Part 39: Turn 32

Turn 32

First up we push the mantis force off of the Karnaaac fort. It's fairly uneventful (arcane bolt, lightning bolt, comically enormous boots) except that we only have half the clowns that I was expecting to be there. Once again all the troops that were being commanded by a now-dead commander (in this case the Emerald Impaler himself) were accidentally left behind. I have really got to stop doing it! In this case it wasn't too much of a big deal even though 3 enormous clowns is a bit higher of a loss than I would like.


On the candle network our new reinforcements come in and re-secure the connection between mantis lands and ours. The mantises seem to be mostly out of the big ones, either that or the AI has decided that the tiny ones are a better buy (they are not). Pongy, having left behind the site searching business, still manages to do very little although he casts Divine Blessing and when we need it will be able to cast Storm (and has the gems to do so).


One more battle this turn, in the mostly undefended Karanaac itself. Oh dear, I guess the mantises must have had one more big flying thug left that they flew over like 3 provinces again--wait what?


Uh, this I was not expecting. The rocks only have 4 provinces total but all (recruitable) rocks are priests so I guess it makes sense that they'd have a bunch of holy levels sitting around. Burning Man is crippled and has lost a point of fire magic but beats 1 point of PD very easily. Urgh fine we'll go kill him. Again. This will just keep happening unless we do actually kill off the rocks and they've got a bunch of temples so praying them down isn't going to be easy either.


With Pongy called off to war, site searching has been left to Danu the Armless Woman and Coco the First Clown. Danu finds a death site that comes with a free skeleton (she immediately summons 4 of her own to kill it).



Coco finds absolutely the best site we've seen so fair, just 2 provinces away from Kirkostaculis. 2 air AND 1 earth is great I love it.


He is going to continue doing a better job than Pongy, and then we also go to kill that force of Chasos indies that have been sitting happy for about 10 turns now.


Anglia did actually move all their forces out of the province they said they'd give us so Danu is going to try and pick it up. We also move a bunch of forces to secure the throne on that side, a level 1 fort with no troops would last no more than 1 turn against that massive Anglian force down there.


We continue to take mantis cave land, I want that throne!


With our big force we'll just storm the mantis fort. I'm a bit concerned because there's a 100-strong mantis force somewhere we lost track of, and then also a 70-strong one down here. However we broke this fort reasonably quickly so I'm assuming they're not in here. Oh well, nothing that can't be solved by an overwhelming application of clowns and it's not like trying to peel rocks out of forts.


Speaking of, in Pretender's Folly I don't want to try and storm it with half our clowns missing and I'm not worried about rocks trying to break siege so most of the forces continue south while Nougat the First Clown heads back to pick up the Emerald Impaler's forces. The defenders of that fort have had about 5 different armies go back and forth over their heads at this point.


The last of the recruitable troops, Knife Throwers, are pretty good! They have a longer range than jugglers do and piercing damage has bonus armour penetration.