Part 239: Sauro - Turn 74-75
Turn 74
In which I suffer a small failure.
- Schneeble/SauromatiaWhat little site searching I am still doing turns up nothing. Random events provide me with a few Astral pearls and some free PD somewhere that probably won't matter at this stage of the game. A Forest Dome goes up on another major caster fort.
This is where a map would go but I feel pretty confident that I can and should get two turns posted today.
- Irony.or.Death/PangaeaI received a gift of 16 astral pearls from Pangaea. IoD and I have agreed that with Mictlan's back broken it was time to prepare for the war with Hinnom. Step 1 was to get rid of Perpetual Storm, and thanks to my close relationship with builds character I had a pretty good idea about how many pearls I needed to dispel it.
Of course, by this time builds character actually kind of wanted me to dispel Perpetual Storm anyway and the only player without flying units was myself. I had reservations about my role in all of this because of the mobility advantage that both Pangaea and Hinnom would have over me, but I hoped that it would work out in our favor.
Even now I don't know if I made the right decision.
- TheDemon/LankaBetween a constant barrage of taunts from TheDemon and the failure of Melancholia to accomplish anything last turn I realize that there is no longer any time to kill Lanka slowly. When the war with Hinnom begins, buildscharacter will almost certainly throw me off of Lanka and take it for himself.
So I gather up a squadron of my most worthless units and send it in to storm the castle. I don't expect much. If I wanted to just scout TheDemon's defenses I would have set the worthless commander to retreat. Really I wanted to see what kind of scripting he had and to trigger some gem use. Sadly my foray failed at both tasks (because when the casting AI decides that scripted spells with gem use are unnecessary it picks something else). Observe.
These are my noble sacrifices. The Enarie has Old Age and three afflictions: Chest Wound, Crippled, and Lost an Arm. Chest Wound is pretty bad news for casters, thugs, and SuperCombatants and I'd written this one off as a dead man walking. The 15 Hydra Hatchlings are freespawn but they still cost me 17 gold in upkeep as a group. They're not terribly useful for much and if I survive even 10 turns then the money I save from getting them killed here will more than offset the value of a half-dead Enarie.
Still, TheDemon seems to use strict recruitment values for his calculator so I expect he would consider this a cost of 150 gold. I'm just getting out in front of his damned calculator by pointing out that by my own estimation this foray costs me nothing. Whatever it takes to ease the pain of failure.
These are TheDemon's forces. Basically it's everything he could possibly summon with the gems he had available. We've got a mishmash of animals, asrapas, a kithaironic lion, some ganas, a bunch of dispossessed spirits, some black hawks, an ice drake, a pair of storm demons, and a handful of hama dryads. All kinds of stuff!
After some light buffing and blessing by Lanka, my hydra hatchlings meet with his Asrapa front line. They kick and bite one another briefly and then Peak Theorycrafting casts Falling Frost.
And that's pretty much the end of the fight. The Asrapas are able to finish off their remaining opponents quickly and then everybody is rushing the hapless Enarie in the back. He tries to flee, but because he's crippled he can only move 2 squares per round. The end.
The upside is that I managed to get TheDemon to kill 13 of his own Asrapas, which is about 28 blood slaves worth of summons. Given enough time I could wear him down to nothing with constant hatchling assaults, but I've already determined that time is not on my side. I spend the next turn moving my prophet into place, and plan my final attack for turn 76.
Turn 75
In which I enjoy the calm before the Storm Castle orders.
- Schneeble/SauromatiaI still have one dude fruitlessly casting site search spells, I guess. No random events, and no battles. Really only three things happened this turn that are worth talking about.
1:
Horray! I guess? I'm still uncertain.
2:
And we'll talk about 3 a little bit later. Have we discussed Wraith Lords yet? No? Let's!
They are not beefy bags of hit points, but they are immortal undead battle-magic casters and I could certainly use that. In this version of the Awesome Endgame they are not as amazing as they were back when Lilli used them to win the Aristocrats tourist game, but they are still damn good. They have 3 Death along with 3 of an elemental magic or Astral, twice. In this case I got Water and Astral, but it's possible to get Astral twice or Air and Earth together, or Astral and Earth. There are several combinations that are great to have.
As I mentioned before, even with my robust gem income I simple don't have enough to summon lots of anything. I'll be using the names of some of the folks that have requested to be Tarrasques for other powerful dudes like this guy and others we will see later. At this point when I was playing I think I had named the full grown Wendigo after DivineCoffeeBinge, for example. It's all fluid at this point in the LP moment but when the time comes to field the baddest dudes in the land, you guys will have your representatives.
Anyway, one other thing that Wraith Lords can do is summon ghosts. So we may see some ghosts here and there in the future and I'll talk about them if they show up. Now it's time for a map.
As you can see, there's not much of Mictlan left. He's down to two provinces and three forts under siege. Goodbye, Incy. You fought well.
- Incy/MictlanAlso, you gave me all of your stuff that wasn't specific to blood magic.
Suck it, Hinnom!
Irrational Objectives:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5. Summon 9 Elemental Royalty or cast each of the 6 Royalty summons at least once (current progress: 6/9 or 3/6)
6. Make my final contribution to the LP (no slacking off!) on or before December 12, 2012. (Estimated odds @ current rate: 68%) I may actually pull this off if I can get two turns each week like this.