Part 44: Turn 39: No New Magic Sites Were Found

Seriously. Not one. Rage.



Zap.



Oh fuck you I am so tired of losing provinces to independents, but I so cannot afford the province defense that would be necessary to hold them all off. Ugh. We'll go look at that battle later.

 actually it's possible to tell from the messages list whether I won or lost 




And an inevitable pile of battles.




I was actually expecting a larger army here. He's patrolling, but he's only patrolling with about 45 units - the rest is all sitting in the barracks. Or maybe he moved them, though if so, he certainly didn't move them closer to my land. The rest of what you see here is, as usual, T'ien Ch'i's huge province defense.

I've flattened larger armies with less forces, so you can probably guess how this goes.



Yup.




It's hard to say how much force I have focused on this. I've got around 250 units, but many of them have high Strength. I'm estimating somewhere around 300-350 siege power focused on this fortress. I'll probably knock the gate down next turn, then finish the siege the turn after.

Werk Enum: Midgard attacking a near-undefended C'tis province.

Ferran Mountains: Our diseased 1hp scout checking things out. He manages to escape again.



And then promptly dies.

There's nothing interesting in Ferran, however - besides PD, there's no commander, only a few horses.




Jomon attacks Midgard from behind, beating their meager defenses easily. Go Jomon!





We retake Cacevic Highlands.

And in Melma, our poor province defense gets jumped by




Oh, hey!

By sheer coincidence, Melma is where I've been massing forces to jump T'ien Ch'i's southern holdings from the west. My forces squash the invading Ronin with no casualties.

And we lost a scout to C'tis. Nothing unexpected.



Originally I was expecting for a good chunk of T'ien Ch'i's army to flee, and then I'd head southwest to clean them up and to capture more provinces. Either that, or their entire army would be in the castle, and I wouldn't want to risk a siege, so I'd leave a scout to hold the castle while I went and beat up their army some more.

As it is, they've got maybe 50 more units in the castle. I'll probably break down the gate in a turn, two at most, and I'll probably be taking the castle immediately after. I guess I'll just stay here.

I suspect that Mind Hunting Black Alps will result in feeblemind. I'm starting to kind of run out of good Mind Hunt targets. Thanks to the Starshine Skullcap I now get three Mind Hunts per turn, but I really only want one of those - targeted at Black Alps, just to see what happens - so the other two get left in reserve, and the Sibyls involved get set to Research.

Recruiting. I'm once again hiring a Sage in Carnag and a Sibyl in Arco. Jome and Agartha get Priestesses, Barra and Sermioc get Mystics. I'm worried about the Midgard forces that have moved next to me again, so Arco recruits a whole squad of Cerulean Warriors and I use the rest of my money on Hoplites.

Hey Jomon. Kill them faster, please. Thanks.

Speaking of Jomon, Ulm is accumulating a pretty nice army up northeast of Ulm's border. I consider warning Jomon about it, but, honestly, if Ulm is planning to invade Jomon, Jomon is just screwed. I'd rather Jomon carved up a little more of Midgard before their inevitable destruction.

I shift a pair of scouts into T'ien's forts. We'll see how long they last this time, but I'd like to take a look at what's going on in there. Honestly, I'm very confused what's going on with T'ien Ch'i in general. Their early offensive push has pretty much dissolved, and I haven't seen anything really threatening from them since I pushed their army off Barra so many turns ago - they've been playing a fully defensive game, and losing at that, too. It's possible they've simply been crippled by those Monster Boars.

(Speaking of which, there may still be a Monster Boar tooling around Black Alps. We'll watch for it next turn - taxes are set so that Unrest will end at 1, the enemy Dominion may increase that a bit further, but a Monster Boar should still be noticable.)



It's also possible that the T'ien Ch'i player is merely insane. After looking over my Oeperi scout reports, I conclude that Oeperi has something like 50 PD in it. That is a highly nontrivial amount of money. It's admittedly sort of well spent since it's keeping me from invading there, but, seriously: that's over 1000 gold. I triple-check to make sure T'ien Ch'i hasn't gone AI (they haven't). Fuck it, we'll go the long way around and try breaking out through Kishia.

One more Clam, and we forge a Lantern with spare fire gems.



Researching at 445 RP, about 1370 RP left.

Next: You love sieging, don't you? I love sieging. We all love sieging.