Part 64: Turn 54
Turn 54As with probably every turn from now on, let's check those juicy mindhunt reports!
Success! Sadly it doesn't tell us who is who but checking the battle report from last time we can see that Frederick is the regular engineer-mage, and Marcus wasn't in the battle report - possibly a scout? I hope he was carrying gems! Marcus might not even have been Anglia's scout, although it does sound like a pretty Anglian name. Random scouts from other nations trying to get a peek at what's going on and ending up with their brains fried instead of an Anglian mage is going to be a pretty persistent occurrence going forward probably.
Anyway the Great Engineer and the King Of Mountains continue onto the next province, not even bothering to leave anybody behind to siege. They're really not achieving anything by doing this, just like before I'm going to simply retake the provinces behind them. I fire off a few more mind hunts at them, with 2 having boosted magic pen..
Look who shows up just behind their heels though! That's right it's our old friend Burning Man! If only he'd been one turn sooner Anglia could have taken care of him for us. I wonder if they're coordinating
. You can also see in this screenshot that U has taken the candle province and is on their way to Anglian lands.
The main other event this turn is still to come though! Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar once again is jumping onto the main Anglian force. His script is Magic Duel x2, Earthquake x2, and Returning. The plan is to, once again, jump in to kill the astral mages and hopefully some troops this time before jumping out again. We don't really have any good battlefield clearing spells yet, the best being Heat From Hell but that takes ages to do anything so earthquaking it is.
And here he is with his new lightning resist items! 26 protection, 30 shock resistance, a bit of fire, and slash/pierce resistance. The storm spool item also has a chance to zap any melee attackers with lightning.
The first magic duel fires off! And misses. I didn't know there was going to be a patch just a few days after this that fixes it.
The second! Also misses. Fuck.
Okay well we still have the earthquakes! The first of those kills 16 units, out of Anglia's 250 or so.
Well hopefully that wounded lots of units and the second will finish them off. The second earthquake coming...any second now... wait I guess he's really sleepy after the first one.
Unlike the king of mountains, Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar isn't actually a very good earth mage. Also because I wasn't planning on sticking around I didn't even bother casting Summon Earthpower which both boosts earth more and gives some reinvigoration to recover from fatigue better. Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar decides that it's time for a nap and the melee troops start closing in. Luckily Anglia's hail of bullets, which can't hurt us, thins the troops out.
Okay the fatigue has gone back down again, time for the next spell in the script: another earthquake. Please? Or just going straight to Returning, I don't mind. It's pretty clear this is a bust. Uh oh he's instead gone off script this is not good. He keeps casting random spells to kill a handful of troops at a time but it's not going to be enough.
At least Anglia are going to have a real hard time killing him but I wish he'd cast Astral Shield or Fire Shield which I didn't think to script because I didn't think he'd be in a long fight. Eventually he reaches for the most dangerous spell an earth/astral mage has access to: Gifts From Heaven. This inaccurate spell calls down massive rocks but you have to be quite careful with it because otherwi-
Hmm. Not the ideal outcome. As I said last time though, since his bless is not incarnate and we have a lot of H3 priests this doesn't really set us back especially far. The main thing we lose is the Eyes Of God global so we don't have perfect information on provinces or graphs any more. I was not this calm about it at the time.
Given that our main force is still between Anglia and our cap, and all our powerful clowns are also very powerful priests it's time for them to sit there and call back their god. Sure would be nice if I had a prophet right about now. It also looks like they managed to intercept a small raiding force? Either that or a missclick from Anglia. Our counter-raiding clown starts his attack this turn too.
Elsewhere we cleaned up a few more inconsequential provinces
Our main anti-mantis force is going to come back south and finish off these annoying stragglers. This force not having a H3 priest is pretty annoying but we don't have very many especially on this side of the world.
Our force taking this cave throne breaks the walls down this turn but I notice at the last minute it's actually out of air gems for arrow fend. That could have been very bad! A bearded woman is quickly nipping down with some and we can storm (the fort) next turn.
Still it's not all grim war, it's important to still have some fun in these trying times.
