Part 59: Turn 49
Turn 49Anglia raiding us, and our counter-raids, continue as normal in the various provinces around Kirkostaculis. Luckily I didn't have to find out this turn whether just 3 enormous clowns could beat 20+ draconians. There's always next turn!
It turns out that one of our counter-raid forces didn't have a clown available to lead them so an Armless Women was given the job. She doesn't have any of the clown buffs or lightning evocations available but is a H1 mage so is perfectly capable of blessing small numbers and as a D2 mage can throw quite a few skeletons to get in the way of the enemy too.
This is just 1 point of PD, no problem.
Clowns are on bodyguard duty to ensure her safety, and skeletons will go harass the enemy.
But what's this?
Hmm.
HMMMMMM well fuck. That was absolutely just lazy scripting on my part, if she'd been at the back instead of in the default central position she would have been fine. The enormous clowns all survive but they're scattered in random provinces so I task a commander with tracking them all down and bringing them back into the fight.
Anglia's Ether force enters my lands proper but they're still 2 provinces away from my cap. One of them gets shot in the back by a buddy.
And their main force swings by Kirkostaculis. Since there's only a few mages and a dozen recruited enormous clowns there the walls are breached instantly. I will obviously follow with my forces but I don't actually think they'll storm this turn.
Since the backup force can't get onto the cap I think this force will meet up with the backup force in one of the adjacent provinces, in e.g. Plains of the Blood Turkey that the draconians are currently in. Our counter-raiding force will continue north to retake the lands on the border with Chasos, that peninsula that we fought so hard for against the undead so long ago. There is also a little diplomacy this turn as Chasos asks us for permission to take some of these border provinces that Anglia is currently occupying in exchange for sending assassins into Anglian lands. I can't really say no as it would be certain death if anybody joined the war against me and hopefully the assassins will make even a little difference. Having Anglia take these lands and then to not immediately take them back was indeed a big show of weakness on our part.
Here you can see the confused and lost enormous clowns that I'll have to collect up at some point.
Enough of this ineffectual back-and-forth footsie with Anglia though, let's watch Bongo kick some ass! The Anglians brought with them some ghost mercs and some normal ones, and also a handful of boars, presumably those were what gave the final push to break the walls down.
On our side we have a good number of knife throwers and pie throwers on the walls, as well as some acrobats to guard them.
Our non-wall-defender forces are just these two bearded ladies and the cubes that they've been frantically summoning. In total the 6 cubes have 50 hp each, the ladies and the shades about 10 each, making the total about 350ish. I am summing these for no reason in particular.
Bongo, of course, has the funny HP. Or attempts to anyway, it doesn't quite go all the way up due to his age. Happens to us all.
The ghosts run forward and start fighting the wall defenders who are mostly unbuffed (other than bless) so the ghost magic weapons do actually start to cause a good bit of harm.
Meanwhile all the non-ethereal troops charge forward and meet our water elemental summons and cubes.
It's pretty costly for Anglia but they do manage to eventually mince up the cubes into, uh, smaller cubes? A thin coating of jelly on the ground?
Meanwhile, as predicted, Bongo is having the time of his life stomping on all the artillery.
He's taking only tiny hits while regenning it all back up every turn.
There's unfortunately two things I failed to consider:
1) Bongo has no poison resist, since Anglia has no poison damage.
Now normally this wouldn't be a problem but in fact Anglia did actually bring along one nature indie mage they got from somewhere, who was spamming Swarm. Normally this STILL wouldn't be a problem but for whatever reason this game wasn't running the JBBM mod, which most of our current mods games put in. This means that Swarm summons a number of bugs that deal armour-penetrating poison damage and some of them got some pretty nasty hits in.
Even this Bongo probably would have been able to recover from with his pretty big regeneration, except that 2) the total non-wall-defender HP left on the battlefield was now down to about 50ish out of 400 which was enough to start triggering morale checks. Note also that while I own all of the provinces around, this is a siege defence so there is no retreating even if you can fly. Bongo decides that the joke can't have been that funny after all and it's not worth it, and flies off (on nearly full HP!) never to be seen again.
The way that the Bongo summon spell works is that you can only ever use it once, there's no resummoning Bongo. He's not actually dead, even if the game disagrees and it's reported as such on the summary screen. I might be able to wish for him should the game go long enough.
We lose the throne with its bonus to our bless as well as the total of 4 water and 1 death gems from the province overall. Fuck! FUCK! This was pretty sloppy of me, I am 100% certain I could have won this battle with better scripting of e.g. a cast of Heat From Hell or even just Fire Shield to roast the bugs or just brought an actual force instead of Bongo and some random shit. I might even have won it had I just not summoned the mostly-useless cubes that did nothing but swing the HP totals against me by dying! I have got to start paying more attention in my scripting if I want to actually win this. Fuck!
On the other side of the world we kill all the large bugs, whatever. The battle was pretty uneventful and kind of a let-down from a war we've been in a full 50% of the game instead of applying our efforts to the real threat.
We quickly go about taking all the remaining provinces while the bulk of our forces start their long journey back east.
Our powerful fire mage of a god is pouring about 100 fire gems into a cast of Transmute Fire, which should give us a few thousand gold that we can solve our mage shortage with. We still have 15 air quills going unused and have started to build up our stockpile of astral boosters that we'll need once we hit thau 5 research.
All in all, while I'm pretty unhappy with how this turn went, none of the losses were insurmountable. We still have our cap pumping out our incredibly powerful (and large) mages and troops and all we need to do is to beat Anglia's one main force and then we'll start taking land from them starting with Fennoscandia. It's looking dire, certainly, but we're absolutely not out yet.