Part 128: Hinnom - Turn 34
Turn 34
After a bit of a setback last turn, King Hippomnomnomnom orders his noble giants once more into the breach. At this point I'm confident in my eventual victory over Lanka (barring any outside interference). It's just a question of how long it will take to grind TheDemon down and at what cost. Fortunately for everyone, long drawn out grinding wars in which both participants lose the game even if they win the war are my specialty!
This turn, site searching has slowed down appreciably as I've finished searching most paths. Just looking at this screen you can see that TACO FLAVORED KISSES never made it to Lanka. TheDemon must have sent a sizable force his way to stop him from moving.
In Vician forest, TACO FLAVORED KISSES managed to kill a couple Palankasha and a handful of undead chaff before losing. Let's take a closer look to figure out what happened here - I was confident in his ability to siege Lanka so why is he losing to Palankasha and chaff?
Here is the initial setup. You can see I bought some PD to stop TheDemon from taking this province with only one or two Palankasha or a single Raksharaja.
Let's take a look at the PD. 24 hp each! They are giants, after all. And six of them at 24 hp each means that there is a full 144 of giant hp that don't belong to TACO FLAVORED KISSES. Can you see where this is going?
TACO FLAVORED KISSES, STOP RUNNING AWAY YOU COWARD!
Once he hits 50 hp, he fails his morale check and runs. This was another stupid loss. If I had stopped to think about it I would have only bought one point of pd to stop scout capping. Instead I bought enough to force morale checks and eventually cause a HP route. This is a classic stupid newbie mistake - putting your shiny SC in with a bunch of shit. The other guy kills all your chaff and your SC routes.
In Nardago, PIMP ROBES loses the fight but ends up killing 16 Palankasha and 12 undead chaff.
Remember that scripting mistake of putting PIMP ROBES in the back left and then having him fight a never needing stream of ghost wolves? Well, guess where he is again!
He's hit by the initial force of Palankasha.
And then a second group (scripted to hold and attack rear?) comes barreling at him.
The vine shield wraps them up, doing some crowd control.
And PIMP ROBES spends the next forty five turns killing ghost wolves and a couple palankasha. Because he has heroic quickness, he gets to attack three times every two turns. That means that every other turn he'll clear the square in front of him and have a spare attack to attack the square to the side. This wouldn't do anything for him because there are three squares in front of him but for the fact that TheDemon's mages fatigue out. They can only spam summon skeleton or ghost wolves for thirty turns. PIMP ROBES can keep fighting all day (until he automatically routes from hitting the 50 turn limit). I was actually pretty happy with this result because this is the most Palankasha I've ever killed and represents slightly more than two turns of recruitment for TheDemon.
Back in Laerian Swamps, KING HIPPO JR uses a pair of flying shoes to go retake the forest north of Lanka and PIMP ROBES heads back to Nardago for another go at any remaining Palankaha.
In Cacian Forest you can see the site I found on the turn Lanka took the province. Sadly, it is not a 60% blood discount site.
On the other hand, this is nothing to sneeze at. Three gems a turn and recruitment of a shiny new mage type.
Illusionists get two points of air and are stealthy. The icon next to the stealth icon is glamour.
This would be fantastic if they were any beefier but, sadly, they're too weak for this to mean much. Glamour is fantastic for units that are actually fighting because it autocasts mirror image when the unit enters battle.
Also hanging out in Cacian Forest is this bad boy. I've been recruiting Ba'als from my cap and this one got lucky and got an extra random, bringing him up to four points of earth magic.
Here is a shot of my gem income after my orgy of site searching. It's quite skewed, but there's little to do about that other than curse Pan for hoarding all the nature gems to pave the streets of their emerald city. Pans have hoofs! They can not walk on nature gems without slipping! Clearly they need better city planners.
Gemgen Counter
Blood stones: 8
Cost: 40E, 64 slaves
Gems Generated: 20
Diplomacy
There are some really interesting things happening diplomatically, but instead of including them piecemeal in my turn posts I will have a much larger diplomacy post after turn 40. Regular diplomacy posts will resume on turn 41.