Mark left the negotiations up to Amelia, after giving her a simple directive on what they needed. Mark felt bad about the deception, but Amelia had no qualms with stringing both the other contenders along. Of course it was doubtful whether either Leonard or Nick believed it entirely, and at some point things would fall through entirely as it became obvious which dungeon they were targeting.
In the end, Mark decided that they would work with Nick. Amelia had conducted the final negotiations just the other day. Both forces were not the easiest matchup in the first place since both would be difficult to kill with their standard arrow enchantments. But Mark had an idea on how they could tackle both, and Leonard would be the more difficult dungeon to take on in a one on one match up in Mark’s opinion.
For Leonard, Mark would mainly utilize beasts and flower tree units, as well as utilizing heavy infantry to break cavalry charges, and archers for support. They would once again breed spiderlings in mass to supply the numbers. The archers might be less effective as a whole, but leopard's units were at least still flesh and blood, unlike Nick’s forces.
For Nick, they would forgo archers near entirely, and instead they would focus on mages and brutes that could smash through the undead skeletons. They would really only need basic enchantments. Enchantments that increased stats or defense, and then protection enchanted shields and armor to defend against the incorporeal spirit undead. All of the magic embued equipment would be sent to this battlefield for the same reason among others. Mark would send air forces to both battlefields, but the majority would go to help fight the undead.
As far as leaders for the forces, it had been fairly easy to decide. Lucien and Dale, their newest champion, would go to lead the attack on Leonard's dungeon. It had already been proven that plant units did not rise from Lucien’s sphere of corruption and were not affected by certain curses like the shrunken head. Mark expected it would be the same for the undead, so Lucien and most of the witch doctors would head to the other battlefield.
Dale was their second champion. Once again Mark had gotten three choices for a champion after they had finally summoned their first champion, the Bombardier weaver. Their other choices had been a 28.3 Chimera for their creepy crawly choice, and a 24.9 Needler for their flower choice. The chimera was a powerful champion like the red dragon, but it would have taken even more CP than the Bombardier weaver to unlock him. The Needler looked to be a blue flower surrounded by hundreds of leaf-like appendages that tapered down to a sharp point. Both would be powerful, but Mark ended up going with the far cheaper option that would allow them to get a third decently strong champion before the upcoming battle.
Dale was a goblin exterminator. Seemingly he was based on their toxic essence and perhaps a bug exterminator since they had the creepy crawly class. In reality he was an extremely dangerous unit with multiple ways to exterminate other living beings. Downsides were that he was physically weaker than most champions, being at about the level of Henry, and his toxins would affect friendlies. Not a terrible issue since they had plant units that would be extremely resilient to at least his fumigate area ability.
On the other front, Henry would lead their forces against the undead. Mark had already relocated the bugbear commander to their newest settlement near the south of the map. He would take along the other two champions to devastate their way through Nick’s forces to the dungeon entrance, before Henry would take the dungeon capturing army in. If everything went to plan, the two champions could do most of the work above saving the real army for the dungeon levels. However, Mark assumed the worst and expected at least half of Henry’s forces would fall beforehand.
All he had left was their choice for their third and what would hopefully be their final champion of the succession battle. Today would be the first day, he needed to start dedicating their CP, since Dale had just been summoned. Mark contemplated as he looked through the choices.
The first was the goblin magus. It was their goblin option with a power rating of 23 even. There were options for adding every single one of their available essences as well as boosting the goblins manna supply and regeneration. All of the additions would have brought the CP price to just under 3 million, which was quite a lot compared to their previous goblin champion options.
The second option was a phase spider with a power rating of 24.1. Evidently the spider was based on their duplicate enchantment since it had the ability to duplicate itself. Options included the spider being able to split or shift its being between its duplicates making it difficult to put down for good. Mark immediately saw the potential ability to spam the crap out of this champion option. They could keep the original in a safe location like their tier 3 breeding spiders and send the duplicates to fight. However the battle was winding down, and there were likely limits to the ability. Not to mention there was the third option.
The flower champion was the corpse flower with a power rating of 27 even. A flower that was based on their toxic and life essence. What made the choice mouth watering was its life cycle ability. The corpse flower used toxins to melt units down, before using the units energy to grow units from the ground. It was an army building ability similar to the sphere of corruption. There was really only one serious drawback. They did not have the life essence required. Every drop they had collected for the last half year and longer had been used for producing more vitality bombs.
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The interface solution for this was adding 1 million CP to the cost, and the interface would extract the life essence source from the ground. Presumably it would mean no more life essence, which was not a terribly big deal since they were basically going all or nothing on this final attack. The problem was the cost. They had 42 days left until the deadline. The bombardier spider was near the same cost and had taken 48 days.
With the life essence extraction and other options, the unit would be near as expensive as the bombardier weaver had been. To make their timeline, Mark would have to dedicate a good chunk of their daily MP to convert to CP. It would mean fewer dungeon units. Not a terribly big deal assuming that the corpse flower spawned units would be allowed into the dungeon as well, which he was fairly sure they would be. Still Mark would have to relook things over. It should not be too bad since, Mark had kept in mind that they might have to use MP to speed along their third champion.
A good number of units had survived their last attack including two thirds of their bugbear and gnarled wood goblin elite, several hundred mages, witch doctors, and healing goblins, and more than half their tier 3 spiders. The tier 3 spiders were a bit obsolete since they had long ago finished the second evolution upgrade with the aid of their institute core building. The double evolved versions had another 50% boost to their base power rating, making them and anything bred off them notably stronger.
After unlocking the second evolution the institute had then started working on other top upgrades that would boost their other unit types. First Mark maxed out the warrior class through level 6 which would in turn increase the warhammer class tied to his elite troops that would be essential for taking on the undead. Warrior level 5 only added an additional 10% or 15% for the specialized classes that fell under it, but level 6 added 25% to the unit’s base power rating or 40% for the specialized classes under it.
Henry was currently in the new barracks built at their southern settlement. In another couple days he would officially be maxed out at level 6 warhammer class, going from the 10.4 power rating to 11.5. Perhaps not a terribly big jump, but it did allow him to keep his lead over the other dungeon units. The double evolved carnivorous centipedes that would be sent along with him, now could quite easily get their power ratings into the double digits once they spent time in the barracks to get to the regular experience level.
The true boon was adding 1.1 to all of the other warhammer class units. At dungeon level 4 the barracks capacity had increased, and Mark was keeping them filled to save costs. Now even the tier 2 bugbear units were hitting a 5.0 power rating once they were level 6 and hat least a regular experience level. The gnarled wood goblins would be higher at 6.75, making them the true elite for his humanoid forces. Mark would have their numbers capped out at 454 and 83 respectively. Along with the support mages, healers, etcetera, they would be the main force to take the dungeon.
After maxing out the warrior class, Mark had shifted attention to the mage class since the mages would be critical for both forces. The cost for level 5 was higher at 250,000 MP versus the 100,000 MP for warrior class, and the cost was 1 million for level 6 versus the 250,000 MP for level 6 warrior. They would still finish in plenty of time to send mages through their 3 barracks, but would only have time for 1 full batch since he would have to take their current mages from level 4 to 6. If he diverted MP to the champion, this would be the main area where he could save MP.
Mark looked through things. A level 6 warrior class added 500MP to summoned unit’s cost, but it was double that for a mage or healer class. Quite expensive for goblins that could die by the score. Still it was the best area to make cuts. They would still have hundreds of mages, but the majority would only be on the lower level, if Mark went with the corpse flower. He would also have to cut down on the accompanying carnivorous centipede force. For the Leonard army, he would cut down on legionnaires and blood roses. He could decrease the planned area to be hold when the force clammed up.
With that being decided, Mark selected to start diverting resources toward the corpse flower. He would have it summoned to their southern settlement to join their army there in 40 days if his calculations proved correct. Not an issue the corpse flower could catch up with the army that would depart a day or two before then.
The army led by Lucien and Dale would depart from the garden sanctuary with routes both over land and by water. The beasts and plants would travel over land with Dale to meet the goblins traveling by water at a landing point about a day's travel from Leonard’s dungeon. They would time it so that they were marching on Leonard’s dungeon on the appropriate date in conjunction with Nick’s forces. Their southern army would set out for Nick’s dungeon a few days prior to strike the very next day. Hopefully, Nick would be caught unaware, and he would not get much out of the unique reward he would get for sacking Leonard. As part of their agreement, Nick would be the force actually entering Leonard’s dungeon, while they would be responsible for defeating most of the surface forces.
Mark and Amelia acquiesced quite easily, since it would mean they were agreeing to expending less resources on that front. They had come to an agreement on unit numbers, tiers, and so on. All of which Mark planned to undercut to an extent, but they still needed to send enough to keep up the appearance and more importantly to guarantee the success of the endeavor. It was a fine balance, giving up the unique reward was hardly a concern since it seemed to take time to really make much use of unique them, and Mark planned to close the battle out a day later.
