Part 50: Turn 44: I Really Hate Forts

Man I don't know what's up with the server.

Looks like Jomon is trying to hold Ulm back. I'm not sure it'll go well, but it'll be interesting to watch, at least.



We'll look at this later.



Done with Enchantment. That gives us Arrow Fend and a few more useful spells. We'll look at that later also.



Cun Aral yields a few more Water gems because we just didn't have enough Water gems yet





I kind of wish we had better flavor text for these.




bet you wish you had astral guards now

This should keep them from reinforcing nicely. At least slow them down a lot.





Well, at least we got fire gems out of it.

Battles!

In Kishia, our lone scout manages to get cut down by arrows. Still, at least we know that they still have a fuckton of PD. Why do they have so much PD. Seriously.

In Tenvir, Gath attacks C'tis.




Um.

Gath, I think you're doing it wrong.

Two turns in, Gath's front line gets completely steamrolled by C'tis chariots, and they rout. C'tis loses about six chariots, one of them to friendly fire.

Gath also jumps a lightly defended C'tis province, Werk Enum:




which goes better for them by quite a bit.



Off to the north, Midgard grabs a Gath province with token resistance.




And . . . yeah, not really going to bother showing screenshots from this. One castle down for Jomon.




Okay, let's do this again.

T'ien Ch'i has, again, summoned a pile of magic things. Each of those Ice Drakes is eight Water Gems. I'm not quite sure how many Tigers you get from one spell, but that's at least ten Water Gems represented there, possibly more. Celestial Hounds cost 5 Air gems for a pair, and the big fat guy is a mere 3 Earth Gems. I'm not quite sure what the point of that guy is - he's got a lot of hit points, but he's basically unarmored and doesn't have any significant damage output. They've also got Shades and Vine Men and basically they've been burning huge number of gems on summons.



They all get flattened by elephants - the flying Celestial Hounds first, then the Tigers, then the Ice Drakes.

T'ien Chi begins pelting my forces with Gifts from Heaven as well. Unfortunately, my army is more densely packed than his is, and he's actually doing a significant amount of damage with it. I manage to take out some of his mages with a few well-aimed hits, and finish off all of his magical units in short order.



It's looking like I'm about to break through their line when they summon a pile of Earth Elementals. Big, heavy guys. I finally take them down . . .



. . . and my forces rout from the damage they've been taking.



Fuck. You. Fort.

Again, this is kind of a bittersweet failure. T'ien Ch'i burned a huge number of gems and we killed half their mages. We lost military, but no gems, and fewer mages. We'll be moving back . . . again . . . and trying again . . . but I'm glad I have a second force moving into position now. We need to cripple their productivity badly, and our current tactic just isn't doing it.

It's worth mentioning that at least 6 of those Commander deaths are Mystics slain by our own elephants routing through them, by the way. Our communion is getting a little thin, and I'm starting to rather dislike elephants.



First let's deal with our combat squads.

I reform the Black Alps army (again) and redirect them at Black Alps itself (again), after loading it back up with gems. Our old Summon Earthpower caster got slain somewhere along the line, and the next Earth 2 caster is really high up in the list. For the sake of good commander layout, I pass a pair of Earth Boots to a lower-down Mystic and get him rigged up as Summon Earthpower so he can keep casting later on. (Future Me: This is really stupid! I've completely forgotten about that whole communion-masters-get-magic-path-bonuses thing. My Mystic is going to end up with, like, Earth 5 or Earth 6 just for leading the communion. It's absolutely unnecessary for me to waste these Earth Boots.) There's a single new Earth Mystic in Barra, who gets co-opted into the army as well - he'll meet them in Black Alps. Additionally, we've got a second Faery Queen, who I load up with Air gems and Cloud Trapeze over to Black Alps. Even if there's no archers worth talking about there (and there are no archers worth talking about there) we can still provide lightning fire support.

I also notice that my Faery Queen is named Dodona, and it is immediately renamed Dodonga because I am a horrible geek. Great, I've got Dodonga and Sponglor. What next, Shotner? Pikard? Maybe I can summon an Archangel and name it Seaphirith.

On my new army, I set my Faery Queen to do her Arrow Fend thing and rig up an otherwise-near-identical communion. The Sibyl in that group is higher up the casting order, so I just have her do Eagle Eyes on the second turn and shut up after that. We're also lower on Earth and higher on Water, so there's more Cold Bolt and less Gifts from Heaven. Such is life. The two Crystal Sorceresses that I've recruited get turned into generic Communion Slaves - I may do something else once we see their position in the combat list, but right now I just want them out of combat.

Time for crafting!

I need another Dwarven Hammer desperately. That's Earth 3, which means Mrs. Butterworth or a Mystic with Earth Boots. My Earth Boots are spoken for (Future Me: fffffffff), so it's Mrs. Butterworth with a Dwarven Hammer. We also want another Clam, of course, so that's our other Dwarven Hammer.

Our Water and Death sitesearching is actually done - we have literally no other places to search. The Sibyls are redirected to Research for lack of a better choice. We grab a low-end Earth mystic and a moderate Water mystic from Jome and move them towards the front lines, while in Agartha, a F1 Mystic is set to create Lightless Lanterns. We've got a large backlog of Fire gems that we need to burn through.

Recruitment-wise, we recruit a Sage and a Mystic as usual, plus Hoplites everywhere. I'm obviously kind of tired of Elephants - I plan to use them as front-line shock troops in fort sieges, since they do a nice job of thinning out the troops, but largely ignore them otherwise. Too dangerous to me, not dangerous enough to them.

So how 'bout that sickle.



Well. Hello there.

When it says "harvest the pain", that means "convert into death gems". This thing can be seriously valuable if it's put on a powerful supercombatant and sent up against province defense. We can't use it yet - we'd just lose it - but as soon as we've got something sufficiently beefy, this sucka is going to start feeding us a large pile of magical power.

And off in research, we've got a few very useful spells available to us.





These are the first three of a series of defensive province spells. There's a bunch of nasty remote attack spells that we plan to cast, and these spells will defend us from other people using those very same spells. There's a few others in the game, two at Enchantment 7 and one buried in Blood:





and I'd quite like a Forest Dome, but for now, it ain't happening.

I'd like some extra Water gems before we put up a Frost dome, but I think this is a good time to toss up the first Arcane dome. Our Arcane 4 Sibyl can cast it easily, and isn't going into battle ever if I can help it, so that should be safe. We add an extra 15 gems to it - it'll last 15 turns, which ought to bring us up quite far into the future. 25 gems is pricey, but we're making a lot of Astral gems now, with ten Clams going. And I know I've been thinking about nuking Ulm's capital - I'd rather nobody decide to hit mine.



It's possible we'll get jumped at Black Alps, but I think we'll win if we do. I'm quite sure we'll destroy T'ien Ch'i's province defense. We'll be moving from there up to their castle, and slowly taking over their entire territory.

Next: Let's take some territory for once!