Part 13: Turn 12: Goddammit Fuck You, Site Searching

I'm not going to show you how many magic sites I found. You don't really need to know, do you? You can just guess. That would be just as effective.

(Future Me: Someone go count how many gems I've burned on this uselessness. Then don't tell me the answer, because, fuck, I don't want to know.)



Agartha has sent us a message.



I send a reply. I don't even know if Mrs. Butterworth sells pies, but, whatever. We've got a theme. We're sticking to it.



Speaking of Mrs. Butterworth, hi Mrs. Butterworth! We'll take a look at her soon.

Now, our three battles.

Wait, three battles? Again?



Oh, hi there again.

The other two battles are elephants, I'm not even going to bother with screenshots. You know how elephants work by now.



We're having to get pretty far out to see everything. The wonders of scouting.

I'd thought castles were three turns, but apparently I miscalculated - it'll be done next turn. No great loss, I have a Sibyl head south to start another temple.



I was hoping to get a huge gem income and then start burning those gems on low-level conjuration to supplement our admittedly one-dimensional forces. Considering our absolutely atrocious luck at sitesearching, I switch to a less gem-intensive research branch. We only wasted 5rp, I can live with that.



Here's Mrs. Butterworth.

As you can see, she's got the magic paths we set up for her beforehand, and is just as frail as we'd expected. She does have quite an impressive chunk of research that she can contribute, but we're not going to be making use of that right now.



At this point you should just be ignoring the gray arrows. I have quite a swarm of scouts. They're mostly focusing on Agartha, but I have several going out to Areas Unknown. I'm also recalling my prophet - his dominion effect simply isn't useful anymore now that nearly everything's claimed.

I have several commanders heading in to my capital to pick up or deliver troops. Mrs. Butterworth is heading south from the capital to site-search manually - it doesn't take gems and it finds all sites equal-level to or lower than the searcher's site levels. Sites go up to Level 4, but the higher numbers are rare. Mrs. Butterworth should be able to root out all lower-level sites, of any type except Fire, Air, and Blood, immediately.

We'll see how well that works.

One of my expansion parties is going to pick up that little enclave of independents that I bypassed on my rush to Jome. In retrospect, I got lucky there - I just found Agartha's capital, three provinces southwest of Jome. If they'd decided to push Jome-wards, I would have had almost no territory, crushed between my three neighbors.

You may notice a small red arrow to the northwest of my capital. That's a commander with all those Hoplites I've been recruiting. Why are they heading west? I do not know! I certainly never told them to do that. How confusing.

How confusing indeed.

Next: Battle plans.