Part 23: Arco - Turns 9-13

Turn 9


Lots of fighting! And a battle in a province I own, and...oh hey, an event, lets see what it is...



Well fuck! This is just annoying and one of the obnoxious events everyone hates - thankfully the less painful of the two, but the net result is the province falls to vine men.



As this shows, you can see the crossed swords in the upper left where I just lost a province. I'll retake it shortly, but gold is gold. At least its not the event where everybody in the province dies. That one sucks balls.

Beyond that, Rainbow Dash murders things, my other armies murder things, yay!

Turn 10



More fighting! This time none of the bad kind, everything I want to die dies with minimal or no losses.



As this shows, my territory is starting to fill out - I'm beginning to run out of space, which means thinking about war!



But not yet. Evocation helps in war, but the real goal here is to gain Arcane Probing to start hunting for astral sites. With that second fort up and running, I'm starting to churn our sages - who are good for research and casting arcane probing and absolutely nothing else.

Turn 11



Trading! I don't have natural nature income, and I want some - Pan doesn't have natural earth income, and wants some. So we swap. This will let me scry the forests and hopefully gain gem income I otherwise lack.



More provinces are taken, I start moving back to take the ones I lost, and Rainbow Dash & my larger army go monkey hunting. I expect few losses.

Turn 12



That finishes up Evocation 2 and Thaum 2 in one go - granting me access to remote site searching in Astral, Earth, Nature, Air, and Fire all at once - namely the 4 gems I have, and one I currently dont. I promptly set all my mages into a mass scrying.

Not sure what the event was - nothing important,


The monkeys die horribly. Rainbow Dash is finally ready to take on those damn cavalry that have sat next to my capital, while I send my primary army to wipe out those damn elephants finally. With the heavy income and low upkeep I have, I'm building a fort northwest of Rainbow Dash - more forts means more mages, more mages means research and magic power. And those mean winning!

Turn 13



A ton of site searching - the events, meanwhile, are mostly gaining free province defense. Not bad, but nothing I really care about either. Rainbow Dash murders the cavalry, but...



Disaster strikes. My other army gets completely wiped out to a man. Why?




Elephants. Motherfucking Elephants. That first picture is the enemy forces in Round 1. That second is what remains of my army in round 3.

In short, what happened was simple : Elephant provinces normally have 3-4 at most. I was expecting to lose some dudes, then the elephants would get poked with a ton of spears and rout next turn, as they have shitty morale - and once routed, I take the province no problem.

Instead there were twice the normal quantity, and as a result not only did they not rout, they annihilated my army in moments.



Rainbow Dash will not stand for this. She massacred the cavalry, and now she moves to murder the elephants. Unlike her minions, because she has Awe, she's effectively invincible - at this point every battle involves her tossing up a mixture of Personal Luck, Body Ethereal, Mirror Image, Mistform, and maybe Air Shield.

The net result when something wants to attack her?

First it needs to pass a morale check against her super awe. Most units fail this.

If they do pass that, they have to hit the right Mirror Image - which is basically a 20% chance or so, something really small. I'm not quite sure how Image works - whether the odds of hitting are 1/number of images, or not quite as good. With her being A5, if it's the former, then the odds of hitting her are 1/11.

And if they do that, they have to get through luck. That's half of the damaging attacks gone.

And if they do that, she's Ethereal, so if a weapon is nonmagical, 75% of the time it misses.

End result? A 1/88 chance of an attack that hits being successful while image is up - and that's after beating both Awe, and her defense, and her protection rolls.

Even after images go down, 87.5% of nonmagical attacks whiff.

In short, those elephants are fucked.



The net result of my site searching thusfar - nothing big, and unfortunately no nature sites, which kind of irritates me.



But I do find this. Shadow Seers aren't great - they are stealthy, and they do have high astral, but not much else. But 4 pearls per turn is a -lot-. So I'm still happy.



Now, I draw your attention to the south - where on my border there are suddenly a ton of Jaguar Warriors. All those units on my side appeared in a random event - nothing I'll say no to, but I really don't care about them.

So I ask Lilli what's up. She claims she thinks I'm about to attack, and I explain what happened - those dudes spawned a turn ago, I'm going to be moving them away soon. I ask if we're cool, she says yes.

That is a filthy lie.

Next turn : The sneaky horrible Mictlanese invade, and the happy halcyon days of Arcoscephale not being at war come to an end.