Do NOT Anger the Giant Squid!

[ThatGuyThere]

Gav was breathing hard, as he brought "Emperors Vengeance" around an old guard tower, to line up another shot on the giant monster attacking HQ. General Kost's Elephant tank was smoking badly, having taken the brunt of the mutated monsters attack over and over. If he couldn't stop the thing soon the Emperor would surely have his head for having let the General die! The problem was even with his upgraded MCV-X1 Burster cannon he just couldn't kill it! The battle had been raging for hours and already most of the garrisoned troops lay dead, scattered across the old base before the Imperial Fortress. He heard the Grom artillery fire off again, hitting the monster with little effect, and with dread watched it creep closer to the massive Elephant tank. But before it struck a small recon Leopard fired off at it, the small shells exploding across some tentacles drawing its attention away while the crew threw their vehicle into reverse, and quickly. The thing was distracted! Time to strike! Pressing his mech forward in a suicide charge he bellowed "For the Emperor!" And let lose on the thing, bathing it in fire from his cannons. Much to his surprise the thing let out a hideous shriek, making him grimace as he tried to cope, fearing the thing would lash out and smash his mech apart. But then the gigantic beast shuddered and slowly fell. He had killed it! Even as it lay dead he kept firing into it, blasting it further apart... just in case.

[AuralParadox]

I just killed off Kabaagh in my second game with him. I wasn't quite ready to face him, but I forgot he demands tribute at the end of the turn instead of the start! Whoops. All worked out well, anyway. I wouldn't have posted this, except...



Can anyone properly describe the tentacle-action going on in this fight? This screenshot is in round two. By some chance, the destroyers never ever hit - they might as well not have even been there! The Enzyme Throwers got in something like... 3 hp of damage over the six rounds... but everything else: Tentacles.

[Ian]

Well I inadvertently angered him by dropping a nuke on a Machine outpost that I couldn't keep clear and I was struggling to hold on to when I did. It was the centre-piece of my fight with the Machines. After getting crushed by the thing in my first attempt at this Cults game (I refused to give him the humans he wanted) I pacified him this time and made sure I was producing a lot of human resources.

So fast forward to me nuking this outpost and the two or three armies in it (killed a few of their heroes too) and all of a sudden I get the message saying he's been angered. He thinks I was aiming for him, apparently.... uh-oh.

I hadn't got enough other resources to build another nuke munition (and I didn't know whether that'd work anyway) and I was struggling to get the best units. So I used Ulysses Starke and cobbled together an army that would have held it's own against normal units but I wasn't confident against this thing. I created a tactic nuke attachment and gave it to some infantry with decent defense and then waited for him to come to me.

When he attacked I just hoped I got the initiative, which I did, and used the tactical nuke on him hoping for the best.

It worked, I killed him in just one turn

[potatoedoughnut]

Another tactic I just thought of:

Would it be possible to "kite" him around by changing your HQ? This would be expensive, but would it be possible to wait until he was 1-2 turns away then move your HQ to the other side of the map? Would he change directions? He only moves 1 hex a turn, so on a huge map this could effectively neutralize him until you're ready to fight him.

I'll have to try this out later.

[Ian]

If you have the resources to do that then the chances are you could afford a good enough army to fight him anyway. Still, I suppose there's a chance you have plenty of resources but you're not getting good draws from the deck, and he does seem to walk right past any units and bases that aren't in the HQ tile so I'd say it's possible.

If you try it, let us know how you get on

[MaximilianShade]

Doing the opposite is also a bad idea!

If you just continue giving tribute over and over, while taking care of the other opponents, the Great Kabaagh just keeps getting bigger! He had 69 attack dice, and 64 hit points by the time I finally decided to go up against him. @.@

And yet, I didn't lose a single unit. The sheer POWER of a planned and fully upgraded Xeno army.......

[potatoedoughnut]

So I just played a game against the squid hoping to try out the kiting tactic.

In the early game I just payed him off as I didn't have bases far apart enough to run him around. In total he demanded tribute 3 times, and stopped doing somewhere in the 30s. I finally got a base on the far side of the map around turn 50 and waited around for about 10 turns before I got bored and finished him off. I'll have to do it another time I guess.

And yeah, fully upgraded Xenos are stupidly powerful. There is no way that 10/9 15hp monstrosities that come back after you kill them aren't overpowered.

[dave866]

I wish you could set up a 3 on 1 where all three opponents were Xeno, versus the machines. Such exquisite pain, that would be. Hard to believe that war lasted long enough to make it to Earth.

[Kni7es]

Regardless he decimated my army

He only killed off 1/10th of your army? That's pretty good

Pffft, you must be an engineer of some sort. ;-P

Or a historian. "Decimate" was a Roman word used to describe their practice of killing off 1 in every 10 soldiers in a disgraced legion. The idea was to make the other nine think real carefully the next time they were about to screw up.

Anyway, I took the Spartan solution the first time he messaged me, and he still showed up a few turns later with something along the lines of 40+ hp and 50ish attack. I started over after he utterly owned by garrison, and tried to nuke the beast after giving it one tribute and then pissing it off once I had a nuke ready. I figured since the thing was about the size of a city, more than likely, a city-killer should do the trick. Didn't even bring it down to half-health. And what's worse is that I utterly wasted the nuke. The next round he was completely healed because of his goddamn "Regen 1" property, which makes it so that he regenerates 1 health each combat round and completely heals at the end of the turn. Next game I'm going to shove three nukes down his fat fugly face and see if he's still hungry after that.

It's like I always say: Kill it with fire. And if it's 'immune' to fire, it's not really immune. You're just not using enough fire.

[Ian]

Well, the Great Kablaagh just completely crushed my stupid Machine behind after I underestimated him.

It was me as the Machines vs the Mutants vs Kablaagh. I quickly built up some human resources and was mostly saved my first encounter with his envoy after I found and took a nomad caravan. With that done, I knew I had a little breathing room to get some more humans before he came to me again. In the meantime I was boosted by gaining a base very close to the mutants after I found a downed Machine craft with a hero in command of two scourge platoon. I replaced them with some much heavier weaponry as I sent an assassin forward to do two things; Kill any heroes who were at their base and see what armies they had. The armies were weak and even my two-unit, one-hero army I knew I'd take them. After creating a few attachments, I marched in and took the base, killing off the Free Mutants after about 35 turns and two visits from the envoy of the Kablaagh. I had about 15 or 16 human resources so the Kablaagh came along and I gave him yet another 9, as I now had all the time in the world to build up my forces and finish him as and when I chose.

I used some of my humans to create one of those facilities that lets you generate thralls and happily carried on. Until, of course, he suddenly came and demanded an increased amount of humans. I'd have been okay, I had exactly 9, but all of a sudden he wants 13.

In my two previous games with him the games had ended, one way or another, before he raised the stakes so this came as a complete surprise. Of course, I executed the envoy and awaited the worst. I threw what decent units I could at my HQ, managed to build myself a nuke and hastily tried to power through my deck. I was hoping to find an attack plane somewhere and knew that once I killed the Kabaagh it'd be game over anyway so I didn't need any other cards. It was end game.

Ultimately, I didn't get my plane and while Mortificus led an admirable defence against the big, tentacled bastard ultimately I was squashed.

Because I'd under-estimated it.