Darkness Rising

[MarbitChow]

Don't the elves have a damaged 2hp archer available ? EE01 ? I didn't notice Comet (or anyone else) take a shot at him.

Nope. See this post:

It was retconned to death, but we still shot at it? Was that supposd to be EE1 that SA9 fired on during phase 9? It would have been the most wounded archer around at the time since there were no lucky survivors from the level 1 archers after phase 10.

Missed that. That final shot should have been against EE01, not EE12. EE01 is now croaked.

[0beron]

Oh, welllll then, have me Fire at a Spearman since they have the lowest defense!

[Werebiscuit]

Oh, welllll then, have me Fire at a Spearman since they have the lowest defense!

Might want to hold off on that till we have confirmation of stack switching. I think Tod gets a free re-stack at the start of the round and one more during the round. Most melee get to move after phase 6. I've a feeling we might need them to clear the gate - thats when Tod will need to stack with them..


Right now I want to discuss whether it's better for Bill to use 8 of his remaining 11 juice to raise an archer this round...or whether it's better to use this round to down a potion so that he can use pall raiser (12 juice) to raise 2 next round and the round after that.

It depends a lot on whether raised archers get to fire the same round they're raised...or the following. ( which is it Marbit ? I don't remember )

[0beron]

Vinny has become superfluous in this fight, I know nobody is going to add him back into a stack. With their archery taken out, he isn't even useful for cloaks. So I'm having him fire in the hopes he at least does one hit per shot, cus that's technically better than him just twiddling his thumbs down in the courtyard.

EDIT: I will move to L19 first before Firing.

[Werebiscuit]

<snip>
Bill : Bone Puppeteer - creates Skeleton Archer (Calcium-Enriched) @ S-19

Sk-3 Skeleton Warrior : Attacks Archer B-1 @ N-19 w/ Mighty Blow
Roll : 7. Combat 12 - Def 1 = 11 Hits. Target slain. Bill gains 3 XP.

Sk-1 Skeleton Archer : Attacks Archer B-7
Roll : 8. Combat 15 - (Def 1 + 3 Leadership + 4 Cover) = 7 Hits. Target slain. Bill gains 3 XP.

Note From the results of our first assault here that Sk-1 was created in the same phase that it fired even though it had a higher com order than Bill.

So that answers my previous question.

[Werebiscuit]

Vinny has become superfluous in this fight, I know nobody is going to add him back into a stack. With their archery taken out, he isn't even useful for cloaks. So I'm having him fire in the hopes he at least does one hit per shot, cus that's technically better than him just twiddling his thumbs down in the courtyard.

EDIT: I will move to L19 first before Firing.

I remember Swodaems saying something about being able to switch between 3 stacks so I'm thinking he might boost Vinny, Triage, Comet and SK1 to where they can do some decent damage before switching to Will, Cupid Coil & Rolf next round...then dropping us to switch to heck pups and melee before their melee get to act ( phase 11)

Strangely it might be what Bill does that's crucial. I'm for him drinking a potion

[0beron]

Okay, Vinny moves to L19 on Com 3, and fires at a Spearman.

[MarbitChow]

I think Tod gets a free re-stack at the start of the round and one more during the round.

All leaders get a free restack at the beginning of the round, but must spend an Action to restack after that. If Tod goes into a round with a Delayed Action, he can restack up to 3 times.

It depends a lot on whether raised archers get to fire the same round they're raised...or the following. ( which is it Marbit ? I don't remember )

Rasied units go on Phase 0 of the phase in which they are raised, then act on their normal phase in the next round.

[Swodaems]

Sorry for disappearing again. It looks like everything worked out as expected however. (In fact, things went better than expected. I was thinking Pyrohalitosis only did combat + 1d6 instead of combat + 2d6. "Pyrohalitosis : Targets enemy units as if using Strike/Lunge. Unit does Combat + d6. Ignores Defense." is the current description of it in the reference. Did a 2 drop off the damage?) Expect for Armolad, the enemy has no more units capable of fire attacks.

Thoughts so far:

Tyler is no longer providing boosts to units on the wall. The 3 level 2 dancing warlords are stacked with the other 21 dancing ground troops.

We can expect Buffy and Rona to take out 2 more alt elves in round 3. Junetta can calm either one at com=3 in round 3, so with Faith already calmed, they'll only be able to take out 1 alt elf in round 4. In round 5, they'll get 2 again, but the battle will hopefully be winding down around then. Our towers are high def enough that the warriors will be hard pressed to threaten them until all the alt elves are croaked in round 5, so we have this round and the next to deal with them.

The majority of the enemy forces have positioned themselves such that they can not reach the units inside the door this round. Unfortunately, we'll have problems reaching the enemy as well unless they move forward. Our delayed actions will give us an advantage if the enemy decides to move forward while we can still make use of them.

I'm thinking Will, Cupid, Rolf, and Yuri should concentrate on mauling a couple enemy warlords early in this round. 2 of them are adjacent to 3 spearmen, and the other 2 are adjacent to only 2. (And the ones adjacent to 2 are sharing 1.) At the moment, we can expect them to have 18, 21, or 22 def depending on what units they are boosting. This will jump by 2 as soon as the Archons get to fire. I'm thinking Will and Cupid can down the 3 guards on the less protected warlords and then Rolf and Yuri can do the rest. (Well, Wandereus's garrison archers will probably be needed to help finish things off.)

Okay, Vinny moves to L19 on Com 3, and fires at a Spearman.

Tod looks at Vinny's actions, does the mental calculation that tells him that Vinny's cloak and special ability as a dollamancer will allow him to survive 2 shots fired at him, and decides not to shout out a warning. Tod wants to bait Armolad back into the hex somehow and a level 1 caster without leadership getting into ground RLOS will serve.

[MarbitChow]

Sorry for disappearing again. It looks like everything worked out as expected however. (In fact, things went better than expected. I was thinking Pyrohalitosis only did combat + 1d6 instead of combat + 2d6. "Pyrohalitosis : Targets enemy units as if using Strike/Lunge. Unit does Combat + d6. Ignores Defense." is the current description of it in the reference. Did a 2 drop off the damage?)

It does d6. I mussed it up - just used to rolling 2d6 every time. However, since the end result would have worked out pretty much the same, I'll just leave it as is.

[BLANDCorporatio]

I'm thinking Will, Cupid, Rolf, and Yuri should concentrate on mauling a couple enemy warlords early in this round.

Apparently, a Spearman has 4D, 20H and those we see have a +8 Ward. I'm thinking this means that an unboosted Spearman can be downed automatically by Will, who has 32 nat. Attack, +2 from bow, +2 from the minimum roll on a 2d6. Even with +3D bonus from dying cry, a Spearman should be toast, I think.

So Will can probably croak two of the spearmen, say the ones guarding WE03 (whose numbers I cannot discern).

How long does a stun last?

Also, Will is always eager to engage in a battle of range with worthy opponents. Pity there were none to be found in this battle, as Armolad has cowardly ran away. Do allow Will to chastise her with some long distance poking, should she deign to enter a hex of ours again. Doubtful that such an event will happen now that the battle is turning sour for the Elves.

[WaterMonkey314]

So I just had a crazy out-of-the-box idea to screw with Charlie - what if I start trying to Ward the Altruist Elves? It doesn't look like we'll need much healing this turn, so I could in theory Ward 2 a turn with my staff. With 4 hits and a 16-hit Ward, the elves would no longer go down in 1 shot from the Archons.

Of course, maybe the elves don't WANT to be warded... but why not? I'm being (somewhat) altruistic here - I feel sorry for the poor innocents getting killed out there. (Or maybe they've been ordered to die... but that has its own implications).

[Swodaems]

I'm thinking Will, Cupid, Rolf, and Yuri should concentrate on mauling a couple enemy warlords early in this round.

Apparently, a Spearman has 4D, 20H and those we see have a +8 Ward. I'm thinking this means that an unboosted Spearman can be downed automatically by Will, who has 32 nat. Attack, +2 from bow, +2 from the minimum roll on a 2d6. Even with +3D bonus from dying cry, a Spearman should be toast, I think.

The spearmen will also be dodging for +6D and may have leadership +2. So, 15 Def. While in my stack, Will does 34+7+2d6, or 26+2d6 to dodging spearmen. It's a 100% chance to one shot, but barely so.

We may want to have the NPC archers aim at the spearmen this round. The warriors are the bigger threat, but they'll likely be sporting either 19 or 20 def at the start of the round. (If we get lucky and take out their bonusing warlords, that will drop to 16 or 17.) Given that our NPC archery will have effective combat scores of 10(1 zed in the garrison warlord's stack), 12(5 zeds in Yuri's stack), 16(Bill's 9 skele archers and 3 of the garrison archers), and 19(4 of the garrison archers), we'll eliminate more units if we target the spearmen. Getting rid of the smaller threats first seems to be the best Idea here.

I'm thinking of giving our 5 front line heavies orders to not break dodge no matter the situation, despite the fact that they are going to be moving forward. They're level 2, in a led dance stack, and will have 27 def while dodging. We send them out there as bait. Any enemy that attacks them forfeits their dodge bonus and becomes an easy target for our archers.

[Werebiscuit]

So I just had a crazy out-of-the-box idea to screw with Charlie - what if I start trying to Ward the Altruist Elves? It doesn't look like we'll need much healing this turn, so I could in theory Ward 2 a turn with my staff. With 4 hits and a 16-hit Ward, the elves would no longer go down in 1 shot from the Archons.

Of course, maybe the elves don't WANT to be warded... but why not? I'm being (somewhat) altruistic here - I feel sorry for the poor innocents getting killed out there. (Or maybe they've been ordered to die... but that has its own implications).

That Idea's not crazy...it's excellent.
Of course it won't stop the archons killing another 2 on phase 11 of round 3 as you can't protect all 5 that are left but it should mean that there are none killed on round 4 and with our healomancers working in tandem we can heal and re-ward their target as well as calming archons we may be able to cut off the bonuses on the elven forces at +15 com & +5 def.
And if we can get the altruistic elves to turn the archons would have to cease or risk breaking the contract. Brilliant !

[Werebiscuit]

I'm thinking Will, Cupid, Rolf, and Yuri should concentrate on mauling a couple enemy warlords early in this round. 2 of them are adjacent to 3 spearmen, and the other 2 are adjacent to only 2. (And the ones adjacent to 2 are sharing 1.) At the moment, we can expect them to have 18, 21, or 22 def depending on what units they are boosting. This will jump by 2 as soon as the Archons get to fire. I'm thinking Will and Cupid can down the 3 guards on the less protected warlords and then Rolf and Yuri can do the rest. (Well, Wandereus's garrison archers will probably be needed to help finish things off.)
.

Interpreting this to mean that Will should fire at SE01 & SE02 which will remove them completely. Their def is max 15 (def4+insp3+lead2+6 dodge) which means will will do 26+2d6 to each for a minimumn of 28 ( they have 20 +8 ward) Cupid will do 12+2d6 so should need 2 shots to take out SE 10 with no chance of it surviving. This leaves commanders WE03 & WE04 unprotected and they will have a maximum of 22 def vs Rolf's 31com and Yuri's 21 com.
so Rolf will do 4d6+9 twice ( for a minimum of 26 ~ avg 46) and Yuri 4d6-1 twice (for a minimum of 6 ~avg 26).
Rolf's target will die and Yuri will kill his if he gets lucky but should seriously wound him at a minimum. He may as Swod suggests need to be picked off by our garrison archers on com 10 who will be damaging at 2d6-3

This should cause 10 of their units to become unled and possibly charge our ground forces at the gate

[MarbitChow]

This should cause 10 of their units to become unled and possibly charge our ground forces at the gate

Note: Unlead means that the side has no leadership in the hex, not that the units themselves are not in a led stack.

[Swodaems]

So I just had a crazy out-of-the-box idea to screw with Charlie - what if I start trying to Ward the Altruist Elves? It doesn't look like we'll need much healing this turn, so I could in theory Ward 2 a turn with my staff. With 4 hits and a 16-hit Ward, the elves would no longer go down in 1 shot from the Archons.

Of course, maybe the elves don't WANT to be warded... but why not? I'm being (somewhat) altruistic here - I feel sorry for the poor innocents getting killed out there. (Or maybe they've been ordered to die... but that has its own implications).

That Idea's not crazy...it's excellent.
Of course it won't stop the archons killing another 2 on phase 11 of round 3 as you can't protect all 5 that are left but it should mean that there are none killed on round 4 and with our healomancers working in tandem we can heal and re-ward their target as well as calming archons we may be able to cut off the bonuses on the elven forces at +15 com & +5 def.
And if we can get the altruistic elves to turn the archons would have to cease or risk breaking the contract. Brilliant !

Warding the Alt elves is going to get expensive fast in terms of juice however. With doubled juice cost on the second cast, it will cost Triage 15 juice to ward the first 2 elves using his round 2 action and 5 more at com 6 to ward the only other survivor we'll have after the archons fire again. This will leave Triage with 14 juice after round 3.

We'll have Junetta space out Buffy this round. Due to her Shockamancy special, Rona has the greater chance of croaking an alt elf in round 4, despite Triage's ward, but we can expect Buffy to use a wake up action on Rona if we calm Rona instead. Targetting Buffy instead gets a slight numerical incentive for Rona not to wake either of her friends up, giving Junetta a chance to freely space out Faith again.

Triage also needs to make sure to keep a swarm of bats next to him while warding the alt elves. Armolad can still reenter the hex and shoot. If Triage move forward, one of T. Coil's 2 brickbat swarms moves to protect him.

I'm thinking Will, Cupid, Rolf, and Yuri should concentrate on mauling a couple enemy warlords early in this round. 2 of them are adjacent to 3 spearmen, and the other 2 are adjacent to only 2. (And the ones adjacent to 2 are sharing 1.) At the moment, we can expect them to have 18, 21, or 22 def depending on what units they are boosting. This will jump by 2 as soon as the Archons get to fire. I'm thinking Will and Cupid can down the 3 guards on the less protected warlords and then Rolf and Yuri can do the rest. (Well, Wandereus's garrison archers will probably be needed to help finish things off.)
.

Interpreting this to mean that Will should fire at SE01 & SE02 which will remove them completely. Their def is max 15 (def4+insp3+lead2+6 dodge) which means will will do 26+2d6 to each for a minimumn of 28 ( they have 20 +8 ward) Cupid will do 12+2d6 so should need 2 shots to take out SE 10 with no chance of it surviving. This leaves commanders WE03 & WE04 unprotected and they will have a maximum of 22 def vs Rolf's 31com and Yuri's 21 com.
so Rolf will do 4d6+9 twice ( for a minimum of 26 ~ avg 46) and Yuri 4d6-1 twice (for a minimum of 6 ~avg 26).
Rolf's target will die and Yuri will kill his if he gets lucky but should seriously wound him at a minimum. He may as Swod suggests need to be picked off by our garrison archers on com 10 who will be damaging at 2d6-3

This should cause 10 of their units to become unled and possibly charge our ground forces at the gate

Thanks for doing the math.

I think we've got a basic outline for what we're doing until com 13 or 12 on round 3:
Triage uses his staff to ward to -16 ward 2 of the alt elves. (guarded by brickbats, of course.)
Will, Cupid, Rolf, and Yuri use the above targeting scheme to try and take out two of the enemy's warlords. Tod will be shouting "surrender or croak".
Vinny will be firing on a spearman.
Am I missing anything? (Do we want to send SK-1 at the enemy warriors and hope it draws an attack or two?)

Com 13 or 12 looks like it should be our next breaking point for this round. The Warrior elves can move at Com 14 and the Archons will have had a chance to fire their shots. Com 13 or 12 will be a good time to reassess the situation before our heavies lose delayed actions on com 11. (I'm saying 13 or 12 because the warriors may choose to move at Com 13, allowing them to receive dying cry from the alt elf the archons can croak on com 14. If they move at 14, I'd like a chance to counter at 13, giving myself a bit of a buffer. If not, 12 would be my movement time of choice.)

And I yet again have another idea mid-post, We could use the heavies delayed action to send them out before com =14. This gives the enemy warriors a chance to go at them before they can receive dying cry. Like I said before, if these heavies don't do anything but dodge, they have 27 def. At com 14, the warriors elves will still be operating at a maximum of 22 com. ~2 hits per attack is something the heavies can easily take.

[WaterMonkey314]

So, I'll make it official then:

Triage moves forward and Wards AE06 (-5 juice). If the Elf accepts the Ward, he continues and Wards AE07 with his staff (-10 juice).

He orders a Brickabat Swarm to move forward and cover him as well.

If the elves accept the wards, Triage also calls out to them: "Altruist Elves! Why must you die here? How does that allow you to help others? Turn, and we can protect you from the Archons! Turn, and you will live to see another turn! Turn, and you can save countless more lives in the future!"

[0beron]

Do the Alt Elves even have to accept? The only thing I see in the rules is that the target can chose which ward remains if 2 get cast on it. So it seems to me that you ward them whether they want it or not.

[WaterMonkey314]

Do the Alt Elves even have to accept? The only thing I see in the rules is that the target can chose which ward remains if 2 get cast on it. So it seems to me that you ward them whether they want it or not.

Mm... good point.