Part 3: Sieeeege!
Sieeeege!
Well, it seems as if most of you want me to go and get magic as soon as possible so Ignatia can bend the game to her will.
"Sounds like a plan to me."Magic is occasionally found in treasure chests, but the more reliable way to get it is by buying it in towns. And since we've only been to one town so far, that means...
... we can only buy one kind of spell.
"This is not exactly the world-shattering magical power I had been hoping for."The people wanted magic, and they'll get magic. Just cast the damn spell already.
"Okay, okay. Alakazim, alakazam, alakabridge!"
I... I have to admit, I was hoping for something a little more impressive than that. Like a shining rainbow of solid light extending across the waters. Or at least a bridge that isn't full of massive knotholes.
"You get what you pay for."
On the bright side, we can now get to that little island.
Profoundly disappointed by lack of pirates here.
The treasure is another cache of 300 gold. Since nobody told us to do otherwise, Ignatia distributes the gold to the peasants again, getting 6 more leadership.
Now, Ignatia, use your newfound wealth to buy more spells! We must build more bridges! More! Demonstrate your amazing magical powers!
"What newfound wealth? I just gave away--"Amazing. Magical. Powers. Demonstrate them. Now.
Hey, what gives? The bridge only went half as far this time! Ignatia, build another one!
"I really don't see what this is achieving."
Waste of a good 100 gold we spent on a useless spell, more like it. Bridges can only extend as far as the edge of the continent's map; try to extend them any further and the spell fails. And while it would undoubtedly be hilarious to cover every single water space on Continentia with bridges, it's probably more practical to just rent a damn boat.
But I don't feel like spending 500 gold on a boat yet, so let's walk east instead.
You've seen all these monsters before. We get 450 gold or so for slaughtering them. Wandering monsters don't respawn, so once a continent is cleared out, it's cleared out for good. Also, 3 militia got killed. That means 15 gold less upkeep at the end of this week!
I suppose I'd better start writing letters to their families.
To whom it may concern,
The premature death of your husband/father/son/secret gay lover saved us five gold worth of provisions this week. His sacrifice will be remembered.
Sincerely--
"I... I think I'd better be the one to write those."
This here is Peasant Way, as the sign would tell us if I could be bothered reading it. It's called Peasant Way because that covered wagon over there...
... is a guaranteed peasant recruitment spot.
"How do they fit two hundred and fifty peasants into a wagon, anyway?"I dunno. How do they fit twenty clowns into a Volkswagen Beetle?
Recruiting an angry mob of eighty peasants might be briefly entertaining, but we have better things to do with our hard-earned money.
Like shopping for new spells in this town!
"Oh boy, Instant Army! I bet I'll be able to summon something awesome!"
Fuck. Castle Azram is in the middle of the desert, which means it'll be a pain to get to for reasons which will become obvious when we get there. Guess we won't be taking on Hack the Rogue just yet.
"Forget about Hack the Rogue! I wanna try out my Instant Army spell!"
That's right, boys and girls, we just blew 1000 gold on nine sprites. The kind of troops you summon with an Instant Army spell depends on your class and rank, and since Ignatia's still a lowly Sorceress, she summons sprites. Once she's promoted to her final rank, this spell will actually be useful.
Maybe we can earn back some of the gold we just wasted by sending our
Skeletons are like zombies, only faster and with slightly less health. Despite wielding big-ass glaives, their attacks are pretty weak. We only earn 450 gold for killing all of these guys.
"Hey, another covered wagon! Maybe we can recruit something that's actually good this time, like nomads!"
Another pack of worthless monsters block our path to some treasure. We get 500 gold or so for putting them down.
Those are some big treasures for this point in the game, and Ignatia can really use the leadership.
Then the game crashed before I saved (it does this a lot, and the fact that I'm running it in an emulator probably doesn't help matters) and when I reloaded there was 200 gold and a shitty mineral deposit in those chests.
That's Castle Vutar, which we heard about in Hunterville. According to our information, it's populated by wandering monsters. (The sign says "Six villains rule Continentia." We've seen the contracts for five of them already.)
See? Monsters. Even if we wanted to fight them, we don't have any siege weapons to attack the castle with. So for now, let's do some more exploring!
"Yay, exploring! Exploring means new towns! New towns mean new spells! New spells mean fiery death to our enemies!"
I don't see what's so perilous about it. It's just a pond.
"Before I decided to take a swim in that pond, they called me Ignatius the Sorcerer."... oh.
Another week passes. This would be a great one if only we'd already found a place to recruit Giants.
"A town! Fiery death, here we come!"
"I observe a distinct shortage of fiery death."Town Gate instantly takes us back to any town we've previously visited. It's actually a great spell later in the game, but not when all the towns we know about are still within walking distance. Also, it can't be used to bring anybody fiery death, and I know you all want to see Ignatia bring fiery death.
Ogres aren't so tough. We'll fight some later this update. Once I have siege weapons and a less shitty army, I might go ahead and take on this castle.
More dwarves! At first I thought this was the group we'd run from last update, but no. Those are still somewhere else, waiting to take us on.
Dwarves are like tougher versions of Gnomes: slow, but strong. Also, there are more
to shoot at us and make our lives miserable.
Once everything but the dwarves have been dealt with, I fall back on my usual strategy of running around in circles shooting at them.
By the time I run out of arrows, there are still two dwarves left. We beat them to death and earn 875 gold.
"Awesome. Now I can build more bridges than ever before."Seriously, though, this is one of the better things you can get out of a chest. More spell capacity is always a good thing, or it will be as soon as we have spells worth casting.
The ugly half-naked guys with the clubs are ogres. If dwarves are the tougher version of gnomes, then ogres are the tougher version of dwarves. Fortunately, they're still as slow as a rock.
That was my second-last arrow. These things can take a beating. After finishing them off (and losing a couple more sprites that I still totally don't care about), we earn 900 gold.
Following the coast further to the west reveals some more monsters and treasure, but nothing particularly new or interesting. We've seen everything there is to see on this island, and so...
... it's time to get ourselves a boat!
This castle just to the north of King's Haven is Castle Nilslag, where Princess Aimola is hiding out. Since we still have no siege weapons and our army is no less shitty than it was before, we're not going to attack just yet. We will, however, deal with those wandering monsters.
Those pointy-eared jokers clad all in green are Elves, and they are the bane of my life. While the enemy's sprites harass my archers so they can't shoot, the elves will shoot at me.
That's barely enough to replace the two archers I lost. Fuck.
"Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main..."Oh, look, more peasants.
I never thought I'd see the day when wolves would be a pleasant surprise, but given the complete lack of useful recruitment spots so far, recruiting some of these is a pretty attractive option right now.
"Our militia forces aren't happy about having to look after all these wolves. They've been... marking their territory... on the troops' bedrolls. Also, they keep trying to eat the sprites whenever they fly too low."Ah, morale. Militia and sprites (and peasants) are in Morale Group A, which is scared of its own shadow. Wolves are in Morale Group D, which means that not much bothers them but sensitive troops will find their presence in our army off-putting. This means that as long as there are wolves in our army, our militia and sprites will fight much less effectively. Since I'm trying to get the militia killed, this is fine by me.
Ooh, a dungeon! This is a recruitment spot for undead and demons.
Our army is too full to accommodate another unit. It's just skeletons, anyway: recruiting them wouldn't be worth the hit to morale that my archers and pikemen would take by having to share sleeping quarters with the living dead.
This sign reads "Wonder Woods."
"I wonder why."
Hey, treasure! That's pretty wonderful alright. Teleport is a combat spell that transports any one unit to any unoccupied position on the map. It's good for getting your own slow troops into battle, or for keeping your enemy's slow troops out of it.
"All in all, I'd prefer fiery death."You would. Tactical spells like Teleport are at least as useful as direct damage, though, if not more so.
If we try to take these on, we will die. Slowly. Trolls regenerate to full health every round if you don't kill them, and we just don't pack enough firepower to kill one every round. Ignatia, it's time to do what you do best.
"Deal out fiery death?"Run away like a little girl.
We sail around to the south side of the island and find some more treasures. Honestly, I'd have preferred a recruitment spot.
Since we're in the vicinity of Castle Maximus and we've gained some leadership, we take the time to stock up on archers and pikemen (but not militia).
Oh, King's Bounty, why must you taunt me with awesome troops that I probably won't find for another three continents?
"It's getting expensive to look after all these troops. The combined cost of army upkeep and boat rental ate up almost half of this week's commission."Well, there's only one way to fix that. Time to send half our army to a glorious death!
"Me and my big mouth."
3000 gold later, our siege weapon icon is now animated and ready to go. If we lose a battle, we lose our siege weapons as well as our army. Let's not do that.
Chaaaarge!
"You want me to order my army to charge a solid iron gate?"Mea culpa. Sieeeege!
I'm sure you can guess which ones are the vampires. I was kind of hoping there'd only be two of them, but I think I can still take on four.
Our situation at the end of round 1. The vampires flew over and killed our sprites, and we lost a few militia to the enemy's sprites (who were killed by the retaliation). Good riddance on both counts.
We focus on attacking everything except the vampires, and by the end of round 2 it's just us and them. Every time they attack, vampires heal themselves by the amount of damage they inflicted, so it's no good just fighting them with one unit at a time. We need to throw everything we've got at them, all at once.
We deal our foes a crushing defeat, only losing three pikemen in the process. Also, we lose most of our militia, but who cares about them?
Now, in case you hadn't noticed, we kind of broke the castle gates when we came in. So we're going to need to garrison it with an army to prevent more monsters wandering in. If we don't, it'll be occupied by monsters again at the end of this week. Fortunately, the garrison doesn't need to be strong: even one peasant will be enough to keep any and all monsters away.
Garrisoning a castle costs a week's salary for the unit you put in there, but each castle you garrison increases your commission per week and your score, so it's worth doing. Now, if only we had a cheap, worthless unit that we could afford to get rid of.
Well, would you look at that. I was trying to save the sprites for this, but these will do just as well.
"Farewell, noble heroes... er, stalwart fighters... uh, guys with swords. If any more vampires come, just fire arrows... er, close the gates... oh, I give up. Figure something out on your own."We're doing them a favour, you know. Now they don't have to be around those wolves any more.
Speaking of wolves, here's our current army. I'm going to need to restock before taking on any more castles.
And here's Ignatia's current stats. Putting those eleven militia in Castle Vutar increased our weekly commission by about 200 gold: not bad. Also, we now have 12 points.
"We'd have more if you weren't letting our troops get killed left and right."Next time on Let's Play King's Bounty:
"Yay! Fiery death!" "I find myself regretting my choice of hero."