Oberon wrote:There is nothing which suggests that he'd be stupid enough to deliberately hamper this happy counter to his own obscure practice of refusing to pop Warlords.
I never said he was stupid, I said he was crazy. But you're right, basically everything we have on Charlie is speculation right now. I joined the forum so I could speculate, because lots of people on here have some pretty off-the-wall explanations for what's going on that are almost as entertaining as the comic itself (Charlie IS the Arkendish? Brilliant, and probably quite possible.)
I am hereby comparing Charlie to the resident neckbeard with all the very, very carefully-painted Sisters of Battle army present at most independent game stores. The one who threatens to beat you up when you begin to take your Callidus Assassin out of the box.
build6 wrote:that's really freaky and it really drives home how wrong the whole Charlie-archon side is...
I was gonna say I hope Charlie gets whacked, but I don't see how that's gonna happen without a lot of dead archons, so ... erfworld sucks. Janice was right, it needs Parson to break it.
I think it's freakier when you consider that love and hate seem to also exist independently of the Obedience/Duty system (Edit: I don't know if I believe this is what Loyalty represents, as spells seem to modify that stat directly). You only need to look at characters like Jillian and Parson to see examples of either. If you pop forces that are totally mad for you, in addition to having high Obedience/Loyalty scores, wouldn't they be much harder to Turn?
Neko wrote:I think Parson's calcs said >14 Archons could defeat GK with that listed compliment, and Charlie had approx 30 in the battlespace the very next turn.
Parson only had 32 archer-class infantry, and they were the only units in GK capable of hitting flying units ('Nother edit: I discounted the fact that at that moment, Wanda had a small stack of uncroaked fliers, and is disproportionately BA in hand-to-hand for a Caster. Still, calculations revealed that 14 Archons could not deal with this in one turn, if at all. The next calc said that 30, however, could). Haggar has numerous fliers of his own, though, and we don't know what class of infantry his units are. If they were indeed archers, they might be able to take on a small sortie of Archons. It's a risky bluff to call, though, considering he does in fact have hundreds of the flying nuisances.
Neko wrote:It's not implied that Charlie "uses" his Archons in *that* way.
Yeah, I can't see him doing that either, and not just because it doesn't fit into the rather half-arsed psychological profile I'm trying to develop.
BLANDCorporatio wrote:And on the Archon Leadership thing, we know (some) Archons have leadership (they said so to Parson), they can and did lead units before (DDR), they can form stacks without warlords that nonetheless do not auto-attack (is that due to a scouting ability however?) so it's not unreasonable to expect them to control themselves without other leadership and maybe even provide bonuses to each other.
My impression was that Ansom was leading that, and they were just providing bonuses, but I could be mistaken. The wiki seems to imply that Archons can be used as scouts, though I'm unclear on what that even means. Scouts do not seem to be distinct units, so perhaps there is a way to simply set a certain kind of unit to scout-mode and not have to worry about them rushing into combat. The Gobwin scout stacks seemed to be semi-autonomous in the tunnels, playing hit-and-run with Jetstone's expeditionary force, so maybe scouts can follow a general game-plan for a Turn or two? I don't know.
kagato23 wrote:Regarding leadership, I think that it is leaderless stacks that have to auto-attack, not warlord stacks. You just need somebody with leadership ability. Note for example that casters can lead a stack. So if an archon has a leader in stack, they can choose not to engage. I have to assume that with a decent amount who get this as a random skill when they start, that it works well. If a warlord or caster was necessary, you'd see a lot less stacks in the game.
Casters can indeed lead a stack, but Knight-class units can't, and if Archons can they're the exception to the rule. And then we must look at WHY they are an exception. Also, you see plenty of leaderless stacks; GK has hundreds of units in the field, but the biggest stack we've seen numbers-wise was Stanley's escape force, which had like 30 Dwagons and three knights, plus Stanley and Jack. And GK only has a handful of warlords and casters. Most other Sides seem to have similar numbers in terms of Warlords and Casters, whether due to attrition or just a natural shortage of such resources. Leaderless stacks can't be used for surgical strikes, but you can use them as a screen like Jillian did a few updates ago, and sometimes you just want to rock 'n roll.
With the threat of Haggar turning removed, though, it would make Tremennis more likely to go along with Jillian's plan.
