Part 26: Turn 24: Let's Talk About Forts While We Wait

I carefully avoid mentioning the hordes that C'tis has ready to attack. I don't want Midgard to go AI.



Not surprising.



Evocation 4 is done. I'm going to need some more Construction before my real goal in Evocation 6 can be used anyway, so I head towards Construction 4.

My casting of Augury found



holy shit this is a nice site! And Agartha was sitting on it the entire time. NICE

I don't find any other sites, but, seriously, who even cares? That site alone is worth all the gems I spent this turn.

(Future Me: Man, even now I'm looking at this thing in awe. That is a fucking amazing magic site! There's better sites - mostly the ones that give substantial gem savings to things like Construction and Conjuration - but for a site that isn't a gamechanger, this is about as good as it gets.)




I get 28 of these guys. They're pretty crappy, but, hey, they're free. I can use them as more siege fodder. Annoyingly they don't come with a commander - I'll have to recruit one to get them to the front lines.

That's going to be harder than I'd really like.



Every once in a while you get attacked by a random group of independents. Barbarians are honestly some of the easiest - this can also include vampires or demonic Troglodytes. There's not a lot that can be done about it, besides "capture it back after it happens". Irritatingly, these independents nicely cut my new Cardaces off from the old Agarthan territory. I'll show positioning once I'm at the overview.

The battle is rapid, bloody, and thoroughly uninteresting, as Anvast had exactly one province defense.

Nydian Range is a somewhat comical battle between Fluffy Bunnies and two leaderless Skinshifters. As mentioned before, leaderless units flee immediately, and they run off the map while Fluffy Bunnies is buffing himself.

Storn Woods is another Abysian attack against the army of Mictlan that we saw earlier. This attack is much smaller, and dies rapidly. It is also thoroughly uninteresting.

Also, we lost a scout to T'ien Ch'i. As usual, the most unfortunate bit of this is that now T'ien Ch'i is informed that I'm scouting him.

We beat two fortresses up. Also, this:



I said a long time ago that I didn't care about Supply, but my army is getting big enough that I actually do. If units run out of supplies for more than one turn then they have a chance of picking up Disease, which prevents healing and results in eventual lingering death. That's bad. Lucky for me, the first turn of Starvation is a freebie. We'll have to move a few troops out of there to prevent a second turn, though. (As it turns out, this won't be a problem.)



Finally, we put a bid on Dagan just for fun when I was worried about T'ien Ch'i jumping me. I'm actually surprised that I got him.



There's Dagan. He's not particularly strong, but he's a good researcher. He's nigh-identical to the guys that we can produce out of Carnag - also sages - and, if we manage to keep him, will cost exactly the same amount per month. Sure, whatever. We actually don't care about him much at all and would be just as happy if he died, since he's a source of Astral to other players and we don't want them to have astral, so we might suicide him into something. In retrospect, there's no real good reason for me to have hired him. Ah well.




You can see my new Cardaceseses south of Jome, across the mountain range from Agartha. You can also see my brand-new barbarian-infested-province southwest of Jome, neatly blocking my new Cardaceseseseses. Grrr.

You can also see T'ien Ch'i retreating.

This means that Carnag is now totally safe, barring Act of RNG. It'll be complete next turn and I can start pushing forward again without worry. The first thing I do is build a Lab and Temple there - even if it does get assaulted, the fort will be able to hold out for a turn or two to get reinforcements there. Awesome.

Naturally, the Lab and Temple eat up most of my money. I have enough to build Hoplites everywhere, and another Mystic in Jome, but that's it. I can't even build a Priestess in Arco.

First off, I'm going to need to move my new Slingers in. Slingers are unfortunately very slow and it'll take them a whole four turns to get to Agartha, so I'm going to assume Agartha will have fallen by then and just move them straight to Barra. (Three turns. Great.)

I also need to clear some guys out of Barra, so I shift most of my forces south to Agartha, along with all my mages besides Dagan. I'm hoping Agartha falls soon, and we'll need as much firepower as possible to defeat Agartha's mages and Pretender God.

I actually just noticed that I had an Earth 2 mystic, currently bumming around in Agartha. Durrr. He gets redirected to Carnag via Barra to search the fuck out of some sites - right now he's too valuable to waste in sieges.

There's actually very little happening this turn. Mostly, I'm just sieging Agartha. Therefore,

Let's Learn About The Game: Sieging



Here's a basic castle. This is Jome, in fact, the most generic castle I could find.

"Administration" is how good the castle is at pulling resources from surrounding provinces and increasing money generated in its home province. Higher is better. I believe it's a percentage, though I may be off on that.

"Supply storage" is the total value of Supply that the castle keeps in reserve for sieges. This goes down as the siege continues. If it hits 0, starvation. In retrospect this is a really good argument for never letting people break out of the fort, since that way their supply never gets a chance to recover. C'est la vie.

I'm going to assume you can guess what "time to build" and "cost" mean.

"Defence value" is the tricky one, and it's the one we currently have a hate/hate relationship with. Castles are tricky to tear down, and the walls take a lot of banging on. Meanwhile, people inside are building it up again. (I think I've explained this before.) On average, a human-sized creature does 1 damage per turn. My elephants do 4, and my Cerulean Warriors do about 2.25.



Now here's Agartha. Fuck you, Agartha. 600 defence: way too much defense. By my count I'll have about 250 siege value beating on their walls, so presumably it'll only be another 2 or 3 turns - they simply can't have many forces left inside. Still. Ugh. Agaaaaartha

And now you know, in excruciating detail, why this is all taking so long.

Keep in mind that I've got another 93 siege value of Slingers incoming. That should help quite a bit.



I cannot wait to crack this damn castle.

Next: Guess whether or not I crack this damn castle.