Turn VII: Man, **** Elephants
Let's see, a response from R'lyeh and me taking on the elephants. We'll read what the sea-dwellers had to say first.
Hm. Purple prose. Translated into basic English, he's saying he'll stay under the water and I can stay above it. Besides that, as we'll see on the map screen, his kraken has moved on, which was my real concern.
Time to go off on a tangent here, at this point I've only made diplomatic contact with three nations.
Marverni: I wanted to make early negotiations with another player right off the bat, and since at the time he was the only person who used our IRC channel regularly (Immac got on now and then but for some reason wasn't on for the first few days of the game), he was my only option. Between that we were starting near each other and that he was the only guy I had to talk to, we agreed to not murder each other just yet, even though we were also open to that we would eventually try to plant knives in each other's backs. However, I thought his starting position was in the northwest part of the map; instead, it turned out that he was more or less right outside of my peninsula, cutting off one of two ways to expand.
R'lyeh: No real talk with them beyond "you stay below the sea, I'll stay above it". Works for me; the less I have to deal with his mindblasters for now, the better.
Caelum: We talked a bit into the game, he revealed that he was south of me and also knew where I was. We decided not to fight each other; while he said in his update that his archers would mess up my glamour troops, I honestly cared more about his mammoths, since I can cast Air Shield on my Vanir to stop arrows, but trampling would break the glamour. Either way, we agreed to not kill each other as well, although we didn't talk much after that.
So, I have someone to my west I'm not fighting, and someone to my south I'm not fighting, and the only ways to go are to the south and the west. I decided that I would expand southwest, between them, and go from there. Can you guess the problem with this plan? It took me a couple of turns to realize it.
Answer: Southwest leads right into an impassable mountain range. After claiming my territory I have nowhere to expand to, since I don't want to kill either of my neighbors just yet. Whoops.
Anyway, let's take a look at that battle. There's no way it could have gone bad, right? I mean, we got past the horrible failure phase of this game for me-
...Dammit. Okay, let's see exactly how this utter failure occurred.
Here's what I'm fighting. Two elephants and a lot of jerks with slingshots. The battle starts normally, with Finn buffing himself and the huskarlar moving in. Something of note is that, despite his Hall of Fame ability being Heroic
Precision, absolutely none of Sir Slicer's castings of Frighten hit either elephant.
In addition to that, despite their shields the serfs wind up getting really messed up by the slingers, eventually breaking ranks. This leaves the elephant free to go right for my huskarlar, and, as I've stated numerous times, trample breaks glamour even if it misses. They get stomped into the dirt.
The death of multiple huskarlar and most of the serfs causes a HP rout, and my army flees before Finn and the Helhirdings have even entered the fray. All in all, this is an utterly terrible battle for me.
Okay, you know what? Screw the elephants. I don't care. I'm not going to deal with them. Sir Slicer, Finn (who is in the southern province with two of the Helhirdings), and the new Vanjarl I hired are all going to ignore them entirely.
See how the movement arrows are gray rather than orange, like my prophet's movement has been? That's because they're sneaking past; I hadn't had to make use of it before this, but as I showed in my first post, the Vanjarls and Helkarls and, well, basically everything I have besides the serfs and dwarfs, are stealthy, meaning they can just move right past this province and conquer whatever is past it instead (that's why my prophet is moving back, so I can see exactly what is in that province again; I forgot and didn't feel like bringing out my old turn file already). I will deal with the elephants
later.
Graphs don't show anything particularly interesting this turn. Fomoria's keeping up its three provinces a turn, Abysia and R'lyeh both get too again, and everyone else but Caelum and I got one. Wonderful. I've fallen behind again.
Next turn: Nothing happens, again.
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Bonus: Research, magic schools, and Blood magic explained
So, you may have noticed that a lot of the updates so far have mentioned research. You may be wondering what that is; while I commented on how research levels are determined for mages in my unit explanation post (for those who don't remember, it's total magic path levels (not counting priest levels), plus two, plus or minus any inherent bonuses and exp), but you may not know what it's
for. Well, wonder no longer, for I shall tell you: Research is what lets you use more and better magic.
This is the magic research screen. It shows all seven magic schools here, how you're currently allocating your research points (I have none yet, since I have no mages researching, but that green bar and the numbers beside it show what you're putting your research in and how much in each school), your progress to the next level for each school, and your total progress. There are ten levels or magic in each path, starting at zero and ending at nine. The amount of research points it takes to get to the next level is the amount of the previous two levels combined; under normal research settings (at the start of the game the host can change it to less or more), this is forty, then sixty, then one hundred, one hundred sixty, and so on.
This is a look at one of the schools. When you reach a new research level, you unlock all the spells in it. Of course, you still need the appropriate paths to actually cast them. For example, I won't be summoning many sea dogs, since I have no water access. Also sea dogs are kind of useless. Whatever.
What each school does is as follows; while there are a few oddities in each one, this is more or less how they generally are:
Conjuration: Summons things. Almost every spell that creates units is in this school. From mundane animals to weird monsters to units that are stronger than most pretender gods, if you're summoning something, you're getting it here.
Alteration: Changes things. Most of the buff and debuff spells are here. Making your units ethereal, immune to various elements, all that. It's also where the super-powerful Wish spell is, something we may see later in the game.
Evocation: Uh, evokes things? Basically, this is the "blow stuff up" school; almost all of the really damaging battlemagic is in this one. This is the school for hurting things.
Construction: Builds things. Unlike most schools, every even level of Construction doesn't unlock any new spells. Instead, it unlocks a new group of items for you to make, with the level eight ones all being the unique artifacts; only one of each artifact can exist at any given time. Odd-numbered levels here are for the most part summons, but with the theme of things that can be made, like clockwork soldiers and Frankenstein-like monsters.
Enchantment: Enchants things, obviously. The buffs that aren't in Alteration are mostly here, with things like flight and whatnot. A few summons are in here as well, mostly necromantic ones, with the idea being that, instead of calling things, you're enchanting them. EDM (a mod that was combined with CBM, mostly modifies endgame spells and summons) put the Great Kraken spell here, for some reason, though. I dunno, its description even describes it as calling the thing, not enchanting an octopus and making it into a supercaster version of the pretender R'lyeh has.
Thaumaturgy: ...Yeah, I dunno. This is sort of a weird school, seemingly a catch-all for anything that didn't fit into the other ones. Lot of useful stuff in here, though.
Blood Magic: This one is a bit different from all the others. Best way to show it off would be to let you see the list of spells in this school.
Yep, that's right. Every single spell that requires Blood magic is in here. Blood summons, blood battlemagic, blood anything. If you don't have Blood access, you can ignore this school entirely. But having its own school isn't the only thing that sets Blood magic apart from the rest.
Remember our talk about magic gems, and how I mentioned Blood magic being different? Blood magic doesn't use gems, it uses slaves. Blood slaves. Virgins that you sacrifice for power, basically. While a few sites generate blood slaves, you will never find enough of these to satisfy your casting needs. The real way to get them is through blood hunting. To blood hunt, you have a commander (usually one with levels in Blood magic; those without it can find slaves, but are really, really bad at it) hunt in a province, taking from the local population. This raises unrest in the region and kills off some of the population; normally people focusing on Blood magic counteract this with Growth scales to balance out the population they lose, while setting the province's tax rate to zero to control unrest and prevent it from making it harder to hunt. If a province doesn't have enough population, there is a penalty to hunting there, too. However, once you get your "blood economy" going, you will have far more slaves than you have gems. Good blood economies regularly bring in over a hundred blood slaves a turn. This allows for some really nasty things, as you may or may not see later in the game.
(Blood slaves also show up in battle, unlike gems, as units around the commander whose inventory they're in. While they won't do anything themselves, they can be hit and killed by enemy attacks. Can be kind of inconvenient.)
In case you haven't caught on to Blood magic being kind of evil, it's also the school used for summoning demons and stuff, and all but two spells in it require you to kill at least one slave to cast it (and the ones that don't basically need you to use one to cut down the fatigue cost anyway). It's not exactly a nice school of magic.
So, that's that. Look forward to me using at least a little of all these schools, and marvel at me trying to deal with making a blood economy while my dominion hastens everyone getting killed instead of balancing it. It'll be hilarious. For people who aren't me, at least.
Helheim: Turn VII
Hybrid Mode
