Part 41: Turn 33

Turn 33

A few small battles out of the way first, we kill those lake rebels that weren't even the scary feebleminding chasos rebels and were instead villains. I've said it before but villains are one of the worst independent troop in the game and the Armless Woman could probably have killed them all on her own by summoning a few skeletons.


Our prophet continues taking the weakly defended provinces. These troops retreated here so were stuck with only PD leaders instead of real ones so it's nice to mop these up before the AI can collect them all up again.


Our force coming through the caves managed to stumble over what looks like 30+ PD. I have no idea if Giacomo or just the AI decided to dump this in but I can't possibly imagine that it was a good plan.
It goes about as as you'd expect - turns out that thunder strike is a really good spell and hellblessed giant clowns are a really good unit!



We take one of the mantis forts too, the battle is the same as you've seen dozens of times before - clowns get buffed, charge forwards, and blender anything they come into contact with.
The mantises try to stall at the gate for a bit with phantasmal warriors but our choice of magic weapon bless once again pays off and we breeze through them. Honestly I was pretty on the fence about taking the bless going into this game instead of spell penetration but it's really impressed me.



A new prophet announcement from U:


We hit enchantment 4 this turn and it gives us 3 great benefits. First off Cloud Trapeze which gives our clown thugs an incredible amount of mobility. Having a half dozen powerful mages trapeze into your lands in a single turn is really hard to deal with.


Mystery Performance is another way to cause unrest in the lands of enemies with order dominion.


Finally we get one thing I've been promising for a long time: Dark Clowns! (shown here in a turmoil 3 province)


Their cruel jokes are a 0 (plus a dice roll) armour-negating hit and then cause fear, the oversized mallet is a brutal hit on a single target, and of course we've seen the comically large kick before. The mallet and their high attack makes them great at repelling and of course having fear-causing clowns sprinkled in among the regular ones makes our opponents much more likely to run away sooner. The fact that they're 4 death gems and a mage turn for 1 means we won't be massing them anytime soon but we absolutely will be putting a few in all our armies going forward.


Back in Greevil's Bog we're half way through our first lizard shaman. Definitely the first one. Don't remember any others.


Clearly the populace in the province are just as excited because some kind of elven treasure was uncovered! Coupled with another smaller event that's in incredible two thousand gold. Two thousand! Maybe luck scales are good after all. We start another Ancient Clown and build a new temple in our cave throne - still with enough money left over for another two Ancient Clowns! This is great!



Right we found the massive mantis army south of us - nearly 200 of them and mostly the good ones at that. To deal with that we're going to need all the clowns at our disposal so our two cave forces are going to meet up, on top of a tiny force of mantises.


Now you may remember the last time I tried to join two armies together on top of an enemy force with another nearby:
but this time both of our forces are massive and the enemy one is small so we should be good, probably.

We also go kill Burning Man again. It'll be like a memorial for the Emerald Impaler!


Got my next big cave force coming through, again potentially ready to turn around if needed.


This is the province that Anglia cleared of indies for us and is apparently giving back? There's some soldiers in it now? Anyway I'm sending just one Armless Woman ready to summon a bunch of skeletons so it's not an incredible loss if it turns out to be a betrayal after all.