Part 65: Turn 55
Turn 55Mind hunt reports coming in: we bounce off Oreigenes twice, and the Great Engineer once, but then the second on on him hits the mark! The King of Mountains is now the only commander left in this province and we're firing off 5 mind hunts at him this time. Mind Hunt is just really effective at neutralising raiding forces like this that don't have astral mage support. We spend 2 pearls per hunt, have an income of +15, and don't have to manage orders or scripting or anything - just point and shoot. I love it.
Jellybean the Clown Paramount's attempt at raiding is much more successful than his predecessor's and he isn't ambushed by 90+ gems of summons - instead wiping out 1 gold of PD.
There does appear to be an Anglian force that might follow him and clean up his mess BUT it doesn't look very strong. No mage support at all.
For now we're going to keep moving forward but if that force does indeed chase us we could turn around on it. When raiders kill the anti-raiding force, that's when things start to get real annoying. We could even teleport in more large clowns, something that is much less effective when done with a size 2 Anglian.
Anglia's main force maneuvers south to kill 1 gold of PD also. It's been reinforced with a third minor astral mage, but still nothing substantial. If only our god were awake we could jump it again easily!
Speaking of, I see no reason for our main force to do anything but sit here and Call God for another turn. If Anglia's force continues to move west then we will need to protect our cap but for now we're fine. A small force splits off to take some of the nearby provinces but they'll come back to the main army next turn probably. The force is mostly enormous clowns with some normal ones and some dark ones.
Now we have gems it's time to get our cave throne (Of Water) back! 20 enormous clowns with a few powerful mages should be more than enough.
The mantis raids are getting really desperate now!
Also our tiny enormous force cleans up another province.
We kick them off their old cap now too. Look who just woke up!
Anyway we take more casualties than I would like, mostly because of the dubious bless coverage, but do kill them all except the god who flies off never to be seen again since there's no provinces for her to retreat into.
As the AI likes to do we receive this message shouting at us. It's pretty much the opposite reaction to the one that the person playing them had.
The mantises are really low on provinces now, god what a slog. But disaster! U has jumped in to vulture a few! I really don't want U to have a foothold (as it were) over here. I message them and agree to trade one of our border provinces for this one. It's not a good solution, and I'm quite unhappy with how big U have got, but if they were to join Anglia in attacking me I would 100% lose so we'll have to stick with uneasy negotiations for now. I hope they're going to start using that candle I gave them to fight Anglia soon.
U also claims a new throne, the one next to us that had all those fire snakes on. This only puts them at 4 points out of 14 required but they're probably sitting on a few unclaimed ones too. For reference, Chasos has 6 points, Anglia 2, and we have 2 also.
Finally we finally hit conjuration 6 this turn! Conj 6 is a pretty big research breakpoint with some goodies like Great Eagles (very efficient patrollers and seigers), Bishop Fish (the only source of H3 priests for some nations), some troll kings, the ether warriors, and lamias.
It also contains a special bonus goody for us: Transcendental Clowns! They're 6 pearls per unit, and require S3A1 which is pretty achievable with both expensive cap clowns or cheap mages with a booster or two.
They have chaos power 2 so in turmoil 3 (or 75+ unrest) they have +6 to all stats! The +2 to unrest per clowns per turn helps with that too. With our bless added on, they're terrifying monsters and their jokes weaken everybody in a small area. However they're not that much better than enormous clowns (other than having Awe) and our pearls are in pretty short supply so I won't really get too many of them. If I'd had gotten conj 6 early then they would have been a lot more effective.
