Part 85: Turn 73: The Beginning Of The End

In all honesty, I wish that too.

Mictlan is the only civilization left.



That's boring. Let's look at it from the other side.



"Patron of Soldiers" may be inaccurate - I don't know what honorifics I ended up with in the actual game - but the rest is what it looks like.








Already healed.



Here's what hell looks like. There's an endless plain, you, and an easy-squishable wimpy creature.

Oddly, Polypoites decides to cast Disintegrate. Are his battle orders reset in Hell? That'd mean he may make some damn stupid choices. Not much I can do about it now, of course.








Forest of Gila, the province I retreated to in preparation to get everyone out.

As I'd expected, Mictlan attacked in an attempt to kill both my provinces simultaneously and leave no place to retreat. If I don't beat these troops I'm probably screwed.



Mictlan's army is pretty clearly just whatever he could scrape up. A pile of Foul Spawn, some jaguars, some eagle warriors, some Mechanical Men, a pair of mages, some Spring Hawks. In retrospect I probably should have tried to Mind Hunt them down, but I didn't, so here we are.

My communions manage to beat Jaguar Warriors with powerful enchants and spells. I don't have those here.



The Foul Spawn go down quickly, but the Jaguar Warriors begin carving a hole in my army. Phyleides ends up stuck on the Mechanical Men, killing them surely but slowly.



The Foul Spawn flee, leaving my hoplites to concentrate on jaguars and hawks.



Disaster: a large chunk of my Hoplites flee as well. And then the rest of them flee.

And then Mictlan routs.

Mictlan's forces are very fast, and they escape the battlefield one turn before my units start moving off the map and into certain death. That was close.



I'm obviously not expecting to win the Dragon Pointe battle, but do you see anything interesting here?




These guys!

Holy shit, if I'd stayed and fought I would have been slaughtered. Luckily I'm nowhere near there anymore.

Midria: Project Remote Annoyance powders some PD.

Alman: Hilariously, the province Mictlan just captured from me gets stomped by a group of Barbarians.

Lettia: The Lord of Corruption sieges my fortress. Not surprised.

Nifel: Ulm attempts to capture my territory. He chooses the territory I just moved Barathrus into. It goes badly for Ulm.

Ogh Woods, Runia, Wesh: I grab a bunch of Ulm provinces via scout.





The forests of Ogh Woods contain many magical and military secrets.




Runia includes some valuable metal mines.





Wesh yields a nice chunk of earth gems (and yes, that's two separate "Deepest Cave of the Province" in the same province.)

Fanligia: A small squad of Man defenders attacks Gath's PD. They win based largely on peppering Gath with arrows before it gets there.



Ocean of Plenty: Atlantis's underwater assault force tries to capture one of my territories back. They choose the one that Thalassa is in. Water Elemental vs. Queen of the Sea: Fight!

(You can guess who wins.)



Avoca: A huge army of Ulm's attacks Man.

It looks huge, but in reality there's almost nothing here. Very few units that are capable of doing significant damage to well-buffed heavy troops. They beat Man's province defense, but killing this army would be simple - any of my Tartarians could breeze through it.

Ocean of Despair: No defense, we take it.

Midgard: Mictlan moved their army out when I was moving in, I guess, and I take Mictlan easily.










Nothing particularly surprising here.



Starting up in the north:

I need to dispatch a few more Mind Hunts to slow Ulm and Jomon down. Barathrus moves into the first Ulm expansion army.

Now, Belial.







Here's our first unit. I'm scripting her to just show up and attack, nothing more. With those weapons and skills she should be able to just cleave him in half in a turn or two.




Especially with her coming along. She's told to spam Lightning Bolts, although in reality she's just there to carry the staff to trigger Aella's Storm Power.

That should take care of Belial.

That's not the only problem we have, though.



A shitload of Jaguars.

It's quite likely that my major army could take this group out. But, really, why risk anything? That army is essentially Mictlan's last stand - so let's fuck it up from a distance.

We're putting off Maelstrom for a turn - we need the magic boosters.





Two W2 Mystics are brought up to W5 (remember that trident? I forged that thing quite a while ago. Told you it'd come in handy.) Thalassa also goes up to W5, though that's a bit easier.




Two Kings of Elemental Fire are given boosters to bring them to F5.




The Kings cast Fires from the Sky. The two Mystics and Thalassa cast Murdering Winter. All of them are aimed at Mictlan's giant army.

That's 220 gems - actually, 244, since I have to alchemize a bunch of Fire out of Astral to pull it off. But it should kill nearly everything in that province. A few extra Seeking Arrows get tossed in just for laughs.

My megaarmy moves north to try to intercept its movement. My secondary army moves south, actually swapping places with the megaarmy.

Off in the Guerilla Zone (ha ha, gorilla zone) I prepare for escape. All troops are loaded onto the Strategos, who gets the Gate Stone . . .

. . . but it turns out I fucked up my orders. My Gate Stone is stuck on a Strategos who isn't at a Lab. There's literally no way I can get it to the army in time.

Luckily there's an alternative.



The Vortex of Returning will jump my entire army back to Arco. No part-by-part escape for me! It's an Astral 4 spell, so I hand her a Skullcap.

I don't want Phyleides ending up in Arco, though. She Cloud Trapezes over to another spot in Mictlan. And I commandeer another Sibyl from Arco to teleport in after her, to build her escape lab again.



Philetor gets a bit of an equipment revamp.





The Charcoal Shield will retaliate against the jaguars automatically. Each of their attacks will backfire, and they have a shitload of attacks - I'm turning their strength against them. The Horned Helm will provide an extra non-AoE attack, on the theory that more damage never hurts. The Hydra Skin Armor will cause Philetor to heal 15 hit points every turn. The armor isn't as good, but as Philetor has Earth 4, he can just cast Invulnerability on himself. Invulnerability's weakness is that it makes you more vulnerable to poison, but Hydra Skin Armor has Poison Resist 100 and so does a Tartarian Cyclops by default - that Poison Resist -100 will just bring him down to mere immunity instead of superimmunity.

Philetor then heads southeast to grab more territory.

Another squad of Slingers moves from Silvania to Vath. I hire yet more.

Now that I have that global enchant up, forging is suddenly very cheap and easy.

The enchant does two things. First, all forge costs are reduced by a large factor (50%, I think?) The hammer still stacks with this, note. Second, all magic paths are considered to be one higher for the purpose of forging. So instead of needing an E4 mage and 25 Earth Gems for Monolith Armor, I need an E3 mage and 12 Earth Gems (or, with a Hammer, 9 Earth gems.)

We start forging our fucking asses off. We'll show the forge results when we use the gear.

Mage road mage road, again with some rockiness from co-opting Mystics into forging.



I'm hoping that this coming turn effectively obliterates Mictlan's standing army. Once that's gone, I should have no trouble swarming them. I'm also getting my Tartarian factory running at full speed again, as well as assembling a new attack squad, and so things should be speeding up pretty nicely soon.

Next: Raining death.