Dark Castle: Turn 21

 

We had no battles ourselves, but our scouts reported a few amongst the other players:

Bel

Phaeacia defeated a large group of independents, but it's not worth showing the independent formation since they were utterly destroyed. I don't know much about Phaeacia besides that it's hard to spell, but we see they are using a communion and throwing a lot of thunderstrikes and buffs on their troops. Here is their bless:

It looks like a caster friendly scales build.

Tirannea

There was a battle between T'ien C'hi (TC) and Ulm.

It looks like Ulm pulled a good chunk of his mages and devastated TC with numerous volleys of Iron Darts and Magma bolts. This looked like a huge loss for TC who his 200+ army obliterated. Strangely, there were no mages on TC's side. What happened to his mages? When I was talking to the TC player on discord he seemed pretty confident about his chances to take on Ulm. I'm rooting for TC since he isn't my neighbor, but this looking good at all for him. 

We discovered Ulm's bless:

As well as TC's 

Today is my lucky day in terms of scouting reports because I also saw a battle between Man and Eriu in Hamane near my border:

Hamane

It was a small battle against PD so not worth showing the formation, but Man easily defeated Eriu's PD with minimal losses. I'm also rooting for Man, although it looks like he's on his last legs. 

Our searchers actually found something this turn:

Yay! More death gems.

Our total death income is now 19:

Here were our events this turn:

Nice. I can definitely make use of that gold. However, the ring is useless to us since most of our troops are resistant to poison.

On the political front Phaeacia didn't attack Marignon even though I defeated Marignon's main army. Why isn't he attacking him? I was originally thinking he might be feigning attacking Marignon in some complicated ruse against me, but that seems ridiculous. Now I'm just confused. 

I don't know Phaeacia's situation but you need to be ruthless in this game and strike when it's to your advantage and you have the opportunity. Perhaps Phaeacia is having issues of his own? My weakness detector is tingling and makes me wonder if Phaeacia would be a good target himself, but he's pretty far down on my aggro list, and he's still useful to me to help keep Marignon contained. 

Anyway, I'm still going Monkey hunting and am assembling a large force in Karene. Next turn it will have 45 lictors, 29 knights, and 248 chaff. If I reclaim Nifel the following turn I'll have 10 more lictors plus 4 forts of freespawn to add to this army.

The cool thing about Ermor units is that they move relatively fast so you can often attack and reinforce from multiple provinces away, which can surprise your opponent.

I almost used Grave Giggler to raid against Bandar Log and hit Nifel, but I don't think it's worth risking Grave Giggler like this -- especially since Bandar Log is an astral nation and they can do some nasty things against commanders, e.g., Soul Slay, and I don't know what might be waiting for me (although it would be pretty quick to get those spells on turn 21).

Also, for some reason Bandar Log move his army to Copper Canyons north of his capitol. Maybe he realized he didn't have enough forces to siege my fortresses, or he's trying to lure me near his capitol to blast me with his mages? Maybe he thought he would be able to grab some easy provinces with Marignon, but realized he's in over his head now that Marignon is (hopefully) out of the war? Either way he just poked the bear and he's going to find out what happens.

For our other moves we start  construction of a fortress in Shade Forest, and we hire 3 more independent priests and a scout.