Part 49: Pangaea - Turns 34-38

What's that? I thought I heard someone talking about posting. Well, don't mind if I do.



Turn 34



Both battles are as expected; my stealth reveler squads liberating territory behind TC's front lines. I order my army to pull back out of Gipha to cut down on the starvation issues rather than sit there and hope TC twitches. The month is otherwise uneventful, except for the (much delayed) completion of a new weapons program.



I do hope TC likes this spell, because he's going to be seeing a lot of it from here on out. For those of you who haven't been paying attention to all of that island nonsense, it adds a significant chunk of unrest to the target province and has a chance of inflicting disease on whatever's there. Goes great with enemy caps and research centers alike.

Turn 35



Those two messages about arrows appearing from the sky are more seeking arrows. The leader of the western reveler company is killed; the eastern survives to lead her troops into hiding in an adjacent province. I don't want to be too predictable with her movements, so I have decided to settle for an attack -> stealth -> attack -> stealth approach to keep bouncing around his lands. One of those battles is TC reclaiming one of the previous turn's reveler conquests, one is him either being stupidly overconfident or reading me too well and reclaiming Gipha in my army's wake, and the other two...



Feinne was apparently so impressed by my wasting gems on Call of the Wild that he decided to try the same thing with Call of the Winds. His birds do not fare any better than my werewolves. The intact reveler company sneaks north in case there is an opportunity to cut off TC's main army after the next time they suicide on mine. I expect Feinne to pull back out of Gipha again, but have my forces hold position just in case I'm wrong about this and he wants to try his luck on the offensive again.

Turn 36



Okay that is a lot of stuff happening. Let's take it from the top. A report from Tenera! How exciting!



Okay, I'm going to be honest I don't know where Tenera is and don't care enough to check. Someone set ten maenads on fire. Who cares? Next up, three events in my cap. That's kind of unusual, let's see what's going on.



Three of these. It might just be the paranoia, but I don't think they're natural. On the other hand, they're also not very important; they cost me some gold, but TC simply doesn't have any remote spells to compare to the constant downpour of adorable frogs I am providing him. The battle in Grey Mountains is him mopping up the stranded revelers; he deploys a new tool for that.



I don't think I've ever seen these guys in action before; they're a TC national summon and those look like pretty good stats, but I'm willing to bet they cost more than they're worth.



The fight is basically five minutes of this. They kill slow and they die slow. I think two of them are still alive when the surviving revelers give up and run for it. Now, the next fight...oh, that's Tenera! The province my army was in. He decided to attack after all. This makes his decision to set ten maenads on fire even more confusing, since there are almost a thousand of them in the province. Let's see if the ground assault was any more impressive.



It gets kind of tough to pretend you're doing anything sensible with formations when you have a thousand troops present.



Here's my standard Swarm and harpies opener, with the addition of Agony - a blood spell with reasonably large AoE that does a tiny bit of damage and is supposed to be bad for the morale of whoever it hits. Something about hideous pain. I'm not expecting much for it, but I'll take anything with significant AoE when he's lugging this many soldiers to the fight.



Here's Blade Wind hitting, now that I can script my mages with it properly. TC's Wot5E are almost perfect targets for it - expensive, not too much hp or prot, and no shields. It kills quite a few of them.



As always the surviving Wot5E do a lot of killing when they meet my maenads face to face, but half their army is already trying to run away at this point.



The running away thing was a good idea. Some of them even make it.



I feel good enough about this result that I immediately order a counterattack on Gipha.



I'm assuming his survivors will pull back again, and there are still enough of them to take out a small reveler force so I abandon the cutting off his retreat plan in favor of more raiding behind the lines.

Turn 37



The revelers are successful. Surprisingly, however, TC hasn't retreated from Gipha.



It's a debacle from the start; thanks to him getting the first turn and having pd present, my Swarms never reach his archers and they fire freely into the maenads. My mages spend the early portion of the battle targeting shielded pd with Blade Wind instead of doing more damage to the vulnerable archers/Wot5E.



And to top it all off, the extra few mages he has along this time appear to have taken his communion from mostly ineffective to an acid spewing wall of death.



I noticed like ten turns ago that whichever of us is on the offensive loses horribly. Why didn't I listen to myself? On the bright side, I killed enough stuff that there's no way in hell he's going to counterattack - but there's no way I can push the offensive with the paltry hundred maenads I have left, either, and it'll take a couple of turns for them to build up in my cap again.



Still, I send a Pan with what's available out from the cap just in case he's feeling suicidal enough to push me again. My raiding party elects to hide instead of sneaking - I have been told in the past that turn resolution shenanigans mean doing this will prevent things like Seeking Arrow from finding you as a target, and so hopefully prevent another vicious assassination.

Turn 38



More trade proceeds from Mictlan. I dearly hope I can actually use this batch of earth gems instead of having to alchemize them to rebuild my cap lab a third time. That's getting really old. More cute frogs from the sky for TC. A battle in Bogger Wold; as expected, that's him reclaiming last turn's reveler spoils. The Hills of Ethereal Gophers? More annoying - he's making another push along the northern edge of the mountains. I kill a bunch more scouts in Tenera. And...what? A second battle in Bogger Wold? I have no idea what that could be.



Okay, I didn't order my revelers to attack here, I ordered them to hide. And I definitely didn't order them to attack without a commander; that's not even possible. Unless...



One of those four deaths was the dryad leading them. With her dead, they promptly forgot how to hide and got themselves all killed. I hate you, Rainbow Dash, and I hope turns your corpse into an art installation.



Mary flies west to intercept TC's new northern push. I hate: Rainbow Dash, TC, my entire worthless empire. This is the most tedious war I've ever been involved in and I swear I will never play Pangaea again.