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Araganzar posted:WE MUST RETALIATE WITH A REMOTE ASSASSINATION JOKE The duck has been killed in every battle it's been in (which admittedly was only like 3) and has been fine every time. Remote assassinations you say? Interesting. I'll have to consider that one over the next few turns, good suggestion.
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Jun 15, 2020 22:58
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 06:30 |
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I enjoy playing the nation with the metajoke has ruined us through means of the meta (screwing up the scripting). Good joke. Everyone laugh. Roll on snare drum.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:04
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gonadic io posted:The duck has been killed in every battle it's been in (which admittedly was only like 3) and has been fine every time. what would be funnier: that it's the same duck every time and it's just That drat Persistent and also impossibly hard-to-kill, or that Bongo is somehow infuriating a different duck shortly before he gets in a fight every time
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Jun 15, 2020 23:20
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Why not both? ASSUMING DUCK-RECT CONTROL
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Jun 16, 2020 02:29
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EponymousMrYar posted:ASSUMING DUCK-RECT CONTROL ddon't post my erotic ducktales s&m fanfiction
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Jun 18, 2020 13:45
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Turn 50 Anglia raiding us, and our counter-raids, continue as normal in the various provinces around Kirkostaculis. It's pretty familiar at this point! It's a pretty good sign that Atlier is not trying to actually fight my forces and instead they're just going round and round in circles. At this point I'm not even going to bother posting the battle reports. It's 2 squads of draconians and one squad of clowns going in circles beating up 1 point of PD at a time. You can see that Chasos have taken the provinces that I ceded to them too.  Anglia once again refused to fight us and their two big forces joined up together. Their Ether Lord and companions are there, there's two of the air elemental royalty, some eagles, a few astral mages, some artillery/gun teams and basically zero foot troops. Those national foot troops are so bad at this point, just totally useless.  We're charging into them with our usual force of 50+ enormous clowns, three ancient clowns, about 20 bearded ladies and armless women, and of course Esteban himself. If they're not willing to fight us at this point, when are they ever going to? They can't take my cap without fighting this battle and their raiding isn't good enough to starve us out.  Fresh from the mantis fight we have 30 enormous clowns coming to help retake the throne of water. They're lead by Blood-Curdling who I'm pretty sure is our last Thirteenth Clown, who if you recall has heroic soul butchering. Feels like a lifetime ago we saw that. Pongy the Ancient Clown is also teleporting in to help them, having a holy 3 mage is always nice so we don't have to care about bless coverage.  Wait let's zoom to the top of that image. Lol looks like U bounced off that throne. Not particularly significant but we'll take our laughs where we can get them these days.  Talking of U, I manage to get them to commit to helping. They still refuse to go via Kitfox's candle (and Kitfox refuses to give their candle up) so I agree that U can temporarily take ownership of my candle so they can get to Anglia's lands. You can see how many connections these candles give, they're amazing strategic bottlenecks.  Talking of U, they're uh pretty big actually. They are starting to make progress through the eastern lake, and have absorbed almost all of the undead and Iram provinces. Iram is incredibly still not AI at this point.  With Eyes of God still up we can actually just look at the province graph. Anglia are still ahead while me, U, and Chasos are about equal now. Mantises have just about fallen behind Kitfox, who is busy Kitfoxxing. Iram is lower than Karanaac at this point.  Over on the Mantis side well since we have their cap it's just cleanup at this point.  They don't have anything that could be a threat or any money to produce it.  Well I guess some garbage tier mercs but whatever.  We just continue to stomp whatever forces they can muster. I mean just look at this battle, this is probably a thousand gold of size 5+ clown.  Going up against a single A1 mage, their prophet, and some poo poo.  The clowns buff up and the poo poo all dies very predictably. Now just to run forward and finish off the two casters easily.  I SAID, RUN FORWARD.  Nope turns out that the clown bodyguards are under strict orders to absolutely never leave Pongy's side, and Pongy was just set to cast spells so spends 100 turns just alternating between jacking off and sleeping. The bodyguards occasionally obliterate a phantom that wanders over. After 100 turns or so everybody has had enough and with their long legs the clowns reach the edge of the battlefield first. Urgh. At least everybody makes it safely out. What was I saying about scripting better?  Oh also some knights show up in newly taken mantis lands and they cause more enormous casualties with their big lance charge than the mantises managed when we took their cap.  But it really doesn't matter, we're just sweeping up leftovers at this point.   Our cast of Transmute Fire gets us less gold than I was expecting but sure nice I'll still take it.  We hit Thau 5 this turn, a pretty big milestone. Soul Slay is an incredible battlemagic staple and will allow us to still pretty effectively toast Anglia's increasingly large summons. Gift of Reason is fun for shenanigans but I won't spoil what those might be. We are going to quickly grab Evocation 6 in 2 turns for the weapon that, when combined with Soul Slay, I am confident will turn the tide of this war. I'm very excited.  Finally this turn U cast Earth Blood Deep Well. Apart from sounding like an album of ambient cave sounds, it provinces a massive 20 earth gems a turn and shows that they're pretty far down enchantment research which, if you recall, they have a discount ritual site for. Is there anything that U can do with shitloads of earth gems in high level enchantment? I don't know I'm too busy fighting Anglia here to check. Probably nothing. 
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Jun 18, 2020 15:15
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Turn 51 First off we have some globals up! Anglia has used their massive research and gem lead to enforce on the world: Mother Oak. This is usually the first global to go up every game on turn 12 or so, for it to appear on turn 51 is just...not a big deal. It grants 10 nature gems and costs at least 50 to put up. It's good, sure, but at this stage of the game isn't incredibly meaningful.  Chasos, remember them, also cast a global and even better a cool national one! Truthweaving Purge causes attacks on death and blood mages in their dominion. 1) we're not in their dominion, and 2) we have no blood mages and not that many death ones. I guess it's an anti-U measure since they have lots of blood mages? There is no custom event text for this one.  It's a long time coming but we have a real battle army vs army battle against anglia this turn! Our force that was moving through the caves was met by the army that just took the cave throne where we last saw Bongo. Their force isn't incredibly mage heavy but it still has enough mages to buff up the troops and cast Flaming Arrows before starting to spam evocations.  Meanwhile our force is Pongy the Ancient Clown himself, as well as Blood-Curdling the Thirteenth Clown, and a First Clown. Oh and a solid thirty Enormous Clowns. These are some of our very first expansion parties and even the freshest of them has 2 stars of experience, so all their stats are even higher than normal. Some of them are even still cursed from taking the lizard province in our cap circle for example! This is why I love playing giant nations.   The battle isn't even close. We put up Air Shield turn 1 and then just run forward without a single clown dying to ranged fire before melee is joined.  One squad of clowns runs to the back lines and starts obliterating the mages and artillery before the rest finish with the troops and the groups join up in the middle.  This kind of battle really demonstrates just how incredibly superior our troops are compared to Anglia's, and how a single A2 mage casting Arrow Fend will just invalidate a huge amount of what Anglia is trying to do. God drat I love playing this nation.  Our force will continue on to the now-emptied cave throne. We're going to be able to retake it back very quickly I think.  You can see also that Anglia moved a force onto the candle in order to try and pressure our lands out west. It's a medium sized force with a bunch of cav and then a handful of mages including one of the earth elemental royalty, Oreigenes the King of Mountains. None of these mages have any astral I'd like to quickly note for no reason in particular. Also that candle is going up be left for U to retake as previously agreed but I don't have much hope that they'll make an effort to deal with this force for me.   Anglia's main battleship of a force dodged back a turn to meet up with some more horses, they still absolutely refuse to commit. My force is going north to prevent them from getting to our lands but at this point I've giving serious thought to just going back to my cap so I can get some of these mages researching again. If they want to dance around like this and achieve nothing they're welcome to.  You can also see that we retook the last peninsula province this turn with our tiny force, and it looks like the draconians decided to not raid this turn and to just meet up in the lizard province? Weird.  Over in mantis lands, looks like they somehow dragged together enough gold for another mercenary band, and also what looks like their last 3 mages on the whole map? Meanwhile our force heading north crushes the weak resistance they can muster.    If anything I'm happy that they've got a force sieging their own cap because the AI will effectively NEVER move away from doing this. We can come back and deal with them at our leisure. Our main force on this side is going north onto Deep Thought Plains, the northmost mantis fort and it's on their border with U. Once we've taken this the mantises won't have anything but a handful of empty provinces left. Wait poo poo they did build one more fort in the middle there, whatever. It doesn't matter!  Next turn we're going to hit evocation 6, for one of the best spells in the game: Mind Hunt. This spell is so good that it's not uncommon for people to take a S4N5 bless of spell penetration with recouperation and base the majority of their strategy around it. It's a remote save-or-die attack that costs only 2 pearls and doesn't even require that powerful of a mage to perform. Its main weakness is that rival astral mages will counter it and leave your attempted astral assassinators with their brains drooling out of their ears. Taking recouperation bless allows the brains of sacred mind hunters to grow back but we don't have or need this because we have a pretty large number of Bearded Women - any that get feebleminded just have their items given to the next one up to the plate. For a few turns now I've been using the steel ovens to build up a stockpile of mind hunting gear and next turn we can start to make use of it. Starting to Mind Hunt on turn 51 is, like casting Mother Oak, not ideal but it very much still has the potential to turn the game around right here.  Looking again at this Anglian force, which does have astral mages in it including the powerful Ether Lord, I begin to have An Idea. Those astral mages are pretty annoying to me and if they were dead I'd be able to very easily snipe all the commanders leading this force with Mind Hunt.  Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar has been pretty passive so far this game, sitting around forging mostly and casting the odd ritual. HOWEVER do not forget that he is an insanely powerful twenty-six path mage, probably the strongest one on the map. Also because he is a big statue with 26 protection and 200 hp he's also seriously difficult to kill.  There's two battle spells that complete this puzzle: 1) Magic Duel, in which two astral mages pit their minds against each other. They take their base astral skill (items and spell buffs don't help) and add a d6. Whoever gets the highest lives and the lower (or both on a draw) die. One really nice thing about this spell is because it can only affect astral mages, then it doesn't care at all about a bunch of chaffy troops in the way. The only way to protect against it is to have large numbers of astral mage chaff, which Anglia doesn't have. The Ether Lord, shown below, has astral 5 base so by my calculation (I made a spreadsheet) I have a 83.3% chance of winning, then an 8.3% of a draw, then an 8.3% chance of losing. Even if I did lose I mean it'd be bad and I'd lose Eyes of God but I have a lot of clowns that could call him back pretty quickly. I like these odds. If instead our pretender is dueling anything weaker than the Ether Lord, then it's literally impossible for him to lose. No turkey related shenanigans can happen here!  2) Even if he's able to snipe the astral mages, Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar is not really set up for battlefield clearing. If he were to use a massive fire spell or huge numbers of wolves to try and clear out Anglia's troops then he wouldn't be using the time or energy to fight the mages. So I decide to use the spell Returning at the end of his script to come home so he pops in, nukes the astral mages, and then pops home leaving the army behind to get taken down with rituals. What could go wrong!  Unfortunately I didn't think of this last turn so I don't have any lightning resist items on hand. I'm a bit worried that my pretender might get hit with a stray lightning bullet and get stunned, or somehow chipped down or lightning bolted in 5 turns. He has Innate Caster so can cast even when stunned (or in melee) but I still decide to take the precaution of casting Resist Lightning first. This whole endeavour is a bit of a gamble but it's well past time to start taking the fight to Anglia instead of just being reactive. Wish me luck!  edit: oh and it's pictured in the screenshot above but I triple-checked that he had the required astral pearls for his spells. gonadic io fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 22:10
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Crush the Brits!
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Jun 21, 2020 22:21
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Yeah, Magic Duel is an easy-to-miss spell that can easily cost your enemy some very expensive mages, especially if they're only S1.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:44
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PurpleXVI posted:easy-to-miss Hold that thought.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:50
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This seems like it could backfire if anyone hits you but ok. I am glad the brits are getting dunked tho.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:51
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gonadic io posted:Hold that thought. Maximum comedy is that he wins all the magic duels and then misses on the Returning.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:54
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The joke was so funny, it drove him mad upon his return... Having your wannabe god be that powerful and random could be a real show stopper.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:56
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I sense some absolute hilarity incoming.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:57
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gonadic io posted:Hold that thought. I meant easy-to-miss in the sense that, being near the bottom of the research list, it's easy to overlook, but... isn't it, uh, isn't it precision 100? Isn't it unmissable?
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Jun 21, 2020 23:37
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PurpleXVI posted:I meant easy-to-miss in the sense that, being near the bottom of the research list, it's easy to overlook, but... isn't it, uh, isn't it precision 100? Isn't it unmissable? I can only imagine that he did in fact lose the magic duel to the ether lord. Or, more comically, a REALLY good astral caster either snuck into the army very fast or gonadic failed to notice them.
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Jun 21, 2020 23:44
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My Big Plays senses are tingling.
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Jun 21, 2020 23:48
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Mock not the turkey or the turkey shall make thee pay for the temerity
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Jun 22, 2020 00:38
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Can't wait to see how this turns out.  Either way it's going to be hilarious, so I think the moral and cultural victory will go to the clowns regardless of the outcome.
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Jun 23, 2020 22:14
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It'll turn out all the English astral casters do nothing but poop out astral geysers or horror marks.
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Jun 23, 2020 22:26
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I should also say that I have backed up this LP and whatever happens will be continuing it...somewhere not sure yet. I'll post a link in the discord and here too if I can.
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Jun 24, 2020 18:30
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gonadic io posted:I should also say that I have backed up this LP and whatever happens will be continuing it...somewhere not sure yet. I'll post a link in the discord and here too if I can. Anyone giving money to the lowtax patreon should give that money to Mu's patreon instead because the clowns are legitimately one of the funniest loving things I've seen Also even if you didn't give to lowtax you should consider it anyway.
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Jun 25, 2020 04:45
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Sorry, I am morally unable to donate to Mu at this time. For reasons.
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Jun 25, 2020 06:11
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TravelLog posted:Sorry, I am morally unable to donate to Mu at this time. For reasons. You just need to find 61 other people to collectively donate 351 more pounds with you.
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Jun 25, 2020 06:18
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TravelLog posted:Sorry, I am morally unable to donate to Mu at this time. For reasons. good news you're free 
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Jun 25, 2020 17:03
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Well played. Mu - PM me your paypal, Venmo etc. and I'll send you a "thank you for all your wonderful contributions" gift. Edit: The deed is done. TravelLog fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jun 25, 2020 |
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Jun 25, 2020 17:45
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Okay I'm just going to post here for now until we see how Jeffery's bid goes. Turn 52 Right let's not waste too much time with setup we know why we're here. Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar teleports right into the biggest enemy force. It's time for payoff.  There's two Elemental Queens here, the Ether Lord, and a whole lot of big guns. There's also two people holding a Staff of Storms which very helpfully makes sure that the eagles and gargoyles can't fly and instead have to hobble along the ground slowly.  From the first turn an incredible hail of bullets and shells fly across the map.  They mostly miss thanks to storm of course.  After casting Resist Lightning to get an incredible 5 shock resist, it's time to d-d-d-d-duel! I don't really know how the targeting works but the Ether Lord is targeted first, I'm not sure if it's because he's the highest astral caster or just one with a chunky amount of HP. Let's see how it goes!  YES! YES! GET hosed! And it's not even a draw! This plan worked perfectly, I'm ecstatic. Time to mop up the other two astral mages and then get out of here!  Wait, that wasn't an astral mage? What? Magic dueling a troop, let alone a commander without any astral is not going to do anything. It happens again too. What is going on, magic duel is 100 precision and can't miss! Well in any case things are starting to look a bit hairy since air elementals can fly in a storm and our 5 shock res isn't going to let us survive too many thunder strikes.  And we're out! I'm going to call that a resounding success, even if there are 2 weak astral mages left. It's probably a bit too risky to do this again exactly the same since it's likely that Atlier would adapt to e.g. send in the air elementals on turn 1 but still, getting rid of what was by far the most dangerous mage in that stack was absolutely worth it.  As an aside, I check the patch notes a week later and what do I see? Well then.  You can see how the Ether Lord had been commanding the Ether Warriors and they all got left behind, and in my dominion at that! This is going to be a great opportunity to either force the big fight that I've been craving or just polish off the remains of those 90 pearls that was spent on these guys, avenging our Ancient Clown while we're at it. The Ether Lord also had 75 gems of equipment on him but some of that was probably recovered.  I'm not entirely sure why those draconians aren't moving, did the commanders die somehow? I haven't even started mind hunting yet! Anyway given that there's a lab in that province, Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar is just going to teleport there. There's no need to cast Returning this time since he can just cast the teleport ritual next turn. It's perhaps a bit overkill to use my pretender to finish off a random raiding force but I'm having too much fun jumping on people with this extremely powerful mage.  Our forces arrive to retake Fenno's old throne and they're uncontested. We don't break the walls this turn but we will next turn. Maybe we'll find out where Bongo has gotten to.  Over in Karanaac's lands we see Anglia's new raiding force come in. It's pretty reliant on the King of Mountains who is backed up by some cav.  However there are no astral mages, and I just unlocked evocation 6 i.e. Mind Hunt this turn and we immediately fire 3 into this stack. Time to find out that Anglia has galaxy brained us and has a sneaky hidden astral mage! We don't yet have too good of a supply of magic penetration items but we have a LOT of S2 bearded ladies so with enough gear (forged by the steel ovens of course) we're going to be able to swiftly increase the number of hunts we can do each turn.  Up in the far far north we go stand on top of the mantis fort there, encountering only a token amount of mantis PD. Finally, this war that I didn't even want to fight might be over!  Except that it turns out that U had exactly the same idea and sent one of their freespawn thugs.  They would have easily beaten the mantis forces here but against the might that is clowns, they don't really stand a chance.  Honk. Too bad they're immortal and our clowns troops killed them so quickly our mages didn't have time to start casting soul slay.  Mantis mercs make mincemeat out of a mini military in a meaningless meadow. Meh.  At this point I've basically stopped showing inconsequential events but this one gives us a Cool Dude who is a slightly more powerful fire caster than anybody we've got (except our god of course). Should help us spend our fire gems better and it's a small amount of extra research. The lab doesn't matter.   I'm suddenly feeling increasingly positive about how this is going! Anglia don't really have much of an answer to Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar, mind hunt will allow me to punish any raiding, and we should be able to start sending our own thugs into their lands again. edit: The ancient compact between clowns and illusions! 
gonadic io fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jun 28, 2020 |
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Jun 28, 2020 15:11
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A magic sun idol just transporting itself into your army, ignoring endless bullets, exploding the head of a wizard, and then peacing out IS pretty funny.
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Jun 28, 2020 15:31
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If only it had gotten all the Astral mages so the stack was incredibly vulnerable to Mind Hunting.
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Jun 28, 2020 15:36
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Precision 100 spells can now miss in some rare cases
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Jun 28, 2020 17:10
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I still really like U's lore even if it still makes the same hilarious noise as everything else when getting crushed under a size 30 shoe 
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Jun 28, 2020 22:28
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If U gets to the top end of their scale of weird bullshit they can produce what I consider to be some of the most absurd mod nation units and thugs I've seen.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:04
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We will see them don't worry.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:18
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"Immortal freespawn thug" already sounds kinda crazy.
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Jun 29, 2020 09:21
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As I recall U is one of those nations that you kinda need to kill before they can bring out their most busted poo poo or else you're quite literally going to get stomped on.
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Jun 29, 2020 10:30
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U sounds like a never-ending series of Monty Python foot gifs  
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Jun 29, 2020 15:21
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The Clowno-Footean Hyper-War is gonna kick rear end in a funny way.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:31
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I, too, look forward to the Bellum Quadragintipedalian Pedipi, or the Forty-Foot Feet Feud.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:27
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Jun 29, 2020 18:47
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 06:30 |
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It's Turn 52 and U is in a commanding board position along with plenty of time to get the research they needed (or very close). Unless Chasos has something really cool (we really haven't seen much of them), you can basically just say that everyone else is screwed at this point. Or at the very least, nothing we've seen from Clowns/Anglia so far has a leg on the sheer bullshit U puts out in the lategame. U is quite high in power level even in its native Hellenika group, and Hellenika in general has some incredibly absurd poo poo. Like, just from a weaker Hellenika nation, how do you like sacred water elementals that can be permasummoned for 1 W gem each at Conj 3?  (Currently under Dom 10 GoH in a swamp, so HP is really 24 and Atk/Def are 1 higher). Feel free to start thinking of the kinds of blesses you could stick on this. Just as an example for U, if I recall correctly they've got access to supercombatants that auto-cast Master Enslave at the start of combat at extremely high research levels.
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Jun 29, 2020 22:19
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