Part 54: Pangaea - Turns 56-63
Last time on Pangaea: we covered the half-demise of Mictlan followed by their new management and why there was no grand anti-Hinnom coalition immediately following this. We pick things up now on turn 56, with incipient plotting to beat the hell out of what's left of TC, because almost everyone still in the game is mad at him by now.
Mostly nothing happens for a few turns while I research stuff and shuffle troops down towards the TC border, but here you can see the extent of my territory post-Mictlan war. That last Arcos fort I got to storm had a single slinger and a handful of mystics who were promptly stabbed and eaten.
I also summon a Queen of Elemental Air. She's pretty cool! Hooray! I finally hit Conjuration 9 shortly after this, so I also summon some other stuff.
This is a Tarrasque. Their job will be to buff everything, cast evocations, and generally be huge hp sponges that regenerate way faster than any incidental damage could kill them.
This is a Cyclops. Builds has talked about them. I have them too.
This is a Wraith Lord. Their job is to be immortal and cast evocations.
This is a Carrion Centaur. They're one of Pan's national summons, and I am making them because they can spend their turn reanimating chaff. Sometimes you get a little collection of vines and bones called a mannikin, sometimes you get a big collection of vines and elephant bones that can trample people and never gets tired.
This is a Carrion Beast, one of the midpoints between mannikin and undead elephant. Sleep vines are a common attack (in varying quantities) to all the stuff my summons reanimate - it does a bunch of stun damage and a small herd of carrion whatevers can quickly fatigue out and murder thugs/poorly prepared SCs.
Finally, on turn 60, it is time to attack TC! In addition to the huge masses of miscellaneous chaff and mages you can see on the border, I order my Queen of Elemental Air to cloud trapeze onto the fort I'm attacking. The only thing Feinne has that I'm at all concerned about is his pretender - master enslave against one of my maenad blobs would be really, really nasty and I don't know that builds is ambushing it right now, so the Queen's job is to clear pd from the sort and, if the pretender is there, make it blow all the astral pearls it's carrying in the magic phase before the army arrives.
So, here's Thuella arrayed against TC's defenses. She's lightly geared, just some defensive stuff to up her MR/let her stand up to Feinne's pretender in melee if she needs to, and a few gems so she can cast Living Clouds - this summons a bunch of air elementals who should draw fire away from her and demolish all of TC's patrolling stuff. On his side, it's a bunch of pd and mages who will probably communion up - no sign of the pretender. I guess I lucked out.
Air elemental summoning: success.
Fuck. In what comes as no real shock to anyone, 22mr is not enough to stand up to an eleven mage communion that can soul slay for five rounds. I spent way too much time worrying about the pretender and not enough about "hey this nation has astral mages". Oh well.
The conventional army just kills everyone to avenge her. I think builds said something about scary river demons being here but there weren't 500 of them so I don't really notice.
Oh, apparently I also had a Tarrasque trapeze in to claim a province. They can do this when they are not buffing everything, because they are huge and tough and surrounded by poison and also breath poison. I am also summoning two of them every turn, because as builds has alluded to now and then I have a lot of nature gems.
I also summon another Queen of Elemental Air hoping to get precious Thuella back, but I am unlucky - Nephele was bugged in the version of the mod we were playing with, so she still has her vanilla stats. They are somewhat less impressive.
Well that's all of TC's territory gone in a single turn, and the fort I attacked instantly breached because maenads.
The brave men inside the fort
With all the bits of TC I can reach dead and the rest under siege by others, nothing happens for a while. I summon stuff, other people summon stuff and siege very slowly. Plans begin to resume invading Mictlan, because based on my previous conversations with Schneeble I figure there's still no way he's going to go for an alliance against builds until we're the last three alive, and as much cool stuff as I have there's simply no way to keep up with the production in Hinnom. So if there's going to be any chance of a non-Hinnom victory, I figure our best course is to get to that state as fast as possible with Schneeble and myself claiming more of the spoils on the way. This brings us up to turn 63, and this being both the end of TC and the time of our most recent update from Hinnom, we will pause here for now.