Part 32: Turn 25

Turn 25

Before anything else happens, we get our first throne! 3 water gems is more than our site searching has uncovered so far and the defence skill is going to be vital during hand-to-claw combat with mantises. Hydromancers don't matter too much to us because water 3 doesn't give you a massive amount over our existing water 2 but we'll probably get a couple.


Pongy also does his damn job for once and finds us some more precious air gems.


Eesh this is not what I wanted to see. Mantises are highly mobile and it's going to be extremely annoying to try and catch flying raiders.


First off in the west the mantises chose to try and sweep up all my lands near Karanaac. Makes sense, since I can't reinforce that side nearly as easily. The shitty small mantises from the candle sweep through a small amount of PD easily enough.


Some bigger mantises come in from their lands even further west and jump on Karanaac itself. Because I had clowns building infrastructure last turn I decided not to patrol but I'm confident enough to break siege on this force.


Over in my lands the pretender somehow flew over four provinces to arrive in some undefended lands. She does not fuck around and is an absolute murder machine in melee however like I said last turn she is definitely vulnerable to evocations with only 40-50 hp.



In particular the spell Arcane Bolt is going to be very effective against mantises because they're all magic beings. It's only astral 2 to cast which most clown mages have and they can all get to with a pearl to cast Power of the Spheres. 10 armour-negating magic damage will kill that pretender in only a few hits but as previously noted with Karanaac's god it can be hard to kill flyers before they just run off.


The real hard part however will be catching her. She can almost certainly get to any province I have on this side of the map, although it'll just be hitting at random unless the mantises have enough scouts in my lands. Seriously this is how far she went in one turn!


One of the smaller mantis thugs tries to do the same thing on the small candle but luckily for me bumps into the forces I put there. Jumping onto an enormous clown is generally not what you want to be doing.


There's two things I'm doing to try and beat raiding. First off I have smallish squads retaking the provinces they've taken from me. Breaking siege in Karanaac and a force moving up north. I feel like it wouldn't actually take that many enormous clown bodyguards (with magic weapons no less) on an evocation spamming mage to be able to kill the pretender.



Next up it's important that I take the fight to them. Running in circles in my own lands playing whack-a-mole is a fool's game and I can't win like that. Accordingly I'm moving a large force into the large candle and then onto the caves.


Not being able to take Fenno's cap is pretty unfortunate but I have one last group of UW indies that I might as well try to take this lake nextdoor with. At this point I don't really care if they win or simply stop costing me upkeep.


As you may have seen I used a Clown Paramount to claim the throne with. These guys are in a bit of an awkward middle ground being cap only and better mages than 1st or 13th clowns, but nowhere near as good or expensive as an Ancient Clown. I don't get too many of them but having 1-2 around to be H3 priests is pretty handy. Claiming thrones, casting Divine Blessing to hit every troop with a blessing, and so on. Most of the time though if I can afford an Ancient Clown I'll get those and otherwise just get a First Clown.



Oh one last thing let's look at how the undead are doing. They've pushed Chasos away from their cap and presumably are going to try and break the siege on their throne. Iram however have most of the cap circles provinces on the other side and must be pressuring the cap themselves.