horrorTerror's General Guide Spam Thread 2: [OPEN] 4 Bizness

Creatures and Curiosities of the Battlefield: Quick summary of the Battlefield for extreme newbies and first sessioners.

Most commonly, the Battlefield is a location often ignored outside of a few contractually obligated visits such as the Legendary Nap and the Reckoning. This is because at first glance, there does not particularly seem to be very much to do outside of the final fight of the war seeing as the carapace fighting is messy, unhelpful after going once or twice to get the hang of the place, and likely to hurt your Derse lunar rep if it isn't already shattered as a Prospit dreamer when Derse autoaggros if you meet strength/proximity alerts and don't meet rep requirements and likely to set back Prospit and thus speed the Reckoning as a Derse dreamer unless your Prospit rep is fuckhigh when Prospit autoaggros if you meet strength/proximity alerts and don't meet said repquirements. That's kind of because that's the truth. The game does not honestly expect you to do very much here outside of your final battle, just giving you the Legendary Nap to show you there's nothing of interest going on and then lets you visit the place without trying to stop you with cloud hurricanes once you're post-denizen and you actually are able to end the game mostly prepared.

But it's not all boring. Maybe. If you've got creative prototypings. And you find abnormally high risk of death not boring. Or just never explored the place due to a particularly weird native.

Mutant Chess Pieces

Surprise surprise, the chess-themed carapacians of the dream moons come in soldier variants when fighting the big ole legendary war between the kingdoms of light and darkness, some of which are also varyingly-organic mutant chess pieces. In general the default pawns are fairly average mooks only slightly higher statted than non-upper-agent carapacians, often on par with policing authority regulators, though this may vary depending on what prototypings affect and whether the military is provided with more powerful buffs in the form of aspect-contaminated or otherwise OP prototypings. Usually once the Battlefield has unfolded into a planet rather than a chessboard besides being fertile for the genesis frog that means shit's fighting and you gotta watch for turns. Conventional pawns appear to be armed with middle ages fare like swords and bows and arrows and spears and clubs and all that early pre-firearms jazz. These people give their ships lasers, and can figure out guns hella fast as exiles, but don't get the idea at the standard carapace land unit level for the oddest of reasons unless WV, someone else with strong enough AI to grasp the idea without being exiled, or a player intervenes and gains access to/provides weapons and possibly weapons production. Joy.

There are other types you have to watch for. Most common are Rooks, which have stronger stats, are bigger and more muscular, and have castlystuff growing off their backs, and sometimes carry other troops as heavy escorts. After that are Bishops, which carry big crooks, usually wear funny hats, heal other soldiers, remove carapace plague, cast aspect powers, cast light/shadow majjyks, and other stuff depending on prototypings. Plus the Knights, which are the elite troopers which act like conventional knights except bloody fast despite the heavy armor, leaping around and killing things. Then there's the Kings themselves, as the queens stay home on the moons unless shit's really gone and hit the fan and their thrones have been destroyed, in which case they could do anything they want. You guys know the drill about all of these, yup. Less familiar are Fairy Chess Pieces, which are created if certain prototypings would be better exploited by entirely new or additional roles. Bishops are great if you're into majjyks but new since you can borrow/loot their spell tomes for unfamiliar basics, and Knights' gear is somehow comparable to midgame alchemized equipment more often than not as they often include a selection of minor relics of their moon or surprisingly advanced technology for their aesthetic's attempt at age shown with pawns, and agent-level flashsteps mean they're going to be able to dodge bullets if they're not caught by surprise, but most knights usually are dead by reckoning, either by overestimating their skill, challenging the enemy king, or being stopped in the various twists and turns of a progressing session's health and reckoning timer. By post-denizen you should be able to storm through these unless you try to take the whole army or most of the surviving knights/bishops on at once, since that's kind of the point the game expects you to be able to visit the place productively period, usually for the Reckoning.

The bigger machines with the firepower of boss underlings or worse are considered Skaian Siege Engines, which include battleships, their dropships, fighter/bomber planes, bishop mechs, mechahorses, mobile towers, and whatnot, which vary heavily by their prototypings. Battleships, dropships, and some planes can be used to exile carapaces if there are no players aboard and it sets to drift towards Skaia in crash mode (nice try exiling yourself, doesn't work n'wah!). Also generic, but just summarizing. Most of these are best taken out with siege equipment of your own or much more lategame such as post-Underworld.

All of these are manufactured in the veil. Woo. The environment is more interesting, sadly/nicely enough.

Terrain Features

Battlefield Castles: 'The only exciting landmark' for most purposes, these things serve as makeshift command centers, unsurprisingly decent fortifications, and often border major battle lines. Taking of castles, especially by Derse, usually indicates the Reckoning timer is fast approaching a serious time cut function that makes it come faster, fast. The fortresses possess excellent libraries that are often the only reason to visit the Battlefield pre-reckoning, containing excellent alchemy materials or simply highly informative texts. Allegedly the castles hold some religious significance related to holy texts, great works of art and architecture, and other symbolic things that will be created in the future world, which is why almost all of them are recurring game-made or playeroid-species-made works. Destroying them doesn't stop them from being sent onward (it has been checked), so don't bother nuking them if you hate literature, it won't work. Except for living beings (though it may recycle their ideas into an offensive mockery), items that are on the Battlefield (or have been at any point) when Skaia becomes a pond are also given the blessing of being reiterated in the new universe, or at least if still present are shunted directly into the grassy Avalon that is where you go in a chain where the Door actually works like your alchemized or game-based inventory items do here (sorry, can't get you there, they have kill on sight registration to avoid unplanned external player imports. GT's case is making me think that Sburb is trying to evolve towards replayer packets rather than away from them, interestingly enough. Lillian was right?).

You know, Replaying is oddly thorough about ensuring you can't escape to a working game, into your future universe, or back to your old one, did you know that they not only disable exile portals if alpha timeline players are capable of getting inside but they also don't allow use of or usually even instantiate hub portals from the moons to the Frog Temple, weird, huh? And also block appearifier/sendificator use on players if it'd take them out of the game? It's beginning to not look like a glitch and start looking like intentional Skaian(et?) planning. I'll have to check if using Battlefield magicant entrances after the Genesis Frog is deployed works, or about time travel use to get into Magicant entries preentry then use alchemized equipment to escape to an unharmed orbiting body like the moon(s) of the host world, but Billious Slick doesn't seem the type to overlook regenerating geometry errors if he inherits any of Skaia's so-called 'benevolence', and I don't think the house magicant entries existed preentry or that'd have been a bigger issue. This is cold hard planned and completely so. The continue option has been removed very thoroughly.

Plague Blotches: Carapace plague generation moss. Keep away from carapaces, and if they get infected take them to a bishop for healing, or use [ Demeter's Fire ] for life players or give them demetergrass which does the same disease removal thing. What they are lorewise is...unclear, but Skaian will allows them to be directed for the purposes of fucking up carapace fighting to keep the battles how Skaia wants them going, as mentioned in the FAQ. [ The War Will Never Stop ] indeed.

Forests: Generally tend to slow down fighting. Battlefields with more naturally occurring forest or simply bigger battlefields usually mean a longer session, though this trend is not indicative of necessity and bad play will still ruin the timer quickly. These are where the lilies come from in the endgame, as they sprout from the ground-level ponds and fly up past the trees then float to wherever they'll be during the Reckoning and frog delivery, which is usually all over the battlefield. I think they're supposed to be an alternative Skaian defensive system that was developmentally axed and left insufficient in favor of more use of portal system that destroys your homeworld and about every host world you've been on too, since many lily pads take direct hits from the BK or multiple meteors to take down and it's often a lot of lilies getting cut down by meteoric hellfire before the Battlefield itself starts taking serious meteor damage. For anyone who somehow hasn't acquired working flight by the endgame the lily pads tend to conglomerate in ways that it's possible to flashstep between relatively easily to provide a way to attack the Black King with melee weapons even if his prototypings or size are not favorable for doing so from the ground.

Farms: Where soldiers get their supplies, since the moons and veil take up their own resource generation and consumption. More farms also mean a longer fight because supplies tend to keep Prospit sending more bishops and thus not being as problematically afflicted by plague and thus making it harder to forcefully disadvantage them into losing as quickly, yee. The WV, usually Warweary Villein, aka the Mayor, recurs somewhere around one of them, usually Dersite. WV has pregenerated anti-royal routines that will lead him to raise a large army against the BK if triggered (even though since they're a less impressive force than the Prospitian army they're still not gonna do very much), so it's a good idea to get him active early on so he'll gather rogue carapaces from both armies to preoccupy the surviving Derse army during the Reckoning so you can handle the BK without too much interference.

Rivers: Like forests, slow down fighting. Yeee. Most of these will be left surprisingly untouched during the fighting and even Reckoning as they emit the endless holy water that fills Skaia during the Vast Croak via verdancy scripts so they're not really destructible beyond filling them up and covering it over, Terraria-style.

Open Chessboard: The black and white coated dirt of the mass itself and surrounding labyrinthine features depending on nature of battlefield complexity. Where the most fighting happens, really. Frontline Soldier and his unit can usually be found in one of these areas on the main body of the Battlefield, and as he's one of Prospit's major on-Battlefield commanders most likely to die pre-reckoning as part of a major twist/turn you should probably find him and give him alchemized weapons while telling him to play it safe on confidence from Skaian prophecy seeing him in several safe locations (whether or not said prophecies exist, if you're believable enough you might be able to get him to do it) as a form of lucky blessing for your session.

Religious Catacombs: Protecting the virtually unmodifiable already-overprotected Skaian Shiny (something something the barriers that keep Heart players out are really strong on that particular shiny cuz it's so damn big and important and weird) within the core of Skaia/the Battlefield, these something something holy chambers beneath the earth are used as secret passages between castles and other points of interest in order to launch sneak attacks and stuff, and often have randomly generated entrances and exits on the surface of the Battlefield once it reaches the complexity stage of functional and planet. They are used as bunkers of varying effectiveness during bombardments, including the Reckoning, which is why the Derse army sometimes seems to be pouring out of the earthen landscape during the BK fight, because it actually is. Most of the time they're not used for Vague Religious Significance reasons outside of said bunkering and sneak attacks, so if they're being used a lot it usually means the timer's nearing the end and pretenses are being dropped and rules of combat beginning to slip more.

In general, a more 'decorated' battlefield means a longer session because the generated landmarks usually tell the game how much it can delay the war without looking 'unreasonable' to itself assuming a normal proper playthrough, so short sessions will be mostly or almost entirely chessboard and long ones will have very little clear chessboard besides large open areas for the Reckoning.

But What Do?

Yeah I'm mostly lost too. For a surprisingly large and important arena there seems to be little expansion to it that wasn't noticeable in a native, presumably because unlike Lands modifying the place entirely after a certain spree of points isn't safely doable with all the scripts relying on the Battlefield not getting dunked on before a certain point, and the place itself is generally a consistent tileset between sessions, give or take the fine details of prototypings and landmark locations.

Things you can do once you're cleared to access the place:

1. Visit/raid the libraries. There's a lot of unprotected good alchemy code wielding items and unguarded reading material, so as long as you avoid ticking off the soldiers who are doing fortifying tasks elsewhere the shelves are yours to loot.

2. Trigger WV's revolution script. If it hasn't been so already by the war, start by finding him on the farms, and through dialogue or the events surrounding him giving him the idea to rise up against the monarchy and start gathering carapaces to his side. Not everybody will do what that one session somebody from another court mentioned in a meeting off-topic thoughttrain said and using the tools involved to start a third army enough on Prospit's side to not fight them but definitively a separate claim, but the mayoral army can usually do sufficient damage to Derse's army before or during the Reckoning to keep the army itself in disarray around the time the Reckoning kicks off so it's just players and king for the most part.

3. Give FS some good equipment and tell him to stay safe, as above. It may not actually work, especially if Skaia says time to die for him quickly, but every possible method of session prolonging is what it is.

4. Plant tracking devices on the lily pad plants seen in rivers and forests. This will give you a good idea of whether the defensive systems have been deployed yet, as they usually float off and begin to blossom shortly before the Reckoning begins to give themselves time to spread across the Battlefield so the survivors can become the jeweled flowers of Bilious Slick's pond. Besides saying 'yeah the reckoning's coming soon' it also provides an indicator of how progressing the Reckoning is, as Skaian defense portals are inconsistent beyond absorbing enough veiloids to barrage your planet to death and deploying certain devices before and after and may change the scannable portal-to-meteor ratio rapidly for unclear reasons depending on boss fight progress and the BK's use of WK's scepter to increase the incoming meteor severity or provide directional aim.

5. Prepare for battle. If your session's almost done you can start planting automated turrets and stuff where you think the battle's gonna be and lure the BK that way during the final fight if you're careful about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯