TVK 77 Ear Candy

[StratOcastle]

Hello.

Welcome to age 77, The Virtual Kingdom. To start off, I didn't try to get groovy with elf tac or other life saving measures since Clear Sight is categorically stymied this age. What I did do was balance core speed and reassert *middle(nw)* control by way of 3 dwarf undead. I had contemplated their utility last age, but this age the undead get parity in offensive and defensive losses. One reason for this decision was to have a combative elite type province that was somewhat resistant to Nightmare and an elite that's more difficult to ambush. It's not that I feel I've discovered anything remarkable, but was done to create a greater number of problems for the enemy.

I'm not enamored by elves as much as there's a need to present capability in a plethora of spell casting fields. Spec defense on t/ms doesn't inspire my confidence, so my sober reasoning is based in top feed pragmatism. Without abduction to babysit armies there's a narrower venue to operating outside of war. The solution is to take land; you know what I mean? We have to think "up".

The 3 paladin distribution is center mass in regard to GMT swing. The racial shared spells are Greater Protection, Town Watch and Reflect Magic.

Now this *middle* I'm referring is simple, but represents a transcendence in meaning that probably comes off confusing. Allow a moment to digress; I've often found congruence of factors that interrelate across supposedly unrelated factors. To point, we might be able to figure out what flavors someone prefer in food by the gun they use and ammunition they prefer,.. by the music they enjoy both in tempo and tone and the devices they prefer to listen, including speaker size and composition. Harmonics. If any of you are familiar with target shooting, there's some level of consideration to barrel harmonics.

So it is in Utopia that I'll refer to the "middle" in a multitude of phases. What I'm looking at is the duality of dwarf and halfling in functional congruence, or victory algorithm. On the surface we have a 7/5 and 5/7 elite which is 1 point above total elite points(defense + offense/elite) in all races. Now nw gurus may laugh at this point, but this simply represents the "tide" effect of flat mechanics. Anything that passes through the elite gauntlet of 4 dwarves and 4 halflings will likely exert more resources combatively to overcome this logistic. This is where we establish strategic foundation. We should lean toward pragmatism, but the dwarf and halfling offer us the fundamental.

In TVK I expressed my admiration for a kingdom called A Mothers Advice/Polar Bears. One of their signature kingdom designs was a breadth of nw center elves, with cows and killers above and "name-your-race" core below, depending on age mechanics. If you hit the nw tab you'd see this daunting belt of elves across the mid nw that was like a gate to crash if you wanted to defeat AMA. I'd imagine the duality of this middle lay anchors on the enemy cows with high penetration ops, and presented a defensive barrier to the enemy core.

Duality exists not just in how the dwarf and halfling work together but what the kingdom defends through aggressive doctrine. We're in an age with limited Clear Sight availability and plague immunity is exclusive to the undead. We know our halfers will be targets just as we must target halfers for t/m survivability. This is that defensive/offensive miasma we employ to focus on military objectives. If we ideally have dwarves and halfers center nw then the wider strategic idiom is to make every action the enemy attempts against this center a stretch. Make it logistically costly to engage the center and the center will engage the enemy that works against our flanks. We want to hammer out venues where the 7/5 elite can break all enemies and sabotage raceways for low resistance.