Part 34: Turn 27

Turn 27

Let's start with a slight recap from last turn. We pushed the mantises off of our cap, although at a large cost, and then decided to meet up with our reinforcements in a province currently occupied by mantises in order for our two forces not to get split up.

However you might have spotted a small problem with this. If that province were owned by us there'd be no issue and the mantises could not catch our forces moving out from Karanaac. Instead it's a mantis province with a mantis force on. So if that mantis force moves to attack Karanaac, and the Karanaac force move to attack the mantises, which province do they fight in?
The answer, in this case, was that the clown force doesn't move and they fight in Karanaac. Shit. So the survivors of the previous battle, just 10 big mantises, 10 big clowns, and their commanders, get to repeat it. At least we get some province defence this time!




The mantises rush in, the mantis thug flies in. It doesn't help that one enormous clown decides to isolate himself and gets picked off very quickly. You know what also doesn't help? Because I assumed I was going to meet up with the force containing my prophet, who blesses everybody on the battlefield, I changed the scripting on all my clown mages to not cast bless. As a result I don't get the massive amount of strength, the defence from the throne, the HP from Karanaac, or the fire resistance vs the mantis thug. Shit.


The clowns get whittled down and we don't manage to kill the Fa'khyrypon'rah. We fire off a few lightning bolts but it's just not enough.


In the end the few remaining clowns just leg it with the small exception of the mages, who bravely stay behind to die for no reason.


Fuck this was just a total shitshow. Fuck fuck fuck.



Hmm well moving on, at least our reinforcements have no trouble getting over now.


After all that we still haven't seen which of our vulnerable backline provinces that the mantis queen has jumped to. The squad of ~10 enormous clowns we've been sending out should be able to kill a lone, naked, enemy pretender in my dominion at least. We certainly clean up Maybe Mountains.


Our other cleanup force, going to clear the lizard province Greevil's Bog, encounter a little snag though. A little snag in the form of 800 gold of province defence. And this isn't even shitty militia, these are lizard warriors who have some pretty nasty pointed sticks. This is known in the business as a "PD trap" and I sure ran right into it.


We have just one 1st clown, who can't even cast Slapstick Display (because it doesn't do any good vs the pretender) and 10 enormous clowns. At least we have bless scripted this time.


One squad of clowns is on actual bodyguard duty and so sticks around to get jumped by the pretender. We cast a few evocations at her too.


The other squad is distracted by the large number of enemies and decide they'd rather run forward instead of staying back to fight the 12 foot praying mantis. I suppose I should have scripted them to attack large or flyers or something.



We manage to get the pretender to half health with a few lighting bolts but she manages to reach around the enormous bodyguard and snip the head off my only commander causing everybody to rout.



The clowns at the front, despite heroically slaughtering lizards without slapstick magic to protect them still have to retreat without a commander and end up getting picked off.



We lost 20 enormous clowns and 3 mages this turn to the mantises blindsiding us, this is so much worse than the merely inefficient trading that happened last turn. My non-ambushed bughunting squad retreat back to the capital and now we need a large force to overwhelm the lizards. We do at least make sure to patrol on the capital with Pongy and all the enormous clowns we have left to make sure that clown college isn't shut down for even one day. You can see here the Owl Quill research boosters we've been handing out to everybody.


Anglia's force has at least moved away, and our fort is going to finish this turn, so the clowns locked here can go join in now. I can only assume Anglia's force moved north ready to take Fennoscandia's cap.


Back west the mantises do very little damage to the fort of Karanaac so in order to avoid any more trickery we sit tight and what was supposed to be our reinforcements instead wait a turn for their own reinforcements.


Fuck, this turn was a total disaster. I still think that we can beat the mantises though as we have better mages and our elite troops, when blessed and buffed properly, still outclass theirs. Plus we have astral magic which, with a little more research, will really start paying dividends.

For events I don't really talk about them but we get a continuous trickle of a couple of gems per turn and this one is no different. Another unit that you might have seen in the recruitment screens but I never get any of are Acrobats. They seem reasonably decent with really high defence and formation fighter but, again, they're not clowns.