Part 107: Hinnom - Turn 7

Turn 7

This is where things start to get really interesting.


I move to cut off one of the bridges to the South West. A party of Dawn Guard gets routed by heavy infantry. Let's not watch, OK? Another party of Dawn Guard easily kills some more indies. That's as it should be.


My scout in Lanka was found and brutally murdered when he completely lost his head and flung poo with his left hand instead of his right - an unforgivable faux pas in Lankan society. I send a replacement as I'd like to know what Lanka has in his capital.

When a stealthy troop (like a scout) is discovered, they fight the province defense and any units in the province unless there's a castle. If there's a castle they fight province defense and any units set to patrol. This is what I see in Lanka. Nothing particularly exciting, but it can be well worth suiciding a scout to find out what a player is using to guard their castles. Not quite as useful as just having a scout sitting on their cap providing intel.


This is what I'm recruiting this turn. More Dawn Guard and, finally, one of my big giants.


These guys are bad to the bone and one of the things that makes Hinnom so good. They can recruit mages that every other nation would have to spend 20+ gems to summon. Of course, the down side is that while these bad boys are out killing things they won't be available for research and their research is quite expensive because they're so good at killing things. Still, it's well worth it to be able to recruit a giant death machine. Or at least it would be if these fuckers didn't raise unrest every turn and eat my hard working, gold producing citizens. I plan on blood hunting with these guys and fuck is it a pain in the ass to blood hunt with a guy that lowers population and raises unrest.


Diplomacy
Oh look, here's the lead I buried.

Meanwhile, in a secret underground lair...

Gentlemen, how do we kill Superman?
Because TheDemon wasn't willing to talk to me about what he was planning on doing I decided the safest course of action was to see if his neighbors were willing to chat. Dawkish and Feinne were, and we have united to form the AXIS OF EVIL (and Tien Chi who is actually pretty unobjectionable when compared to cannibal witch kings and blood thirsty giants). I'm moving 13 Dawn Guard from the provinces adjacent to my cap into position to attack TheDemon next turn, and TC has an army of 100 guys that could, arguably, be headed for either me or TheDemon (I do not think TheDemon is going to fall for that but it's worth a try I guess).

The plan is for all three of us to attack him with the understanding that he's inevitably going to do a ton of damage to one of us but, because his best recruits are cap only, he won't be able to use any advantage he wins because he'll need to pull his troops back to protect from the other two who are threatening his cap. It's a little nerve wracking and I'm not looking forward to him absolutely thrashing me at least once but I'm confident in the plan. No single player can take on three other fully committed decent players and win at this stage in the game, not even TheDemon. He's going to make us pay but this should be relatively short and bloody and we've agreed that once TheDemon is dead we'll look outward and not fall on each other (because that is also totally how things work in real life - looking at you here Russia, what was up with that Iron Curtain?).