Part 12: Mictlan - Turns 21-22

Turn 21



Arco continues to pepper me with seeking arrow. Not much I can do in short notice to really avoid it hurting me. It makes raiding with just groups of jaguars and priests hard. One of the standard counters is to send indie commanders along with whoever you don't want dying to seeking arrow, but even then its a bit of a gamble since without a silly number of commanders there's still a decent chance seeking arrow will get you.



Also in one our battles Arco deploys a mini communion. He has three slaves and a master, the master is carrying two fire gems. This can really only mean one thing.



He has flaming arrows. Flaming arrows is one of the spells that really tears apart jaguars and other unshielded troops. It gives each arrow a second attack that does 8 AP, similar to the flaming weapon bless on my jaguars.



I do some rearranging of my attack. I figure Dexanth will keep pushing into my territory, and so I move a group up to try and stop his progress. Otherwise he has essentially taken back all the provinces I raided from him now that he has brought out groups of troop to fight with instead of just letting me have his territory.

I also now (finally) have construction 4, and I can forge some of the things I bothered going to con4 to get.



The most important of which are blood boosters. A lot of the spells I want to cast are higher than the level 2/3 that most of my mages get. So I need boosters if I'm going to get anywhere. This is one of the easiest boosters to forge (only takes B4 and requires construction 4).



I also start shuffling all those slaves I hunted from my capital the turn my lab burnt down up north to patrol some other provinces.

Turn 22



No battles this turn, so I guess Dexanth decided against moving deeper into my lands.



However, when I go to check the graphs for the turn, I notice that Pan is blood sacrificing (okay technically I noticed this last turn).



So what I decide to do is forge some jade knives. These things let my priests sacrifice an extra two slaves at each temple, and each slave is equivalent to 2 temple checks. So an extra 4 checks per temple is quite nice. I'm not really concerned about Irony or Death's blood sac. Half the players in this game can blood sac (Mictlan, Pan, Hinnom, and Sauro). He won't be able to win the game solely through blood sac, and I can easily fight against it with my own blood sacrificing. Therefore I just ramp up my domspread in response to his.



Since Dexanth consolidated a large army in his capital, I assume he's getting ready for a big push. So I send a fairly sizable force to go reinforce the small group of jaguars and slingers I had to block his groups of archers.




Also I finished my new fort this turn, but I was an idiot who forgot to build a lab and temple in them. I basically can't recruit anything of use from this fort yet. I send a priest from my forest fort over to get to work on those.