason. You have no idea what the group will comprise of either. For the first time since I started playing, I very nearly lost my base (which I always leave the Opinion Leader on), as high-flying groups would suddenly appear in the mountains below the base and zip over in an instant with little I can do because my units can only match that speed at best (as high-flying groups are the fastest.) It's kinda hard to properly strategize if you can't even see what's coming. There's just way too much that comes down to chance, and it seems like the way to victory is to learn all the nitty-gritty details of these various opaque mechanics (probably from outside resources because the game itself sure as heck doesn't explain it clearly) and then see what you can exploit yourself. Anyway, it looks like my reputation meter is 50% full again, or very close to it, so hooray for getting back to where I started the game at, haha.