The Shop, continued
Dec. 1st, 2008 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerIt was another machine like the last, though I thought I remembered the last one being slightly smaller and in better nick. It was surrounded by its own walls, which were dilapidated but still solid. And it was right next to my settlement, which was spang in the middle of the map.
Hermit Guy thanked me fulsomely for building the settlement so close, but expressed some concern over the safety aspects. Also he pointed out that if the machine didn't knock its own walls down, I would need to take them out with catapults so that he could get at it, which meant promoting my knight all the way.
As I started to build my woodcutters and hunters and so on, it occurred to me that there was a logical flaw in this mission. It had probably been present in previous missions, but it was this one that brought it home to me. The knight and the hermit were settler-size. The walls around the machine were a lot taller than they were. How, absent my god's eye view, did they know it was in there?
Well, maybe the hermit had some whizzy war machine detecting hoojimaflip. All things were possible.
A village headman popped up, from a village to the north, and urgently requested the boon of my knight's presence. As he was setting off in that general direction, another one issued an urgent invitation to the village in the east. My expectations were confirmed when the south and the west villages reported in while he was hacking his way through the bandit encampment that straddled the northern track. Apparently he was wanted at all points simultaneously. Dead or alive, they didn't say.
The north village was on a barren patch, and sorely in need of water. I needed to send them some money and some stone to repair their well, which meant the bandits would have to go first, which meant soldiers. In the meantime, I sent them a shipment of water, which would get through unmolested, and set off eastward, pausing only to claim a territory near my settlement that had two quarries in it.
Guess what, there were bandits on the eastern track as well. Sometimes the game could be annoyingly symmetrical like that. The east village was short of wood for their palisade, and needed money and stone to rebuild their storehouse. I noticed that in this village, as well as in the northern one, there was a bit of battered-looking ancient machinery right next to the marketplace. The hermit said he'd look into it as soon as he had a proper workshop and the usual stone road all the way there.
And so it went. The southern village wanted iron and their castle rebuilding, the western one wanted booze and their church rebuilding. They all had the strange widgets, but no-one volunteered any information about them. In turn, I didn't inquire as to how they'd let their public buildings get into such a state. I had four gangs of bandits to root out. I promoted the knight, built a barracks and set to training some soldiers, and located the nearest iron mine to boost my stocks. The map was beginning to fill out, everything was going well--
And just as I was about to promote the knight for the second time, the machine inside the walls heaved itself up on some kind of stilts, scanned the countryside with what looked like a laser, and calmly blasted the lot. The stone quarries and iron mines were unaffected, as before, but everything else outside the central territory I was in had gone, and each of the villages was down another public building. The machine settled down into its bunker again, and I swear I heard it chortling.
Hermit Guy thanked me fulsomely for building the settlement so close, but expressed some concern over the safety aspects. Also he pointed out that if the machine didn't knock its own walls down, I would need to take them out with catapults so that he could get at it, which meant promoting my knight all the way.
As I started to build my woodcutters and hunters and so on, it occurred to me that there was a logical flaw in this mission. It had probably been present in previous missions, but it was this one that brought it home to me. The knight and the hermit were settler-size. The walls around the machine were a lot taller than they were. How, absent my god's eye view, did they know it was in there?
Well, maybe the hermit had some whizzy war machine detecting hoojimaflip. All things were possible.
A village headman popped up, from a village to the north, and urgently requested the boon of my knight's presence. As he was setting off in that general direction, another one issued an urgent invitation to the village in the east. My expectations were confirmed when the south and the west villages reported in while he was hacking his way through the bandit encampment that straddled the northern track. Apparently he was wanted at all points simultaneously. Dead or alive, they didn't say.
The north village was on a barren patch, and sorely in need of water. I needed to send them some money and some stone to repair their well, which meant the bandits would have to go first, which meant soldiers. In the meantime, I sent them a shipment of water, which would get through unmolested, and set off eastward, pausing only to claim a territory near my settlement that had two quarries in it.
Guess what, there were bandits on the eastern track as well. Sometimes the game could be annoyingly symmetrical like that. The east village was short of wood for their palisade, and needed money and stone to rebuild their storehouse. I noticed that in this village, as well as in the northern one, there was a bit of battered-looking ancient machinery right next to the marketplace. The hermit said he'd look into it as soon as he had a proper workshop and the usual stone road all the way there.
And so it went. The southern village wanted iron and their castle rebuilding, the western one wanted booze and their church rebuilding. They all had the strange widgets, but no-one volunteered any information about them. In turn, I didn't inquire as to how they'd let their public buildings get into such a state. I had four gangs of bandits to root out. I promoted the knight, built a barracks and set to training some soldiers, and located the nearest iron mine to boost my stocks. The map was beginning to fill out, everything was going well--
And just as I was about to promote the knight for the second time, the machine inside the walls heaved itself up on some kind of stilts, scanned the countryside with what looked like a laser, and calmly blasted the lot. The stone quarries and iron mines were unaffected, as before, but everything else outside the central territory I was in had gone, and each of the villages was down another public building. The machine settled down into its bunker again, and I swear I heard it chortling.