Part 28: Turn 21

Turn 21


One thing to note about the turn order is that battles that result from teleporting happen before site searching and way before regular battles. You usually only see this thing pretty late into the game but in this case Karanaac are dumping some rocks onto our head. But which rock?

It's this rock! The 30 earth gem summon. World Shartds are basically Karanaac's emergency palm slam button to shut down and then block off any early aggression. The goal is to blow your whole stash of gems on something that will annihilate an enemy army and then also sit in a choke point preventing any future aggression too. Karanaac are extremely unlikely to have another 30 earth gems saved up and if you recall we had queued a move onto their capital. Due to a quirk of how movement works in dominions, any of Karanaac's teleport attacks onto one of their forted provinces will always just move safely into the fort and cannot touch any sieging forces. This is what I was talking about earlier when I was saying that one of the safest places to be when fighting rocks is sitting around their fortifications slightly outside of their arms reach.


World Shards are even beefier than your average rock with 350 hp and 25 protection. A poor militia man's fist will do absolutely nothing against one. E3N3 is a great caster but it's worth bearing in mind that as a teleport attack spell there's been no opportunity to script them or give them any gems. However this doesn't really matter because of the world shard's heart. Every single round the heart casts tremor, which is earthquake that only affects 50% of the battlefield. Every. Single. Round. If you are a militia man you will be dead long before you get remotely close to it. Earthquake also does nothing against fliers (except in caves) which leads to some pretty funny situations like in the first mods game where the clowns paid a wasp removal service to remove a world shard from on top of Kirkostaculis itself. Earthquake can be negated by high armour (which we don't have) or just defense (which I believe represents you jumping just before the earthquake hits?). We're in turmoil 3 here so have a nice and high 15-17 defense. Finally tremor specifically deals extra damage to inanimates so that the shard will eventually kill itself.



In our case we are neither flying nor small so it won't be a complete wipeout one way or the other, plus our invulnerability buffs help once they go up. The first earthquake isn't too bad, hitting only a few clowns and the indie commander leading them.


Before too long though we get the surround on the world shard and well, that sure is a lot of numbers on it. 25 protection is high but 30 strength is higher.


Let's tally up the casualties! The humans all died as I would expect but the clowns, even the ones that are "only" size 3 have double the hp pool so should mostly be okay. Oh wait, of course the 13th Clown decided to play the fool.


Let's all remember Febrile and Wiry in his prime, and not crippled on the ground with two broken calf bones shouting something about having legs to stand on. He never made it into the hall of fame.


And with that we move onto the cap, brushing aside the tiny amount of defense left after U took it the first time. The eagle eyed amongst you might notice that most of the small clowns have been left back in Academic Eremitage because they were being led by either the indie commander, the armless woman, or Febrile and Wiry himself. With their leader dead they got confused or were holding a wake or something.


Faced with the choice of leaving them to possibly die or leaving the safety of the fort to go back for them I, of course, send all my forces back to the province we just left. Left behind on the cap is only a single clown mage with 5 admittedly enormous bodyguards. I gamble that Karanaac's crippled god won't break siege into this huge force and will instead sit at home healing. Honestly even if he does, 5 enormous clowns sitting at the back waiting for him to fly in might well just be able to kill him there and then. Also looking at the map over here you can see that Karanaac has another temple up in Fallen of Coax and U has a 200-strong force on the borders in Jb's Jaunt. They've lost an incredible amount in this war between the cap storming attempt and the soul slays meanwhile I've lost 2 mages and 3 troops. I do hope they don't decide that now's the time to jump in and take the spoils from me after I did all the hard work for them.



Elsewhere: chaosos claimed the throne of life (reducing aging for all units), we find a small handful of gems, and we get a villain attack. Villains are no big deal, often being turned away by even pretty moderate amounts of PD. However since I'm so short on gold and have maxed out luck scales I've only been buying a single point. Even worse, the villains prevent me from reaching the province that the wraiths said they'd give back. It is pretty lucky that they did not waylay any commander. Faced with my fading claim on those lands I quickly recruit an indie commander next door in Razor's Reach and also start preparing a small force to send north. At long, long last a lab is being build on Greevil's Bog the lizard province.


In other news Anglia kicked Fennoscandia's ass in the battle for their capital. Fenno now have few troops and all their forts under siege. I let Purple know that I'm invoking the contingency clause of our agreement and nabbing some provinces myself to "fight Anglia". Sadly they informed me that they'd changed their mind about giving all their gems and items to me too. There's two big clowns squads, one on the cave throne and one by the lake, and even the force of amphibious indies (yet to get enter the water) get in on the action.