Part 15: Turn 10

Turn 10

I don't like showing the turn summary normally, I find it quite samey. However this once I'll make an exception:


We finally got that bump we were hoping for! Although it was in a province that was very cold, and only slightly chaotic. Hmm. Well first we get to see Eljudnir's army fight some shitty indies, hopefully it'll soften them up a bit.


Nope, never mind they didn't lose anybody. From the battle report we see that they have 26 wraiths, 1 generic commander, and 1 Demiwrath who is Eolian the irreplaceable starting hero we discussed previously. It's turn 10 so Eolian has a reasonable amount of XP now and certainly isn't the pushover he starts as.

So the fight! We see the 28 enemy lined up and facing them are 8 giant clowns, 9 jugglers, 7 unicyclists, and So Intense In His Cuckoo Hostility the lion tamer prophet. Additionally I hadn't noticed last turn but this is a cave province so it's dark. The undead aren't affected by that but I am incredibly glad that I went with lowlight vision instead of poison resistance (I'm sure absolutely no way will that bite me later).



The province is cold 3 and turmoil 1 which means that the average wraith has attack 13 and defence 17 while the average enormous clown has attack 14 and defence 13. 1 on 1 sure a clown would slaughter the wraiths but here in the cold and dark I'm suddenly not at all convinced that 8 clowns can simply land enough hits.



The battle starts as you'd expect with both sides blessing up - undead only have sacred commanders note, their troops are not.


The fight starts with the unicyclists rushing forward trying to get to the back but actually running right into the mass of wraiths. They do not last long at all. RIP those brave boys, they served me well. The undead commander has actually rushed forward into the large mass of large clowns though that's really good for me.


The unicyclists all die quickly, then the wraiths and giant clowns close with each other. The undead generic commander is still managing to hold off the clowns with his 19 defence. Our prophet starts to banish the undead too which don't really kill any but it does stun them.


The generic undead commander is finally killed and you can see some unicyclist skeletons have risen from the corpses and are buffing out the undead numbers. I actually think they help me because it spreads out the wraiths a little


The fight does not go well for me, 1 enormous clown is dead and I killed only 3 wraiths. You can also see that an enormous clown leaves behind an enormous corpse to reanimate BUT since it's not sacred it's a puny size 4 and we can actually still stomp on it comically.



But what's this? Two enormous clowns have broken away from the pack!


Oh...oh YES


Get owned, irreplacable hero and the last undead commander on the battlefield!

With all their leadership gone the wraiths file off the battlefield although those hero clowns find themselves unfortunately right in the way


They do not make it out


The final results:


I really thought we were going to lose that for a moment there. I repeat,

For all my talk about using a bump as an opportunity for war given how easily we could have lost there I immediately talk to Eljudnir's player and agree our current borders. I would be throwing away all my forces if I tried to push the advantage into the cold dominion.

Having said that though we do get access to the peninsular and to cut the undead off from it


Our fort in Jessinka's Oasis is finishing this turn and so we construct a lab too - from next turn we'll be able to start recruiting research mages.


It's a good thing too, because Ssason'raha the mantis nation has outbid us for Obscuro and so we're back down to an incredible 0 research on turn 10. At this point I regret recruiting only the slow(ish) to recruit clown mages but I mean what else am I playing Kirkostaculis for? Pongy is site searching now and while I had previously dismissed his research as less important than the gems we still haven't finished one single level of research, not one! I really hope he finds lots of gems that we can turn into research boosters to make it worth it.


Finally we're sending a scout over to Karanaac's lands this turn. How are we doing that when they're half way across the map you ask? That's right it's time to talk about this map's gimmick, the candles. Not dominion candles although that ambiguity did come up several times when talking to the other players. This map is surrounded by 4 large candles which all connect to each other, so that once you get onto one you can very quickly cross the whole map in just 1 or 2 provinces. Although they do look pretty sickly when parts of them are in "snow" and parts of them aren't.


The most important candle right now though is the southmost one, Wax of Waywinkle. It joins mine and Karanaac's lands directly with just two moves! There's a boosted force of Troglodytes and earth gnomes (i.e. earth elementals) and this would be pretty scary to your average human nation who would literally get trampled all over. However it's actually a piece of cake for giant clowns - their size 5 against the trog's size 4 means we even get double damage kicks against them! Karanaac could also just teleport past them but it would be a real galaxy brain play for Karanaac to have predicted that I would potentially fight them like this. Plus I'd much rather fight them in my chaotic dominion than in their presumably order one (they need the gold).


So our scout is just going to see what's what, we're not committing any forces yet. U has said they're going to attack the rocks this turn, we'll see how that goes.

Finally we've been quietly recruiting a nice little lake force. It's cost a reasonable amount of our valuable valuable gold on troops that I've previously described as "shitty" and "absolutely not worth spending any gold at all on", not to mention "fucking useless". I just have to hope that once we take the first lake province we'll be able to recruit some better ones. They start their march to the lake this turn (they don't even start next to it).


update from discord: