Turn 0 [Initial deployment; ruleset]
That's what we are fighting for, so that's what you are going to see.
The world is divided into 6 castles (1 to 6) and 25 regions (A to Y). Each player "starts" in the castle, and the objective is to find "his" treasures in 3 of the other castles. In practice, that means killing the other players, because if you don't gain any troop if you don't control a castle.
Each region / castle (except the Dark Forest in L, N and O) has a 3-digit code.
The first one is the ID of the owner :
0 = The Gruds - neutrals. More on these later.
1 =
Morpheus Kitami
2 = Porkbelly
3 = Rastignak
4 =
Dayyālu
5 = Argyra
6 = ValeVelkal [myself], as "Scribe"
So here is a version of the map easier to read :
The second and third digit is the number of soldiers (or gruds) from 1 to 99. Any empty region is immediately occupied by one grud.
So basically :
- Dayyalu, Rastignak and myself have basically no way to grow except by killing one another. I hope Dayyalu will continue this Let's Play if he kills me
- Porkbelly is on an island surrounded by gruds... which WILL be problematic if he does not cull their numbers quickly,
- Morpheus Kitamin chose a border-gore deployment by starting on U, blocking an obvious expansion path for Argyra.
At the end of each turn, each controlled region connected to a castle gives +1 soldier, to be allocated anywhere. For this reason, everyone deployed the 4 starting soldiers in one region each, so +4 soldiers by turn for everyone. The "Dark Forest" around Porkbelly's Dark Forest in the South works exactly the same way, but it hides its content and provides defensive bonus. The river and the mountains in white also provide defensive bonus.
As for the gruds, well, the little green fellows grow by +1 or +2 in each region they control every turn. They can also attack several times in the same turn (a player can only attack once by turn from one region to another region). Worse, they WILL attack if they have a good chance to win. They are relentless and I totally expect at least one player to lose to them.
There are two more things to know :
- There is a dragon (technically a "spectrar") roaming the land and eating humans and gruds alike. It started in Q, where it ate one grud.
- There is also a magician going from region to region, giving one soldier / grud to the owner and then proposing to help further - basically random positive or negative effect ; he can even hand over a region to the gruds. Dayyalu wisely declined his help.
Well, you know everything there is to know, and the game starts !