Part 42: Turn 34

Turn 34

Our sitesearching efforts continue, unhindered (or unchanged rather) by Pongy marching off to war.


Back on the central candle we have some more mantis thus running around our lands. They're the smaller ones, and are ungeared, but they can still trivially clear up a few points of PD and so are going to be very annoying to catch. I just hope the AI isn't smart enough to beeline to the lizard province again...


In the Nethermines in the caves we once again sweep through a bunch of smaller mantises. A clown still died though, how embarrassing for it.


In Karanaac's sieged fort we did actually get a breakout! I didn't think that this was going to happen but I guess the rocks must have gotten the adventurer event, and also been recruiting an indie commander or two. The Singing Stones there are very interesting when playing Karanaac because they, like the bigger troop rocks and the Ancient Cromlech, not actually immobile. In practice this means when storming forts (or breaking siege) as rocks you generally have just 1-2 commanders and then 30+ communion slaves. It's one reason the marverni mages are so good on the nation because it lets you actually use your communions properly.


Speaking of breaking sieges we kill Burning Man again. Despite his recouperation he's got a few afflictions and probably isn't having a super fun time any more. Still this will keep on happening until we finally kill off the last few priest rocks. Wait only 16 enormous clowns? God fucking dammit we left our troops behind again didn't we! Fuck! It's being increasingly revealed that I'm not actually good at this game. My clowns are too busy to play shuttle so I'm just going to recruit an indie commander in that province and he can carry the troops to where they need to go.


Karanaac, in fact, express their displeasure at us. This message has always fascinated me because human players can only send messages to arrive the next turn but the AI get to send messages that arrive on the same turn as the action that triggered it.


The entire nation rejoices. Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar, God of Kirkostaculis, Lord of Madness, Prince of the Rock, Gardener of Happiness, Eater of Filth has broken free. Imprisoned pretenders usually arrive on turn 36ish, so it's very nice that ours arrived early. I've previously mentioned how badly we want earth and nature magic for forging and Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar has them in spaces. First off he makes a Dwarven Hammer or two to make our Owl Quill forging more efficient - we're running low on air gems.


As for our orders this turn, in the spirit of stomping out the rocks we're going to quickly take the adjacent fort. It's got a temple and some rocks in, so it's as good a target as any. Note also the dozen enormous clowns still refusing to move. Has the Emerald Impaler's show funeral not yet finished?


In the caves I'm not sure where the large mantis force bugged off to but now we have unified ours we're going to go on the offensive again. This force is positioned to take either the throne or the mantis's cap itself.


Our new lizard shaman is going to the safety of the capital IMMEDIATELY I can't risk another snipe like the last one. Our next squad of roughly 20 enormous and one ancient clowns are heading over to the other side of the map (and/or the Anglian border).


Looking over the map back to the central candle to where the mantis thugs took beat our guards there's something a little odd about the map:

It just so happened this turn that a group of trolls tried to take over the province and killed both thugs! I would be incredibly mad if my marauding thugs got sniped by an event that would have hit my opponent.

Taking a look at the undead they've managed to, with U, push Iram back off undead lands up to the Iramian fort. Having said that Iram has a pretty large force there so who knows what's going on.


Let's see what discord is saying at this point about the conflict: