Ahahahaa... Oh lordy.
So I was doing some more pretender chassis tests, running some ideas for LA R'lyeh as well as a quick into-the-water pretender for Jomon. That was really the entirety of the design philosophy, just "get Jomon underwater, ASAP".
The R'lyeh expansion pretender was an incredible failure, dying to the first province. The starting expansion force (supplemented with a few crabs) was also slaughtered to a man on the first excursion. I figured that was about as poorly as things could go, and just put them on AI control while I focused on Jomon.
Fast-forward a number of turns, and I've made contact with R'lyeh. As expected they haven't expanded a whole heck of a lot, but the dominion has started freespawning stuff so they've at least taken over a few adjacent seas... I don't think very much more of it and start creeping in on their real estate.
And that's when things turned. Hoo boy. Bastards got a vastness freespawn in the beginning of year 3, which they then presented to me in a not-particularly-friendly manner, along with about a dozen elder things and a smattering of illithid soldiers. Mind blast hell, in other words.
Now, shrimp soldiers may have void sanity... But they do NOT have magic resistance. Ohhhh no, not a bit... With a base MR of 8, my beefy underwater force evaporated within seconds, their puny little brains popping from the pressure of too much fhtagn. As part of my testing on Jomon, I was going to do a couple simple runs of seeing how an onmyo-ji communion would work out (I've even entertained some notions of picking up a bless to lay down on the free shikigami that spawn for each onmyo in a communion). And with that many stars being that right, that close to home... I realized it was time to really kick things into gear.
So eventually the rampaging mindblaster armada worked its way into kind of a dead-end between three of my castles, and I managed to catch them with my little communion army. Now, mind, I have little to no experience actually using communions, and this was the first time this particular party was seeing live combat... Unexpected things were to be expected.
It didn't take very long before things went wildly off-script, and instead of hurling fat ol' evocations across the battlefield, my caster pack sat around summoning REALLY big elementals (that promptly got stuck behind my front line), casting "enlarge" on each other, and casting berserk rage on the crossbowmen. Their big contribution was honestly just laying down flaming arrows for the samurai archers to pull a Longshanks on my shikigami.
Somehow, through sheer weight of manflesh, we managed to start gaining ground... And then something really weird happened. Going completely off the script, one of my onmyos decided to cast "paralyze" at the vastness. "Hah," I thought, "you've got absolutely penetration gear on you and 10 perception on a good day, even if you DO manage to hit him there's no way you- holy shit he just paralyzed a vastness".
Through some insane-crazy RNG roll, he managed to punch through that 20 MR and pinned the thing for some 20 turns worth of paralysis. What followed was a rather surreal end to the fight, wherein the berserk crossbowmen (accompanied by the few actual infantrymen I possessed) ran up and manfought the vastness with their daggers until it died.
Communions, man... Crazy shakes.
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Topic: Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension (Read 520308 times)