TURN 141-145
Something unusual. For most of the game, I have been unthinkingly pooling Blood Slaves each turn, then manually doling them out one at a time to temple priests for blood sacrifice.
This last turn, I went totally manual, collecting and assigning Blood Slaves by hand. When I processed the turn, all Priests with Blood Sacrifice orders from the previous turn had, on average, been automatically assigned three Blood Slaves each (even though I expected the previous turn’s allotment of one slave to have been reduced to zero). Wow...
There’s no question that Blood Slave assignment is a little fiddly, but apparently it fiddles both ways (at least in the Concept Balance mod). Immediate pooling each turn isn’t necessarily the best move, as I had reflexively assumed--that would disrupt the automatic assignment of the optimal (?) number of Blood Slaves to sacrificing priests. Another new thing discovered in this game.
On the west continent, turn 143, Man dies as I take his last Fortified City. Next turn his Pretender (Green Dragon) comes back to the capital, and besieges it, and is destroyed.
On the south continent, my minion, the arch devil Furcas, flies blindly into an Ulm province far to the southwest. Defeated, he is banished to the Abyss and his devils are destroyed (he wasn’t really stupid, he was just played that way).
Two turns later, the pocket lich Carcator, carried by Furcas, is found in the possession of a minor Ulm infantry commander who is slain by an Earth Elemental (love that Earth Attack ritual spell, Evocation 8).
Another Earth Elemental locates the Ulm Prophet Hildegarde in a fortified city, but she slays it with six mighty blows. I give up Blood research in favor of Alteration—I wonder if you can Wish for population? If the game goes another half dozen turns, I may find out.
East continent, the Manticore pops off the Strands of Arcane Power (the twit finally got it right this time). This is my sixth global spell. Oddly enough, this blows away the Arcane Nexus. I really expected it to replace the Wild Hunt, which was cast at minimal gem cost; the Arcane Nexus was cast at a substantial premium. Oh well...who knows what
really goes on in the black box of AI operations--incidentally, Arcane Nexus was the last global cast before the Strands of Arcane Power.
I meet another milestone turn 145, all of my land PD is at 10+ and all of my Citadels are at 25 PD. I have been in the course of this game developing a personal discipline for solo play that gives magic sites a 15 PD minimum, and increases high-income province PD by 5 per 25 gold (so 10 PD up to 25 gold, 15 PD to 50, 20 PD to 75, 25 PD to 100 gold, and so on. I use disciplines of this type to create administrative "drag" that increases the challenge level of a solo game (such disciplines are unnecessary for multiplayer games, IMO).
Gold income: 6,407. Treasury: 3,935; gem income 44F/20A/36W/35E/40S/38D/38N + 108B this turn. The huge increase here is because the Strands of Arcane Power global has been turning up 3-4 sites per round on average. However, it doesn’t flag or identify them, which means I have to go to the Province screen and try to figure out which site listings are new.
This turn (#145), I get to pick the three new sites out of 201 listed sites. This is busy-work, and
it is annoying. It’s not so bad if the sites are all vanilla, but really cool stuff can be buried for turns and turns.
Schools: Conj 8, Alt 8, Evo 9, Cons 8, Ench 9, Thaum 7, Blo 8. Currently researching Alt 9 at 313 RP per turn; completion in four turns.
I have become bored with Ulm; the question of Wishing for population consumes me. I find the 0 population provinces left by C'tis irk me and mightily offend my sense of divine order. All my remote casters are directed to turn their efforts to research Alteration. Revised count: 481 RP per turn, completion in 3 turns. I also order 13 more Temples to be built on turn 145, which will bring my Temple count to 141. I burn off most of my Fire and Earth gems to do this, but it’s all rather moot at this point.
However, I have now discovered THE QUESTION. Stay tuned.