How did he appear there, anyway? He wasn't there when I was scouting the south and the land to the east was blocked by the Luchuirp. Did he go through Beeri's land?
Darrell says he mentioned him appearing during his turnset. Looks like he bee-lined to us or Perpentach.
Anyway, first thing I did was put both the capital and gold city on Warrior duty, and moved poor wounded Houdini back to the frontlines.
I was going for the luring plan:
I managed to pillage a Cotton plantation on the way, for a cool 40 gold!
Then the deep incursion/lure guy got offed by a Balseraph Freak...
Anyway, the plan seemed to work, and I was moving troops into Udenarat, ready to move out if Orthus suicided against the Balz cap.
Erm:
Oh boy... I was kicking myself for not at least trying to get rid of those forests.
Then Orthus moved away, as shown on the screenshot above...
He then moved northwest.
Now we're talking:
I had moved out a couple of Warriors to fortify our new city (Mardoc, you really gotta rename em) in case Orthus got smarter somehow and wanted an easier target.
You can also see the first Balseraph attack squad, consisting of three highly promoted Freaks.
I had to move that Worker out of the way, because the big orc had also picked up Commando now.
Anyway, I promoted a fully fortified Warrior to C1S1, and pressed enter:
Ooh, only half his life left!
Grunt Warrior gets which odds?
Good enough! Charge!
Redlining him!
And who else to finish him off?
The Great Houdini! (I hastily promoted him to C3 first though, still only about 96% odds)
:take a bow:
I promoted him to March, as we have much in store with this guy.
Anyway, I moved him back into the city, and promoted the rest to withstand the Balseraph attacks. One of them manages to kill a Warrior, rest dies on the attack.
Houdini was at 36 exp, so I couldn't resist, and promoted him to C4 and took out the Freak, taking care to promote a Warrior to C2 to cover him. :jive:
I'm sorry I didn't take a lot of screenshots of the economy, but I had other things to concentrate on (micro was a bit sloppy). I took the liberty of grabbing Festivals after Archery, as we were losing too much money. Markets are going up everywhere, and the economy is looking decent. We'll have the Great Sage in 6 turns for the Academy.
I've put around 200 beakers in Bowyers so far, but I really think we should consider going KotE first. We really need two movers for some tactical options, and I'd prefer grabbing an Adept and promoting him to Body I, then grabbing Animal Husbandry and Horseback Riding for the Mobility promo.
Mardoc, could you please check the tiles worked in every city, because I'm pretty much wasted, and could have done a better job with the Econ side of our game.
There's a Warrior incoming from the west of our new city. The capital has been set to another Warrior to replenish our troops. It has a Settler in the qeue, which could be finished in four turns.
Beery still hasn't researched Exploration, and I even considering teching Carto, so we can build the damn trade connection for him.
Alexis has founded and converted to OO, I expect him and Beery to start fighting soon.
Things are looking pretty good, we just need to keep focused, spam those 5 exp Warriors, and work our way towards Bowyer, save gold, buy an army and go stomp Perpentach!