Part 12: Turn 11: Conquest!

C'mon, guess whether we found a magic site. I dare you.

We're about a year in, so Mrs. Butterworth should be showing up soon. I'm going to use her to scan for more magic sites ASAP, in a less expensive and more personal way.

Three battles . . .





. . . no surprises, or casualties.

Let's Learn About The Game: Afflictions




The elephant in my first attack squad picks up an affliction. I haven't really talked about them, except to mention that I can cure them. The most common way of getting afflicted in through battle damage. Each attack has a chance to afflict based on the attack's damage and the wounded unit's hit points. On average, you'll get one affliction every time you take your total hit points in damage. Afflictions can be minor or debilitating. Sometimes you get "Feebleminded" on an armored shock trooper, which means they can't lead troops or cast spells. They weren't doing that anyway, so nobody cares. And then sometimes you get that on your Pretender.

This affliction is annoying - that's 4 fewer points of damage on every attack - but not devastating. The elephant's picked up enough combat experience by now that it's almost a net wash. Nevertheless, it's just an elephant, I can recruit more. I probably wouldn't bother healing him if the opportunity arose, and I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to do so.



And there's Agartha!

Agartha is another undead-focused race. I spend some time trying to figure out what Agartha's big gimmick is and fail miserably. They seem to have capable ranged units, impressive castle siege potential, and knights riding giant lizards. The biggest problem versus Agartha is that those giant lizards are nigh-invincible and very difficult to rout - they're essentially moving walls of armor. If I want to take them down, I'll have to do it with spells.

Another big worry is that they'll manage to cut down my elephants before they reach Agartha's front lines. Crossbows en masse can be devastating, and I need something to protect me. Unfortunately, I don't have many solutions to this - the best answer I have right now is . . . well, it's in Conjuration 2. That's convenient. We keep plugging our way towards Conjuration 2.



More diplomacy.

Meanwhile, we have Thaumaturgy 2 done, and that gives us Haruspex.



Haruspex is the Nature equivalent to Arcane Probing and works otherwise identically. What I haven't been mentioning is the spell requirements - Arcane Probing takes Arcane 1, which all of my Sibyls have, but Haruspex takes Nature 2, which I'll get about one time in four.



Looking at my Sibyl list, I have gotten really lucky. See that 2 3 2? That's a Nature 3 sibyl, and that's less than a 1% chance. I don't know what I'll use her for yet, but she is staying very safe in my fortress - she's actually a more powerful nature caster than Mrs. Butterworth is. No reason not to push her into Haruspex duty, though!

I hit all my forests with Haruspex, adding a bunch of Arcane Probings. I'm really hurting my research here, but I have no plans to go immediately to war, and I'm going to need those gems.

I look over my new provinces. Every single one can make scouts. Holy shit. I am now rolling in scouts - five scout provinces, four once Jome finishes construction. I buy five scouts, but I might be cutting down on scout production in the near future, as that is a shitload of scouts I can now produce.




I'm actually a bit worried that people are going to decide I'm the primary threat. I do have a ton of provinces, but my income is . . . well, okay, my income is only third place, only beat by Man and the Abysia money machine. Why the fuck does Abysia have so much money?



I start infiltrating Agartha and Midgard seriously.

Next: More gems please, for fuck's sake.