No decisions to be made on your end yet, I'm afraid.
We'll be playing the game on the highest difficulty level - Wizard. Why? Because.
That burning splatter used to be a redcap that Cornelius dispatched on his own. Don't worry, we'll be seeing a lot of those here.
I expend most of my mana summoning a couple of zombies. As we can't adjust our spell loadout yet, they're the best we've got.
Sending them off down the path unearths another redcap.
Here I'm making a dash to grab this apple before that redcap with the red jewel gets it. These items don't respawn and letting your enemies get a hold of them makes things significantly harder. As it is, our enemy has likely grabbed most stuff of worth already. Food items, which most of them are, heal you on use. You can pick most consumables up with a creature (so long as it has hands) and they'll teleport it to you - unless they're wounded, in which case they'll use it for themselves.
More importantly, at the bottom of the screen you can see a pedestal of sorts - that's a place of power. Mana doesn't replenish on its own in this game, but controlling places of power by having a creature stand on them causes your mana supply to slowly drip-fill. You also get a little mana back for each kill you make, the specific amount depending on the strength of creature killed.
One of our zombies chases the redcap guarding it away. The other one's fighting several others at top of the screen. Undead, in this game, have a serious advantage in the sense that they're generally very resistant to damage, but the effectiveness of that resistance depends on what they're fighting. The rocks thrown by the redcaps here can barely hurt our zombies.
I summon a brownie on the place of power. Brownies are decent scouts, but right now using one just means I'm not wasting a zombie.
While the zombie's distracted a redcap sneaks up and kills our brownie. I have just enough mana to summon another and keep the flow going.
god damn it they're everywhere
(Also, the bridge collapsed for some reason. Never seen it do that before)
Once I run out of mana for fireballs, I have to melee them to death. Most wizards have puny basic attacks.
I had to use the apple, but we all survived. In the top-left corner you can see that our zombie has a halo/torc/thing. This means it's a veteran (I forget the specifc term the game uses). There's another veteran level beyond that one, which makes the creature a king of its type, and only one such king can exist per type of creature per wizard. It's a shame that we don't have any way of healing him.
Over on the other side of the river, our zombie scouts.
Nope, nothing here. As you can see by the minimap, maps in this game are spherical - they'll loop around as you get to one edge. This leads to impressive games of cat-and-mouse as it's fairly difficult to actually corner someone, and it's often possible to hit-and-run back into an advantageous position given enough time.
That must be Camulos. Let's go and say hello.
fffffffffffffffffffff
As I'm building up my zombie army, skeleton attack! These guys output tons of damage but are fragile.
Re-killed with no casualties.
I send the dead squad to scout just as another skeleton shows up.
I think it's time that we go and pop, you know, just pop down to Camulos' place and see what all this fuss is about.
Cease! Desist!
He soon wastes all of his mana spamming fireballs.
Cornelius: Stay thy hand, good stranger. My name is Cornelius.
Cornelius: I seek my uncle, the wizard Lucan. Have you seen him?
Camulos: Lucan! Aye, I know that name. The wretch defiled this sacred place!
Camulos: The wily old fox confounded me and disappeared into the night!
Cornelius: So, my trail runs true!
Battle commences. Or, rather, Camulos gets mobbed.
After using pretty much every healing item on the map, he tries to run for it...
...reconsiders...
...tries to run again, but this time I block the place of power with a brownie...
...ducks into his house...
...only for me to head him off and produce a hail of fireballs.
There's nothing left to do here, so we enter the portal Camulos left open.
The game helpfully tracks how much experience there is available per region, so you'll know if you've missed anything.
Here's the portmanteau. This is where we select spells. We can take any of the ingredients on the right and combine them with an aspect of law, chaos, or neutrality for different effects. Each ingredient can only be used in one aspect at a time. Right now we only have three ingredients, but we'll be getting more later, and to use them all at once we'll have to buy more talismans to put them in. I'll detail the available spells in a second spoiler.
Here we can spend experience. Everything has a sloping experience cost and said cost tends to add up faster than you'd expect. Everything else on this page is self-explanatory.
Next time: Greenhenge!
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Topic: Let's play .jpg compression: CH9: The Base of Olympus (Read 7822 times)