Part 73: Turn 63: The End of a Nation

He's actually sending this on the turn he marches, despite a large army of mine being adjacent the capital and possibly invading. Could've been better timed, dude.

Luckily I have little interest in the capital and I'm just letting him take it. Too much effort for too little gain.




Bet you can guess how many military units that curse hits.

I'll give you a hint:

it's zero.

Also, because we didn't yet have enough gold, we now have more gold. Seriously I'm starting this turn with almost 5000 gold. That is a lot of gold.

Cacevic Highlands:



it's like we're in turn 10 again

Linshire: worthless AI attack, easily repelled.



Forest of Gun is not so easily repelled. This is by no means a large army, but it's large enough to flatten my PD.

However, none of his commanders have Astral, and you know what that means. Incoming mind hunts!

Cythia: Fluffy Bunnies continues to reclaim land. I'm actually just waiting for him to get devoured by another Horror, but it's not happening yet and it's getting a bit annoying.

I could totally Magic Duel him to death but that requires me to, you know, actually hit him, which can be a bit tricky.

Tenvir: Easy claim of a C'tis province.

Lettia: It's not exactly a fair fight. The siege begins.



White Peaks: oh man who is going to win this one

the stress

so much stress

I haven't been bothering to show every single gem site I find because, let's face it, most of them are pretty uninteresting.






But after capturing this well-defended province, Barathrus hits a small jackpot. Damn, that's nice!



Atlantis left their capital to reclaim some land, Man came in with a new force, Atlantis came back to Atlantis to desiege their castle.



I'm not actually sure what the difference here is compared to last time. Man has a few more troops. Some of Atlantis's troops are crippled or limping. One way or another, Man rips them to pieces before they reach the front lines. Man ends up losing a few units in melee, but not really all that many.

Atlantis's military backbone is broken. That's pretty much the end of Atlantis.



In Ocean of Plenty I'm sort of going to have to eat those words.

Sort of.

When two forces try to move past each other, a few weird things can happen. They might fight in the first army's province. They might fight in the second army's province. Technically, they can pass either other, but that's rare.

If you remember my orders from last turn, my orders were to move my Queen northwest, and my Shamblers to where the Queen was. From the results, I'm guessing that a small force moved from the northwest to the old location of my queen, while a large army moved from Atlantis's capital.

The queen ended up fighting in her original province, along with the shamblers, and the entire army.

The problem is that routing is an army-wide thing. The queen could probably take on that entire army and live, but as soon as enough Shamblers die - and oh boy do they die, Atlantis has an ethereal summoned kraken - she routs along with them, despite taking no damage.



I didn't even realize this could happen. Well, we learn.



My Titan weathers about two dozen Paralyze attempts, flies over the castle wall, and fucking obliterates Midgard's casters. Robber Home is ours.



The entire army of T'ien Ch'i.

They have a goodly number of mages. They have some ground troops. They have an extremely durable statue which is unfortunately incapable of casting any magic.



They are so fucking boned.

It's actually a very dull battle simply thanks to how many spells are being flung around - they take a long time to animate, and there are a shitload of spells.


T'ien Ch'i's gate guard collapsing under the weight of a dozen small planets.


T'ien Ch'i's god eating a Horror Mark. I didn't even have that scripted.


hit the damn statue


T'ien Ch'i's pretender god is smashed into rubble.



This is how far inside my army gets by the time T'ien Ch'i has routed.





No, I'm afraid this war is ending now. Say goodnight, T'ien Ch'i.



And finally, the army of Pythium attempts to hold back Man, and fails.

That's the army, over there on the right. Yes, that one guy in green.





Looking at the nation list, Jomon has gone AI.

Five destroyed nations, five who have dropped out of the game, one who has sworn allegiance to me. Two left to kill.

Speaking of that: if I can't get Gift of Health, I need the Chalice. Gath mentioned he was forging it, so I send him a PM and work out a deal for it - I'm handing him all my Fire gems and a bunch of Astral gems, he's giving me the Chalice and all the Water gems he's got. I can use the Astral gems, but I can really use the Water gems, and of course the Chalice is invaluable.

He's also going to be handing off some Blood gear to me, and he's going to be taking Werk Enum to move troops around, which I'm fine with.



Yeah, this is pretty small, but you can probably at least see the flags.

Now that Jomon is AI, I may as well start grabbing his territory also. Barathrus moves east to grab a Jomon province, with me hoping I don't run into Ulm in the process. Phyleides Cloud-Trapeze's up to Kunal, the province north of Barathrus's current location. Philetor moves east towards Silver Fangs, the Midgard fort that is as-yet uncontested.



I start to Mind Hunt that C'tis group, but then I realize I don't have to. Gath is presumably taking Werk Enum. That C'tis group is probably going that way. So I'll just take where they are, and let Gath deal with them if they flee north.

Polypoites is finally done with his mausoleum (sheesh, I don't even get a Mausoleum building?) so I finally head northeast with him.

I move armies eastward. We're done with the west, hopefully forever. The huge army in Black Alps Gate Stones east to Robber Home while the mages begin the relatively slow trek on foot.

I'm actually out of non-horror-marked Sages, so I start piling lanterns back on the horror-marked ones. I'm really close to running out of research, and then I'll either junk the lanterns or send them to Gath.



Just to give you an idea of what my magical item treasury looks like. I've got about two full sets of SC gear in here, minus a few cheap items that I'll forge later. I've got boosters coming out of my ass and two damn Shrouds that I have no idea what to do with. (I asked Gath - they don't need 'em.)

Maybe I'll mail them to Man. I know they don't have a bless.



My scouting network expands outwards rapidly - I'm recruiting huge numbers of scouts each turn to increase my intelligence ASAP. I'm planning to grab as much of Jomon as possible, but I'm also setting myself up for a large assault against Mictlan soon, as our territories are butting up nicely against one another.



I've got substantial gem income, and that's not counting the ~20 clams I'm sitting on. Soon I hope to cast some really nice big global enchants and turn my gem income up to 11. Or, you know, higher.

Next: The Arcoscephale Hoplite Rapid Transit System continues.