by Cadellon
My experience with this strategy is mainly in Epic, where in 2p or 4p a stalemate sometimes occurs near turn 4-5 once everyone has set up their strongholds and troops. Also, if you need to reposition your troops just replace Rally Supports or harvest(especially if you are Evil) by a Strategize or Mobilze earlier in the year.Also, you can set yourself up to pull off that strat. By the time turn 4-5 comes around, your borders (if well planned), are already maxed out on troops. So what you want to do is to empty you home stronghold of troops on the previous year so that you can recruit there the year where you farm influence. And if you see a threat coming, just play a mobilize to use the troops you just recruited in your home realm :) but the threat of these troops counterattacking is often enough to prevent your opponent to attack.
If you plan correctly it is totally possible to pull this off (remember that I am eaking of a game with players of relatively equal skill)
EDIT: it helps a lot in setting up game winning combos: for example, I have already gained 2 runes in one turn with this strat. I would not have been able to pull it off if I had not collected so much influence during the year. I played an acquire power that gave 3 influence (it made 15 total influence!) and played a coercion on a enemy hero that had several rewards, revealed my Influent Leader objective that allowed me to discard 8 influence for a rune and then bought captain of the Heroes League to discard 3 rewards and win the games. Of course, such combos are very rare but it helps a lot to have a lot of influence in these situations.