The dockyards are a teeming mass of humanity, a solid wall of flags and cheering faces turned out to see the fleet depart. It's the largest mobilization that Spire Wreth has ever seen, and more than a few tears are shed as families wave good-bye to hundred of sons and daughters. They go to war, and while some do sail to reconnect the lost outposts, most sail on missions of vengeance.
Wreth painters do their best to capture the moment, to give some semblance of individuality to the faces that line the ships. For many, the painting will be all the one of the records of their existence.
Outside of tax records and accounting information, of course.
The Center DemispireThe WOSV Herbie sails to the central demispire without incident, dropping a squad of marines off to begin search and rescue for any survivors. Civilians should be able to make their way back when the debris is cleared and the site swept for Kasgyrite infiltrators.
The Captain of the Herbie is fairly pleased with the performs of the Itshana crystal. Though small in stature, it's proven sufficient to meet the vessels needs. Her speed is only about three-quarters that of a similar transport, but she carried a fair load without complaint, and did not (as some marines theorized) fall out of the sky.
Wreth gains territory at the Center Demispire in their own territory. ((You should really name all of your demi-spires))
((Also, you're welcome to change the name of the Herbie. As well as the ship designation. I was tired and it made me smile at the time.))
Three CaptainsThe Wreth transport and her five escort Skyskiffs make good time getting to the spire formation known as the Three Captains. A hush comes over the soldiers as they approach, getting a good look at the three immense pillars- frames of jutting spirestone containing mountains of rock and soil. Trees grow from the sides of the pillars, canting out in the wood in a desperate gambit to get out of the shade of their higher brothers.
More than one soldier makes a superstitious gesture. While the Three Captains are tactically valuable, this will be the first time that any permanent fortifications have been erected here. The stories brought back by bootstrap miners, whether they be true or mere tall tales, have been enough to discourage potential colonizers- and more than enough to discourage the penny pinches in charge of peacetime outpost construction.
The transport pulls in alongside a particularly large cave in one of the great pillars, beginning the slow process of unloading marine squads in their dinghies and floating them over to the spire.
The transport barge is nearly unloaded when the Kasgyrite ships attack.
They come without warning, five Kasgyre Skyskiffs diving straight out of the sun. Three of the five Wreth Skyskiffs captains get enough warning enough raise shrouds in time for the initial barrage. Aetheric cannon shots rain like burning meteors from the diving ships. A some miss, but not nearly enough. One of the two Skyskiffs unable to raise Shroud in time disappears in a cloud of splinters and white light after taking a direct hit. The Shroud of another Skyskiff buckles almost instantly, losing most of its web in the same barrage. A few more shots blaze past the skiffs entirely, aiming for the transport barge.
The captain of the transport, focused on getting marines to the spire, doesn't raise his shroud until much too late. An aetheric blast nails the ship, blasting a burning hole in the her side. Her weight suddenly imbalanced, the transport begins to list almost immediately.
The initial return fire from the Wreth ships is scattered in its efficacy, burning away the webbing from one Wreth vessel, but otherwise going wide.
Instead of slowing down to continue the engagement, the Kasgyre ships continue their maneuver, blazing past the Wreth vessels. The cowards strike from hiding, and now they try to flee judgement? The Wreth Skyships immediately begin pursuit, heading after the wounded Kasgyrite ship.
A few things become immediately clear. The first is that Kasgyre's crystals are inferior, without an improvement similar to the Itshana process. Despite the blistering speed of their initial dive, they're below par in nearly every other respect. The second is that they've upgraded their guns in some manner. The wounded Kasgyrite ship fires on incoming ships, with a speed akin to firing cold, but for much longer. As the Wreth captains converge on the injured vessel, aiming to bring it down before her sister ships can loop back around, they become aware of a tea-kettle like scream coming from her cannons.
That ends abruptly after half a dozen cannon shots tear the ship's shroud to tatters and obliterate the hull.
The battle is then joined evenly, four against four. After the shock of the initial ambush is lost, the battle turns decisively in Wreth's favor. Their improved crystals offer maneuverability, and their flanged cannons offer better staying power. The shrieking cannons of Kasgyre appear to only offer the dramatically increased fire rate while the cannon is shrieking, which lasts about a minute. Essentially, they've doubled the amount of time they can cold fire their weapons. It's a sharp advantage in the beginning of the fight, and the Wreth Skyskiff that lost its shroud also loses its bow (and sadly its core crystal, and thus its ability to stay in the air) to an almost-miss, but once it's over...
Wreth Skyskiffs hunt the Kasgyre vessels down. The enemy's hit and run tactics do them little good against an enemy that's faster than they are, and their lack of sustained fire means that Wreth vessels outgun them completely. Wreth cannon fire reduces to Kasgyre ships to splinters before the Kasgyrite captains flee completely, diving down into the mist.
Rather than risk their ships in pursuit, the Wreth captains return to investigate the damage to the transport.
The transport can still fly, and she can probably limp home to receive repairs, but that's where the good news ends. The blast seriously compromised the hull, gutted her cargo, and completely consumed a trim crystal. Half a squad of marines that hadn't yet deployed is lost, either to the fall or the initial impact.
Inside the SpireFor the marines who survived, the interior of the Three Captain is... interesting. Fauna and flora are as expected- small puffy plants that grow in cracks and needed little besides the air, interspersed with harder fungal flora inside the caves. Small insects seem to thrive within, though they thankfully don't seem to be of the biting variety.
The stone, however, is quite odd. It pulses with light when stepped on, and yields proportionate flashes when struck. It's an interesting phenomenon, and one that makes stealth quite difficult. Still, since there were no reports of Kasgyre landing ships, the need for stealth will hopefully be limited. The reactive stone is pierced in places by curiously smooth circular openings, some scarcely large enough for a man to fit his arms down, others large enough for a man to crawl into.
The two-and-a-half squads split up into groups and survey, looking for strategic locations to put up a base. All is well for a time, and mission reports come back regularly. Then command receives a disturbing mission report. Monsters in the deep caves, resembling spiders in as much as a hunting falcon resembles a farm chicken. They had eight legs, fangs, and thick chitin of a color akin to mother-of-pearl. The creatures swarmed without warning when the marines were mapping a cavern to set up a potential permanent base, and seemed utterly without end. They came in every size, from palm sized skittering monssters that could be crushed under a boot to a monster that the Squad Leader writing the letter describes as weighing at least four-hundred pounds and as large as a dinghy.
Casualties were steep. The smaller monsters, those shorter than a man's knee, had a hide soft and thin enough that the Pincushion's could find some purchase. The rapid fire of the weapon was effective at driving back the swarming tides of such small creatures, but found itself utterly ineffective against the larger beasts. Blades, likewsie, proved valuable in hacking though the smaller creatures, but blunted and warped when plied against the carapace of the largest beasts. The battle was not decided by superior force of arms, but rather by the creatures stopping their assault in order to drag the bodies of dead Wrethian marines back into the peculiar holes in the walls noted earlier. In addition the immediate casualties torn apart and drug away by the monsters, the letter notes that any soldier bitten by the monster succumbed to a terrible fever that culminated in the afflicted's eyes turning black and bulging grotesquely from their heads.
The letter makes an immediate request for rifles, or another weapon of sufficient power to breach the hides of the tougher bugs. Without such a weapon, and reinforcements, he fears that his men will be unable to complete their mission.
Confirmed Kills: 2 Kasgyre Skyskiffs
Losses: 2 Skyskiffs, Squad F, 25% of squad E.
Damaged: 1 Transport Barge
Wreth gains territory at the Three Captains.
The UnfinishedThe conquest of the unfinished repeats a similar pattern to that at the Three Captains. Wreth arrives first, begins unloaded troops, and then is attacked by a meteoric attack from Kasgyrite skyskiffs. The difference this time is that instead of a deftly executed maneuver meeting a slightly unprepared team, it's an incompetently executed maneuver striking a criminally unprepared party of Skyskiffs.
No Wreth Skyskiffs are lost in the initial barrage, but the transport (with the captain again failing to get his shroud up in time) is caught by aether cannon fire and simple misfortune. The Kasgyre Skyskiff divebombing the transport barge falls victim to a bad case of target fixation, and when a Wreth vessel blows off her web with a well placed cannon shot she can't turn fast enough to prevent a direct collision with the transport barge. It doesn't destroy the barge, but it sure as hell cripples her. Thankfully, she'd already managed to get the last squad of marines onto the dinghies when the crash happened.
The pursuit action is more effective this time, with no additional damage to Wreth vessels other than webbing, but one additional Kasgyre Ship was sent back to the surface.
Inside the SpireThe Marines that made it within the unfinished have their work cut out for them, mapping through sprawling miles of the vacant and incomplete Spire. For those of more architectural mindset, it might be a fascinating experience. For the marines, however, regular progress reports indicate that they find the work unsettling- and that the halls of the spire are eerily empty. No insect, no spirebird- not even air plants, live inside the spire. It's utterly barren, and yet soldiers repeatedly complain of hearing noises- sometimes like rats, sometimes like voices. Once, a soldier exclaimed that he could quite clearly hear music coming from around the next bend.
Two of the three squad commanders ascribed the phenomena to nerves, but the report of the third makes notes that, while she assures her men that it's nothing, she has heard things she can't explain.
The reports worsen quickly. Supplies missing. Soldiers suddenly at one another's throats. Voices in the walls that beckon and call men by name. People start going missing, and the directions withing the spire seem to warp and bend.
The final report you receive is filled with sections where the officers has scratched out large sections of writing, and their hand was clearly shaking at the time of writing. Things attacked the camp. The officer describes them as approximately seven feet in height, with humanoid form, but built like the stick figure drawing of a young child. Their arms, legs, and torsos were all perfectly cylindrical, with only slight spherical bulges at the points where limbs met. The officer describes the heads of the creatures as grotesque balls of woven cylinders, like a bundle of writhing worms laced together into a wicker sphere. They wore the clothes of the missing men when they attacked, and they spoke. They knew things. They greeted their fellows by name even as they lashed out with their horrible limbs, the cylindrical appendages splitting apart into hundreds of fanged tendrils that tore apart flesh and bared bone.
Crossbows were nearly completely ineffective -the bolts hitting and inflicting only slight cuts before bouncing off-, and only the heroism of Squad B was able to push the monsters back. With cutlass in hand, they hacked through the grotesque enemy, severing hundreds of small writhing tendrils and eventually reducing the attack group to nothing more than piles of writhing (and heavily fanged) worms. Their losses, however, were heavy. The remaining men have been shuffled into squads A and C.
Confirmed Kills: 2 Kasgyre Skyskiffs
Losses: 1 Skyskiffs. Squad B.
Damaged: 1 Transport Barge
Wreth gains territory at the The Unfinished.
Notes: If you feel like I phoned it in there at the end, that was me realizing that I had a shitload more of these to do and I needed to step back on the level of detail. It was also 2am, so I blame that as well. Essentially, here's how things are going to work. IF the situation changes, you'll get a longer form combat report. If the situation is basically the same as already described, you get the short form combat report.
You guys got my first attempt at doing this, so it's a bit rougher than Kasgyre's. Sorry about that. In future, you'll see overall shorter reports, with a lot less play-by-play.
The Calm: The calm is a region of the aerosphere with almost no wind beyond fleeting turbulence, and absolutely no aetheric currents. It's frigidly cold, and filled with fine red 'snow' that barely moves. Traversing it with a conventional vessel is impossible due to the lack of energy to fuel the lift and trim crystals.
The Everstorm: As the name suggests, the everstorm is a region of the aerosphere dominated by an enormous and eternal thunderstorm. It's a chaotic region of raging winds and surging aetheric energy that manifests in terrible bursts of prismatic flame. No conventional vessel could hope to survive the nightmarish storm conditions.
Wreth TerritoryLeft Demi-spire Marine Presence: K 0/8 | W 0/8
Territory: 0/4 | 0/4
Resources: 1C, 3O, 1W, 2S
Conditions: Deadly Gas Pockets, significant vertical shafts and steep tunnels.
Middle Demi-spire Marine Presence: K 0/18 | W 1/18
--->
Marines---> Squad G (No Equip)
Territory: 0/4 | 1/4
Resources: 1C, 6O, 0W, 1S
Conditions: Toxic Stone, Massive Caverns, pitch-black
The Verdant Vista Marine Presence: K 0/18 | W 0/18
Territory: 0/4 | 4/4
Resources: 1C, 0O, 8W, 2S
Conditions: Mostly earth and soil, Unstable pocket caves
The BeltThree Captains Marine Presence: K 0/20 | W 2/20
--->
Marines---> Squad D (Pincushion, Fireteam | Cutlass, All)
---> Squad E (Pincushion, Fireteam | Cutlass, All) [Squad at 75%]
Territory: 0/4 | 1/4
Resources: 1C, 6O, 2W, 6S
Conditions: Kinetoluminescent Ores, Heavily Infested
Wrackspire Marine Presence: K 0/12 | W 0/12
Territory: 0/4 | 0/4
Resources: 3C, 4O, 4W, 2S
Conditions: Unstable Aetheric Phenomena, Broken Spire
Burned MountainMarine Presence: K 0/24 | W 0/24
Territory: 0/4 | 0/4
Resources: 1C, 10O, 1W, 0S
Conditions: Inexplicably Molten Core, Hundreds of narrow tunnels and small galleries.
The UnfinishedMarine Presence: K 0/45 | W 2/45
--->
Marines---> Squad A (Pincushion, Fireteam | Cutlass, All)
---> Squad C (Pincushion, All)
Territory: 0/4 | 1/4
Territory: 0/4 | 0/4
Resources: 8C, 0O, 6W, 2S
Conditions: Unfinished infrastructure, Massive open rooms and halls.
Skiffs With No Name - Skyskiff Class (x3)
Loadout
2 Light Aether Cannons+ (Flanged Heatsinks, Itshana Refinement).
1 Very Small Basic Core Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 Very Small Basic Lift Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
4 Trim Crystals+ (Itshana Refinement)
2 reams of webbing
Location: Three Captains
Status: All papers are in order.
Transport With No Name - Transport Barge
Loadout
1 Small Basic Core Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 Small Basic Lift Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
1/2 Trim Crystals+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 reams of webbing
Carrying: 0/- (6)
Location: Three Captains
Status: Damaged. Cannot Carry Cargo. 3 wood, 1 ore for repairs
Transport With No Name - Transport Barge
Loadout
1 Small Basic Core Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 Small Basic Lift Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement) [Cracked!]
2 Trim Crystals+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 reams of webbing
Carrying: 0/6
Location: The Unfinished
Status: Damaged. 3 wood, 2 ore, 1 crystal.
Skiffs With No Name - Skyskiff Class (x4)
Loadout
2 Light Aether Cannons+ (Flanged Heatsinks, Itshana Refinement).
1 Very Small Basic Core Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 Very Small Basic Lift Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
4 Trim Crystals+ (Itshana Refinement)
2 reams of webbing
Location: The Unfinished
Status: All papers are in order.
WOSV Herbie - Transport Barge
Loadout
1 Very Small Itshana Select Core Crystal
1 Small Basic Lift Crystal+ (Itshana Refinement)
2 Trim Crystals+ (Itshana Refinement)
1 reams of webbing
Carrying: 2/6
---> Marine H (No Equip)
Location: Spire THE MIDDLE
Status: All papers are in order.
It is the beginning of 354 AR.
11/y Crystal, 12/55 Banked
8/y Ore, 8/40 banked
18/y Wood, 24/90 banked
7/y Silk, 23/35 banked
It is the beginning of the Design Phase and Project Maintenance Phase. You have 5 Dice to spend.
Cloudrunner Corvette: 9/28 | 4 wood + 1 Ore, + 2 of either ore OR wood | Rushed 0 Times | Nothing Invested
Current Technology
Infantry
Flint-Lock Pistol: Cost: 2 ore to give one of either to every fireteam in a squad, 8 to give to every man. Inaccurate beyond spitting distance, incapable of dealing significant damage against hard armor, and liable to explode when used regularly even when given the most expert maintenance, the primary advantage of these weapons is that they can punch straight through shrouds like they didn't exist, and they're slowed by aethersilk officer's coats as much as by an ordinary silk shirt.
Flint-Lock Rifle: Cost: 3 ore to give one of either to every fireteam in a squad, 12 to give to every man. Reasonably accurate, but slow to reload and still incapable of dealing significant damage against hard armor or ship hulls. These weapons still require expert maintenance to keep them from being single-use weapons, and sustained use still makes these weapons terrifyingly unreliable as service weapons. Still, an excellent choice for shooting through silk shirts and ignoring shrouds.
Suppressor Repeating Crossbow: Cost: 2 wood+ 1 ore per fireteam, 8 wood + 4 ore to give to every man. | A repeating crossbow with a forty pound lever weight. Field modification allow it to operate has a standard repeating crossbow, or as a light crossbow using a goat's foot lever. The latter is underpowered, the former is inaccurate.
Pincushion Repeating Crossbow: Cost: 3 wood to give one to every fireteam, 12 wood to give to every man. | A lighter and nearly all wood version of the Suppressor. Limited draw weight and not terribly robust, but cheap.
Grappling Gear: Cost: 1 ore to give to every member of a squad. Standard issue ropes and hooks for boarding vessels or climbing the outside of spires. Cumbersome if you're not going to use it.
Aetheric Gauntlet: Cost: 1 Ore, 1 crystal to give one to every fireteam in a squad, 4 of each to give one to everyone. A gauntlet (usually left handed to keep the right hand free) of copper and leather with a tiny weapons crystal locked into the palm. Capable of firing dozens of low energy blasts of aetheric energy at the user's discretion, but is difficult to aim and the copper cage used to draw heat from the crystal has the unsettling tendency to leave disfiguring gauntlet burns, melt, or set the user on fire if used too frequently.
Bronze Cutlass: Cost: 2 Ore to give to every member of a squad. A simple, heavy blade of bronze attached to a wooden handle. Simple, and brutally effective in close quarters.
Aethersilk Vest: Cost: 1 Silk to give to a squad's ranking officer, 5 silk to provide to ranking officer and team leads, 16 silk to give to every member of a squad. A double layer vest of dense aethersilk, capable of absorbing a considerable amount of Aetheric energy. Can stop multiple point-blank shots from a gauntlet, but doesn't cover the arms, legs, or head. Does nothing against physical weapons or projectiles.
Ship Tech
Light Aether Cannon*: 1 Crystal, 1 Ore for one. A small cannon, capable of being mounted on deck without reinforcement. Fires powerful blasts of aetheric energy, and uses a removable block of copper as a heat-sink. Relatively inaccurate, short ranged, hot, power hungry, and prone to exploding violently if hit directly by enemy fire. Still, it can blow wood into flaming cinders and will melt through light plating in a few shots.
---> The Itshana Process has improved crystal purity, allowing for a slight increase in power.
---> Can be manufactured using Itshana Select crystals, which gives a 175-200% increase in power, at the cost of increasing the ore cost of the component by an amount equal to the base crystal price. WARNING: Cannons have not been modified to compensate for the increased energy output.
---> Improved Dissipation enable it to be fired 25% faster than normal once hot.
Basic Core Crystal+: [VS 3 Crystal | S 6 Crystal] A massive rough gem, grown in vats and used to transduce aetheric energy into electric current. This particular model is relatively inefficient, both as a transducer and as a storage unit. It can generate a defensive shroud around a vessel, but more than a single shot from a light Aether cannon on the same point will knock a hole in the shroud. Will explode spectacularly if hit directly.
---> The Itshana Process has improved crystal purity, allowing for a slight increase in efficiency.
---> Can be manufactured using Itshana Select crystals, which gives a 175-200% increase in power, at the cost of increasing the ore cost of the component by an amount equal to the base crystal price.
Basic Lift Crystal*: [VS 2 Crystal, 2 ore | S 3 Crystal, 2 ore for one] A chunk of crystal the size of a bathtub, heavily reinforced so that it can be locked into a ship's spine. When fed electricity, it will progressively invert gravity's effect on itself, flying upwards and pulling anything attached up with it. This basic model is incredibly power hungry, produces only enough lift for a small ship and internal flaws mean that extreme maneuvers could easily cause it to crack.
---> The Itshana Process has improved crystal purity, allowing for a slight increase in lift.
---> Can be manufactured using Itshana Select crystals, which gives a 175-200% increase in power, at the cost of increasing the ore cost of the component by an amount equal to the base crystal price.
Basic Trim Crystals*: 1 Crystal for two. Head sized chunks of crystal, similar to lift crystals, though of greater refinement. These produce directional gravity when powered, allowing a ship to make finer maneuvers. Like the basic lift crystal, these are power hungry and prone to fracture of used for rapid maneuverability.
---> The Itshana Process has improved crystal purity, allowing for a slight increase in maneuverability.
---> Can be manufactured using Itshana Select crystals, which gives a 175-200% increase in power, at the cost of increasing the ore cost of the component by an amount equal to the base crystal price.
Basic Webbing: 2 Silk per ream. Aethersilk webbing, designed to catch hold of aetheric currents and shunt them into a ship's core crystal. Particularly susceptible to fire from aetheric weapons, which will rapidly cause overloads that burn out whole sections of webbing.
Light Copper Ship Plating: 3 ore per section. Nearly pure copper plates, heavy, but with good thermal conductivity. Useful for spreading out the heat generated by an aether blast. Low melting point does mean that repeated impacts will melt the armor and set fire to the wood beneath.
Ship Hulls
Skyskiff 5 wood, 2 ore for one.
At her heart, the Skyskiff is an 18ft long frame of sleek timber and brass reinforcement, built from the ground up to be light on the air and quick to handle. Her basic design is quite old, dating back before the perfection of trim crystals, and she still sports a rudimentary mast that a sail can be run from in addition to the normal spars to run out web. In service, she's typically run by a crew of four. Two gunners who worked crouched in the middle of the ship, a pilot who spends their time practically laying on top of the core crystal in order to manipulate the power control, and the spotter who usually stands at the rear of the ship and calls out directions and threats. Generally, the captain of the vessel is the spotter, due to their superior vantage point and ability to see the entire local theatre.
A notable problem with the Skyskiff is that despite her speed, her web is cumbersome to replace, and without it she's painfully slow. In addition, both her Core Crystal and Her Lift Crystal slots are only designed to fit small crystals. Her small lift crystal means a lot of the burden for vertical maneuvers is still placed on the power hungry trim crystals, which in turn puts more demand on her small core. As a result, her shroud is weak, and a single light cannon blast will knock a hole in it. It still takes two or three more shots before her shroud will buckle entirely, but if another shot comes in the same spot swiftly enough- that's the end of the skiff. Except in the most fortunate of circumstances, a single cannon blast to an unshrouded skiff will destroy it.
She has no usable cargo capacity.
Armament
2 light cannon mounts. One on each side.
Requires:
1 Core Crystal (Up to Very Small in size)
1 Lift Crystal (Up to Very Small in size)
4 Trim Crystals
2 reams of webbing
Transport barge 7 wood, 2 ore for one.
In times of peace, this was the vessel most frequently seen going to and from Spires. She's little more than a wooden oval with a few metal bands designed to support the lift crystal. She's got capacity for crew and cargo, but she's quite slow when fully loaded, and her lack of significant trim crystals means that she can't maneuver with any speed. Her only real defense against attack is to dive down into the mist layer and hope that the attacking vessel loses her trail before the mistmaw comes lurking.
She can hold six units of cargo.
Armament
None
Requires:
1 Core Crystal (Up to small size)
1 Lift Crystal (Up to small size)
2 Trim Crystals
1 ream of webbing
Basic Dinghy (Special, used automatically by Marines to embark/disembark transports)
A very small boat, technically capable of transporting eight people as long as they aren't too broad, don't have a fear of heights, and their legs aren't too long. Her core crystal is about the size of a housecat, and kept powered by a fixed ventral web. She's solid wood, unarmed, and has the tendency to tip alarmingly as she doesn't actually use a lift crystal, but makes do entirely on a trio of small trim crystals. It's a slow and terrifying way to travel. Though she's the primary lifeboat of transports, your chances of survival are alarmingly small if you find yourself alone in a dingy .
When used by marines, she's typically crewed by five, with the squad leader acting as an extra member in every set of three boats. When going into a hostile spire, one marine steers, the other four act as spotters or (if one or more has a gauntlet or rifle) shooters. She's such a small vessel that it doesn't take more than a dozen gauntlet shots for her to break apart completely, and a single shot to her ventral web will (at best) cripple her.
Her core crystal is, technically, capable of generating a shroud. However, the limited energy the miniscule core crystal can process limits the crew to picking two of three options: Maintain Altitude control, maintain thrust, raise shroud. For obvious reasons, raising the shroud is something of a last resort. Worse, even when powered, the shroud can be penetrated by sustained gauntlet fire. This is to say nothing of a shot from a light cannon. The shroud will buckle completely after a single shot from a light cannon, though to its credit, that's one more cannon shot than the Dinghy would have survived normally.
Marines
Massed Fire and Charge: When engaging, Marines will bunch up to focus fire with their ranged weapons until they run out of ammunition or become too hot to use (depending on weapon type), at which point they will charge in with melee weapons.
Crossbow Corridors of Carnage: When engaging, Marines will attempt to find cover, or at least concealment, and fire from behind that. Advancement is a leap-frog between cover, and retreat is a similar series of backward jumps.
Ships
Close Aggressively: Ships will attempt to close distance with enemy vessels and engage at close range, firing all cannons until the enemy is destroyed.
Small Docks: Relatively simple affairs of wood jutting out into the void, capable of servicing a relatively small number of light craft. These docks are best suited to peace time usage, and are ill-equipped to service or build true warships. Light defensive cannons have been mounted in strategic positions, and will be upgraded automatically when needed.
Provides a single production line that can be used for any small or smaller production pattern.
Marine Academy: The basic and unaugmented marine academy, where men and women are transformed from milksop civilians into hardened marines.
Provides a single production line to be used ONLY on Marine production.
Production Patterns
Basic Marine Training: [Max: 25 | Rate: 2]
Generates Marine units at the spire. These marines are capable in hand-to-hand combat, but are not provided any initial weapons. You might want to buy them swords, at the very least.
Skyskiff Pattern A: [Max: 10 | Rate: 2]
Creates two Skyskiff units per turn, up to a max of 10. Each skyskiff is outfitted with
2 Light Aether Cannons.
1 Very Small Basic Core Crystal
1 Very Small Basic Lift Crystal
4 Trim Crystals
2 reams of webbing
Buyback cost: 9 crystal, 6 ore, 5 wood, 4 silk
Author
Topic: Arms Race: War of the Cinder Spires | Spire Wreth (Read 162139 times)