Part 112: Hinnom - Turn 12
Turn 12
Well, this is it. The big reveal. Will our noble heroes live to sit in mom's basement and bitch about how Code Red isn't as good as the original another day? Or will evil TheDemon monkey ape ogre bad guys of Lanka force them to move out and get a job?
YES! No battle in Hinnom means he didn't attack there. It looks like my clever ploy bought me another turn at least and he's retreated to cover his escape route.
Meanwile, you're a child Harry, you can't even use that lab. This is pretty nice because I wanted a province around my cap for my Melqarts and Ba'als to hang out in not eating cap population and now I have it. They can all research and forage for roots and berries
There are two battles in Anvast. The first is my fat ponies claiming the province for noble Hinnom. The second is the dirty savages of Pangaea killing the last of my fat shetland ponies. Truly, this is a day of mourning in all of Hinnom. We will honor the dead by pouring out this bottle of Pitch Black. RIP Ponies. I chat with irony.or.death and we agree that our borders are fine as they are. I don't think he has any desire to fight me and I certainly have no desire to fight him when I've just barely escaped this turn with my cap.
Here's the map. The Melqart and Dawn Guard headed back to reinforce the cap make a quick stop to take one of the indie provinces I've cordoned off.
Meanwhile, in Hinnom my cavemans move out onto the offensive. I'm quite hopeful about this throwing a net on palankasha and clubbing them to death plan.
I think it's James Herriot who says that you should get a puppy when your dog dies, so I make a bid on some mercenary elephants in the hope that they can bring some joy back to the hearts of Hinnom's children after the loss of the fat shetland ponies.
After reaching thaumaturgy 2 for site searching which I'm not doing because I'm fighting for my life, I head into construction so I can craft my Melqarts some sweet gear to protect them from Palankasha.
Recruiting is another Melqart and a mix of cavemans and Dawn Guard. I'm tempted by more fat shetland ponies but I've promised to play a fair game and recruiting more would just be unbalanced at this point.
A little commentary on this whole monkey pd thing, and an important mechanics issue I want to bring up that you should always consider when playing dom3.
Look at me.
Look at how sweaty I am. You think tromping through a jungle looking for monkeys is easy? There's no dew here. There's no fried chicken here. You can't say "but moooooom, I need it for tomorrow" and have that shit magically appear. No, there's just sweat and tired and shoes that give you blisters and those god damn tiny monkeys always chattering at you and throwing shit from the trees. This is bullshit, I'm tired and I'm hungry and there isn't even any ranch dressing and fuck this, I quit!
So, you see that battle south of Nardago in the Midwest province on The Island? That's where my guy with heroic stupidity attacked this past turn. See how that province is still TheDemon's? That's because my poor stupid, fat giant got tired of chasing tiny monkeys through the jungle and just laid down and quit like his stepfather always said he would.
There are two mechanics at play here. The first is defense. Whenever a unit tries to attack the game calculates attack score + an exploding dice roll and compares that to the defense score and an exploding dice roll to see if you hit. Pretty standard stuff. The twist is that for each additional attacker the defense score is reduced by two. Giants are big and monkeys are tiny and monkey province defense provides a ton of monkeys. So monkeys number 1-4 might not hit anything but once you get to monkey number nine your poor giant is getting swarmed and has no hope of defending himself. You might think that this wouldn't be the worst thing ever because the giant is wearing armor and monkeys are quite weak.
How wrong you would be. That's because of the second mechanic at play here. Fatigue. Fatigue is, in my mind, one of the most important mechanics in the game. As units accumulate fatigue the damage done to them increases exponentially. I think the big change happens right around fifteen fatigue, and after a unit accumulates twenty fatigue even monkeys start doing 20+ damage a hit.
So, what happened to my poor heroic giant? He ran into 25 monkeys and, while he was killing one a turn, he was also accumulating four fatigue a turn. After five turns he had killed a fifth of the monkeys and he was fat, hot, sweaty and exhausted. The remaining monkeys swarmed him and his fatigue score meant every hit was a crit and he quickly died.