Part 72: Turn 60

Turn 60

Last turn we were attacked by a giant monster named Trito. Despite Anglia's attempt to boost his magic resistance we're firing off five mind hunts with boosted magic penetration. Roughly 40-50 gems went into each set of mind hunting gear although the Steel Ovens helped a lot of course. Trito might stand up to a few hunts but 5? I like my odds.

Okay try 1: not Trito. Not ideal but now that we've gotten rid of the scout we still have 4 left to slam into the monster.


Try 2: also not Trito.


Tries 3 and 4: oh come on



Try 5: I mean that's a bit more like it. Fuck. To make matters worse I'm not actually sure where Trito flew off to. He's absolutely not dead, or stealthy, but I really don't know where he went.



Anglia cast another global this turn, and it's one of the best - Dark Skies. Trying to invade into somebody with Dark Skies up is brutal because even though our extremely smart low-light vision bless means we don't care about the darkness we DO care about the -8 or so to morale for all units. Consider your normal morale 12 guy: he's fine, braver than usual, might get spooked seeing his friends die. But under Dark Skies? He's morale 5, at best, and is so cowardly that simply being in a small enough squad will see him flee. If you then combine this with battlemagic like wailing winds, earthquake, bloodletting or what have you, it basically means you can't be invaded without a massive amount of preaching investment first. It even works on the map layer so makes enemies more susceptible to seduction, looming hell, melancholia, and other ritual attacks. It's a problem. It's not quite so bad for us because clowns have Really Good morale - 15 base, if you remember I had a spare bless point so took +morale giving my bless +2 total, and then also most of our clowns are experienced enough to get another 1 or 2.


There was a battle in the magic phase! Anglia has started cloud trapezing counter-raiders onto our wandering clowns. I don't know if Faery Queens are technically elemental royalty but they are certainly of a similar powerlevel being a conj 8 summon. This one has some half-assed gear and more importantly enough nature gems to spam swarm a bunch. Note that this game wasn't actually running JBBM (it was the last of the mod games not to) so this is still the pre-nerf swarm that summons an absolute shitload of tiny bugs including some ants with armour-negating stings. Vanilla swarm is notorious for being able to assassinate effectively most single commanders.



Because it's not a true assassination, Jellybean is able to flee from the bugs and because Anglia haven't been diligent about cleaning up these provinces then he was even able to successfully retreat and be no worse for the experience! Most Clowns Paramount have fire magic and casting fire shield would have made this kind of thing much easier to deal with. Unfortunately Jellybean doesn't have fire magic or an AOE weapon so can't really stand up to 20 bugs. Lucky that Dark Skies was up or he might have fought to the death!



We do at least know that the Queen has no more gems so that means we could probably just kill them if they can't cast swarm! Time for a rematch (jk the Queen is really unlikely to stick around).


Meanwhile the Anglia cleanup is still belatedly happening. Maybe Jellybean should just kill these guys.


As for normal battles, Nudge the Clown Paramount does start his journey but pretty quickly realises that the only way to go is a big fort so I guess he'll just turn around and join the siege with his friends.



Meanwhile our Karanaac-based forces clean up some AI or mind-hunted trash.



We're mostly just gathering forces in this area ready to retake this cave throne on this side.


Meanwhile Anglia's own raiding force of mercs go stand on our secondary fort next to Kirkostaculis.


Our big force is finally reaching Fennoscandia this turn!


I seriously have no idea where that Tarresque has gone so instead I'm just mind hunting (and then attacking into) this force sitting on my fort.



There's still this massive force here which is concerning. It looks like it's heading back east to either pressure my cap or to attempt to save Fennoscandia?


I take another look through my spells list and there are TWO we haven't cast yet! The first, Construct Little Pie Factory, finally finally lets us start to recruit first and thirteenth clowns outside our cap. It would be nicer if we had more money of course but it's still good.


The second is Strongman Transformation. Now prior to the game I had decided that this spell was pretty useless. Clowns get no earth magic and every pretender is old enough that when they turn into a strongman they turn into an incredibly wizened one and take incredible stat penalties, not to mention probably dying a winter or two into the game. However turns out it's good when you happen to get random indie earth mages like these Crystal Mages. It's cheap too so I'm going to have a bunch of E2S2 strongmen!