Part 37: Turn 30

Turn 30

Flush with our victory after killing Fennoscandia's god last turn, we ran right into the large force on Karanaac. Our forces were, as usual, 40 enormous clowns, some mages, the Emerald Impaler, and we even have the last dozen jugglers and the last unicyclist from our starting army.


We're against about the same number of good mantises, then the same number again of chaff mantises. The good ones have 14 attack and 20 defence versus our clowns' 15 attack and 17 defence. That throne really makes a difference! The mantises also have 2 small air/fire thugmages, 1 death, and 1 big one.



Both sides rush forwards while their respective mages unleash thunder strikes. The difference however is that mantises have only 20 hp on their good troops, whereas this enormous clown with his 67 just shrugged off a direct hit to the face.


The clowns and mantises engage and you can see a few of the clowns have been hit with a Coordinate Magic Display to allow them to dodge a mantis hit. Our formation is also slightly flatter so we get a small temporary surround on the very first mantis troops


The mantis' death mage also helps us out with a few shadowblast casts.


The mantis mages wisely do not jump into the enormous clown bodyguards, preferring to sit back and cast. The smaller ones, not able to cast thunder strike, instead waste their time summoning illusions. Against normal giants they'd be an okay roadblock but against clowns with 3 magic weapon attacks a round they just disappear instantly. Honestly this bodes well for a future war against Chasos.


Before long it's just over. The mantis mages all fly off and we win the day with surprisingly few losses! This really is just a DPS race, these battles finish very quickly.


With that out of the way our other force is also moving up through the caves.


Our events are pretty good this turn, 800 gold and a Lore Master. These guys are cool but also it's paths we already have so he's going straight to the cap and is going to join Esteban and Diana in the library. That room must be hell.


One more event this turn, looks like we lost the game. Sorry everybody, LP over, time to go home.













Nah it's just a bug that the defeated message now mentions your god every time regardless of who actually dies. What actually happened was that Anglia successfully stormed Fennoscandia's cap. There's only about 70 troops remaining so either it was a costly battle or Anglia's other army didn't bother to turn up and it was not at all a costly battle. One of the two. You can see that Fennoscandia would actually still have a province left except it got hit by one of the Chasos indie attacks.


On that side we have another clown force (the one that took the lizard province) continuing to move down to the candle and/or our Anglian border. They've got a lot of land, good scales, and Kitfox is not a remotely threatening neighbour so I'm definitely starting to get concerned. I've now switched to recruiting Bearded Ladies instead of Armless Women mostly just because of the reduced gold cost. One of the water randoms is making some rings of water breathing for me so we can try a second strategy to get underwater - it can hardly go worse than the first.


Our two huge clown forces charge into mantis lands. We'll take the mantis cave fort, then swing back around to take their throne. Given our outstanding performance in Karanaac I'm confident that my biggest force has got this.


I also reach out to the mantis player this turn, offering peace for their only throne. I would really like not to be in a hellwar for the next 20 turns when I have more threatening neighbours I'd like to deal with. I got this reply:

Sigh. 20 turns of fighting an AI that doesn't understand peace deals it is. I just hope nobody backstabs me while I'm doing it!

In our research we hit evocation 5 this turn, the main prize being Storm. The anti-flyers and anti-missile effects are nice don't get me wrong but the main reason we want to cast this is that it enables the other spell Summon Storm Power, enabling every one of our First Clowns (and also the Clowns Paramount and Ancient Clowns of course) to cast Thunder Strike.


Evocation 5 also gives us Orb Lightning, a nice thing for lower level air mages to do when I'm not going all out with Storm, Shadow Blast for Armless Women, and Stellar Cascades/Astral Geyser for generic astral damage spells. They're all good, but not thunder-strike-in-a-storm good. Next research is to go up enchantment to level 4 for reasons I won't go into just yet.


Another unit we'll never see in game is the Sideshow. We're just far too poor to ever spend any gold on things that aren't our main attractions: clowns or clown accessories (for example research).