And we're back here later the next day IRL. I think we left in a position where we were just about to end the turn if I'm not mistaken. While it was a way I thought about the fact that she's ridden all the way up here by herself and that that could be she's quite a long way out of position now and can't really get back to help us if things go pear shaped. So we'll see if we live to regret that. Hopefully not. I think I can end the turn here. Do I need to just do a quick check of everything? A quick security check? Yeah, Stig came down here. She wants to fight this. Try to take the fortress. See about that. Okay, we're good. We're good. Blue. Yep, fine. Don't love that. She comes up here. They don't know what to do with themselves. Straker comes back towards the stronghold. Teal gets in a boat. All right, so I always like to look at what Teal did because they were the last one I just watched. They've made a big army. No, they haven't. No, no, I'm useless. Terrible, terrible. Blue's doing stuff. Who is this blue guy anyway? Eris. Okay, doesn't look very impressive. Ignisa. It's all pretty futile. So Lizzie is in control down here. She could pop back up, know that I'm paying attention and kill Ignisa, or she could just go and try and capture the fortress now. Day five. Let's scout the fortress. Let's find out how hard it would be to take. Keep coming. There's no one home. And there's a horde of Magi here. Then yeah, that might be worth doing at some point. Well, I just walk up to the walls here. Not much they can do really here. I mean, they can desperately hire some dudes, but I've got tons of spell points and I'm a pretty good spellcaster. Let's do the big move we wanted to do. We've got the Ghost Dragons now. We've got the Skellies. I'm not buying the Wraiths, I don't think. After I've ridden past here, I'm going to give them to Rissa. Maybe I could buy them. Let's go back in. That's not exactly a high stakes play, is it? Three grand? That's three grand. I just think they're a rip-off, man. I'm not buying them. Just leave them behind in case we need to defend the town. They can do that job. Let's get Rissa these Ghost Dragons. I want him to permanently carry them around. Aiden talks to Tameka. Xy, there is time actually to head up to... Oh, he's there. She wants to learn logistics as well. Maybe just go there and do that. Tameka's done it. Yeah, Tameka's not stopping. So Aiden gives her this. And I guess it makes sense to grow the stuff in Wormwood. So I should take these. Oh, there it is. Ring of the Magi. This is what I had last time. So, yeah, it doesn't really do anything. It just makes it that my spells are never run out, basically. But they already kind of never did before. Well, actually, then again, for a hero like Tameka, that actually is kind of maybe impactful for a change. Last time I was playing the Conflux campaign, I made the Ring of the Magi and I had it on a hero with huge spell power, where it was just like, ah, this doesn't feel that powerful. You know, compared to the Wishing Well, just not the great one. Maybe Rissa would like a Ballista. Kind of rhymes, so we'll go with that. All right. Tameka, take all of this and give it to her. Has someone gone there yet? Yes, all right. Love having a crystal warehouse nearby. It's so nice. Now, my dear, take, take, take. I'll take these and I'll take these as well. You don't need a two skull cap, so I guess we'll keep them floating. So, yeah, she's okay. Defense is a bit bad. Nine ghosties. The problem is the rest of this army isn't very good. 12, 12 of these aren't going to get a lot done. It's day five, so she pops her head up here, gets defense, so that's good. She can't fight blue. Like, that's just going to be too scary. There could be a proper pain in the backside though for them. Flag these things, get the sulfur, dominate the area, have the trading post, maybe wait around for day one and then get you some fresh stuff. Certainly get you these three bone dragons back anyway as well by that stage. I think that's okay. She could also gallop down here. Too much of a waste, I think. Let's just do these ones. Can she learn that? No. Okay. Well, actually then, let's do this. Get the luck, the moves, come here, get the defense from the battle scout veteran. Come on down here. Cool.  This girl, she's got it together. All right, Nimbus visits a monk, learns a thing or two, can fill up at the well there. Why not? That goes with that. What is up through here? Nimbus is just a perpetual explorer. It's all he does. He just wanders around all day. Gee, you've done that. Congratulations. I'm not scared of Straker taking a stronghold. I don't need you to come back and do anything about it. So that's fine. What am I going to do with her? I never found out what that is. Could just give this to Aiden. What's Aiden going to do? He's got this stuff. Come here. All right, on to Septiana. Now, what's she doing? I feel like she's run straight up through here in the hope of finding a town, but we've found nothing. I still think I'm going to follow the path anyway. Okay, well, we found a town. I think that's a location. Isra is here. She's in Port Evendor. It's a cove. All of the creatures in there are going to die as soon as I attack to make way for, yeah, she's got a hodgepodge of all different creature types in there that all have to make way, which you can absorb one of them, the best one. So the one to four bone dragons will still be there. And I'll be up against this army. We know how good Isra is, expert earth mage, huge attack defense, better than Septiana's. Yeah, we have to think about this. Let me bring the two comparisons closer together so we can contemplate it a bit better. I don't really have time to go back and get reinforcements.  There's no escape. She can't get away. All right, if I go here, I still have even a few movement points left to walk into the cove after I've done it. I just can't see Isra winning this. Yes, you can do slow, expert slow. I can do expert teleport in response with the dreadnights. And then it's just, well, she's got good dreadnights too though. Or I could just sit there, be slow and implode. Just keep imploding over and over again. There's not a lot Isra can do about that. I feel like with the teleport and everything, we probably do just want one pile of our plords. It might be a bit painful, but I think it's okay. She's ready with a bow, she's ready to rock. There's no morale. Luck is switched off. You're not going to destroy undead, right? Because destroy undead is a spell that hits all undead on the field. We're in good shape here. Let's do this fight. I'm procrastinating. I know I am. What haven't I thought of? What haven't I thought of? Just do it. Come on. Oh, I don't. Okay, it says we lose. Let's not apply that battle result, shall we? All right, there's only 50 of these sea dogs. Right, so it's hands off until you let me know. I lost 13 vamps there right off the cuff. These are very fast. 56 goes down to 54. So that's the effect of the cruel shot or whatever you want to call it. Accurate shot. So let's attack here first if we think that's what we're doing. Nice. Fantastic. Kills four to five. Not too worried about the ammo cart. Okay, I didn't kill all of them. Yeah, so this kill, this, this puts some hurt on the aspers. I think that's worth doing. So I'll take this retaliation. I guess I will attack you. All right, let's do this. Let's still get back and help the liches. Well, it's your turn. I can't do anything. I'm just gonna sit back and let you hurt me. That's really bad. Oh, that's a strange choice. Okay. Okay, that's why the auto resolver is unhappy with this. Okay, I think I've changed my mind. I think I want to see if he has resurrect. If he has resurrect, that just suits me. I'm the one with the vampire lords, right? So I can just, I can just restore these dudes. 25 come back and then another truckload of them come back. Yeah, we're back to full. Right, that frees the liches up. There are two bone dragons. I'd like to hit these, but I want to use this guy first. Kill three to four. Do this. The other thing I could do, hmm, how far can I move? No.  I will walk to here and then I'm going to do this and I'm gonna do that. Kills five to nine. Yeah, there's no retaliation. Just do it. Where's my double damage? See, they're all coming back, son. All right, I do have to wait until they do their thing. That's not good for you. That's a terrible attack on his path. Who cares about the liches? I can just raise them back up again when I'm ready. Seems good. Okay, where do they act? They act after these. How far can I move? Five, one, two, three, four, five. He can get there. So yeah, let's just pile into this, or I could just go for that. How about I soak up these retaliations with the lich? The water alleys to move, right? No, the zombies are gonna move. So if the zombies move to here, can I go one, two, three, four, five? No, I can't get there if I stand. All right, maybe do zombies on ghosties. Maybe I'll do this, actually. All right, we'll take this. Just trying to keep that really deadly stack. Oh, water retaliation. Man. I probably should have taken that with the liches. Maybe a mistake. So we just have more mass. We have more body mass index.  Now these are all coming back. Yeah, because this has already cast the lightning bolt, I'm just gonna do the alleys now. Okay, so the haspids and black knights both died on that square. The zombies died here, and so that's what we need to be mindful of. These are expendable. Like I'm not getting them back, so who cares? Just get in there, girls. And it doesn't matter, you're too small to matter. Okay, that's what they're there for. Really? Oh, wow. That's just excellent. Well, it was idiotic. So keep draining, and I will start raising. How many were there, about 110 at the beginning? Yeah, definitely waiting. Is this worth bothering? Yeah. They take quite a lot of killing, these nicks warriors. I tell you what, they take a lot of killing. Man, oh man, they're so resilient. All right, well, we just do that 22 HP. Now you take a big hit. Okay, so, okay, all right, let's see what you're doing there. I just want to keep animating everything I can. Yeah, and I might just start hitting the defend button. Oh, that was a mistake.  Okay, so can I animate them faster than he can hurt them? Okay, that's actually useful, because now I can do this. Five doesn't matter. How many are dead? I'm going to need to, I need to reanimate everybody. Okay, so some logic. Maybe I should start animating zombies instead, because we'll let the liches take all of the arrow tower, until that's ready. No one's going to bother with 51 zombies. Maybe I can convince them to try to shoot these. Okay, but that's fine, right? That's okay. Why? See, I'm going to get you, because I've got more, I've got tons of spell points. You're going to run out with 79 and lightning bolting me and stuff. Kills 10 to 17, too risky. Should I do it? Don't let me down. If I attack these, they better not die. They might retaliate. Yeah, that's really, really bad. They'll attack and then I'll retaliate and murder them. So don't go near them. Just do nothing, everyone. So weird, isn't it? Okay, so it's just attrition, like it's just, this is fine, right? We're both burning spell points down to the point where he runs out. Arrow tower's killing zombies is fine. See what I mean? Like it's taking the attention away from the liches. That's just, that makes no sense. You could be reanimating your dread knights. I can play this game all day long. Cool, uh, Corsairs in the, yeah, fine. She's on 49, I'm on 166. So it's costing her 10 and me 12 each turn. So, sorry, this looks pretty boring, I'm sure. Um, just doing the same thing here over and over again until Isra runs out of spell points and ideas and I'm able to finish resurrecting everybody. Pretty rare that you end up with this kind of equilibrium. Oh, finally. Why does it see the zombies as such a big threat, I wonder. Yay! Oh, he's got to, he's got to work to a budget. He can only afford ice bolt this time. Now that's close to starting health. I think it is starting health. We've lost one dread knight. We've lost several vamp lords and we've still got 20 odd, 20 odd, um, liches to raise as well.  That's what success looks like to me. I think that was their starting. I'm nearly sure that was their starting. Well, it says health left 10. What, I have about 57 maybe in each stack before I started so they would have made 114. There's a little bit more in that stack still. Seven perish from that. That's really annoying. Okay, well I'll have to hit them again before the end. Isra's out of ideas. That's actually all right. As long as all the damage goes to one place, um, we can work with that. Right, that's their full stack. Okay, I'm not doing this yet. I might know. Wait one more turn. How good were the water elementals man? That was ideal. And now they've got nothing left. There's 17 skellies I can have there too. What happens here? It kills 19 now. So I made a mistake. I should have killed these with that shot that did 10 to 17. I should have done that before. They're down to now 81. So I need two triggers. What else could I do? So they have about 2000 health. I can't do numbers. 800 health. So if I hit them with something that hurts, there's also this, but then they might walk up. That would be terrible. They walked up and me lead me.  It's just I'm worried that I'm going to need to do two resurrects. Talk about war of attrition. Nearly, I'm nearly finished. I promise. Is this everything I had at the beginning? Yeah, because I have no whites or wraiths and I have no dragons. These are all the guys I can think of that I brought with me. I've got one more to do on him and then I think we're done. All right, I think we're ready to close it out. If I wait again, he's still slowed. Yeah, I think it's too fiddly. I'm just going to, I'm losing 13 Skellies. So maybe this is sloppy, but I think I've put Isra through enough torture. I only got 12 points, 12 points left myself, but we'll call it, call an end to it. 15 Skellies is better than departing in shame the way that the auto resolver wanted us to. So apply a battle result. Yes.  Isra is dead, even deader than she was before. Let's have a look. I'm expecting some good things here. I think the sword of hellfire is good. We know what that is. Pended of courage plus three luck and morale. Whoa. I can't make use of it and neither could Isra really, but holy cow. Plus three to both. So that's a combo artifact, right? That's odd because it looks like an artifact. I wonder if this is a combo artifact added in horn of the abyss. Maybe it looks like something that was a basic artifact in the old game anyway. Plus three to both is bonkers. That's amazing. Sword of hellfire. No, okay. Plus six to attack, all right. Bucklers plus four to defense, all right. Seal of sunset reduces the other guy's power. All right. Gloves we know about. None of these are good. Okay. What else have you got? Not much. Not much is the answer. That sword isn't even good enough for me to use. All this lumber. Wow. All right. The town is mine. I can pop inside. Wow. Okay. Here we are. So horn of the abyss newbies. We have conquered a cove and you can see everything there is to see here. And we really caught Orange out. I don't know why she didn't hire some of these troops before the fight started. 15 extra sea dogs, all these extra things, aspids and everything else. So this is a fully developed town. I believe this is the year tier seven whirlpool where you go to get the haspids and sea serpents. But you can see for yourselves here. Look how cool this all is, right? This is the nest where you get the storm birds from. This is the temple of those warriors that are really hard to kill. There's sea dogs here. See what I mean here about the three levels of troop, which is this cool unique sort of idea. Blacksmiths over here, the taverns over here. We have a city hall and these are the level two guys, sea men and crewmates. Basically just a walking melee guy. Pretty good attack and good damage, but bad health, good speed. Who are these guys? That's the mage guild there. Look at that. Look at the art on that, the way that that's rendered really, really nice. This is the sorceress tower inside the mage guild. There's nothing I want. That's okay. And there's the castle. Really, really cool. Really nice resource silo is giving me sulfur. Port even door. Nice one. Now Sceptiana doesn't have to spend the night behind the walls. I don't see a big reason for her to not do so though with her last movement point tonight. And I can afford to do that because I have the bull. Another bull. The wizarding well. The wizard's well. No, don't disassemble it. Keep it on. So that was a huge win. I will pop, I will pop in and say hello to the locals tomorrow, I promise. We're probably going to buy some defenders for this place. Let's just buy a few. Let's just literally buy that many. Just on the off chance. There's an orange hero somewhere around. I think that's okay. So orange now is in pretty big trouble. I think blue is the you know, the last real holdout. Let's have a quick look in our tavern, which we did find. It's here. Let's just check the old rumor mill, shall we? Orange has, well we don't know if that means zero. Haven't been counting. Our army strength is now better than orange. Okay, they do have this hero. Blue still has the best kingdom army strength according to the stats. So, as we said before, I think blue's strength is spread around a lot of different heroes and different armies. I think Zepchen is the most powerful hero on the map. Oh, Moondor. Yeah, Moondor used to be somebody else's. Now he's back. And my employee. What's the fastest thing? How fast are you guys? Speed 11? I'll buy a few more than that, will you?  That's fine. Diplomat's ring. I have lightning bolt and ammo cart. Oh look, I could take some of this stuff off you, but I'm not gonna. Give me the lumber. Take that off here.  I want that triple luck that comes from that, so that's fine. One on the finger. What does this do on my finger? Reduces morale by one. Well, that's useless. I might as well wear that. There we go. I have gloves. You can take some gloves. That's actually useful. Oh, Necromancer's cow. I think I'd rather have a tabard. Oh my girl. Surrendering is cheaper. I don't plan to do a lot of surrendering. Okay, that's it. Right, we're done. Let me check I'm wearing that well. I am okay. Okay, sorry. Right, here we go. Yeah, they're running out of ideas, so to fight this a good old-fashioned way. Yeah, so when the AI starts to do this, they've just got no other towns. I've just run out of ideas. Probably could have autoated for you guys, but something about just holding a seed that I just really enjoy. So there's the again, horn of the abyss newbies. That's the cannon which replaces the ballista for cove heroes, and it can shoot sections of the wall, which is really thematic and cool, I think. Yeah, that's nice. That's cool. And you'll notice that Straker won't actually, what happened to him? Why? You're slow? Okay. Straker won't actually run. He'll just fight to the death, and that means you've broken the back of this particular faction. Yeah, so it looks a bit strange when the cannon shoots there. That was him shooting the walking dead, and I did lose for him within the end. Okay, Teal is always busy. It always looks like they're very busy. I'm not sure what they're actually doing. In and out of boats, not really sure what they're doing with themselves. Okay. Okay, Aiken is now looking for a new home. I don't think that hero, Aiken, I don't think he's, I think you don't think I'm seeing him flying over here. He might. Do I care if he does? Because none of these troops, he can't, he can't buy any of those troops. So he really cares if he manages it, if he does go all the way down. Well, I have some friends in high places down here.  Should be all right. It won't be comfortable. All right. Sceptiana, you've got to go hurt blue now. You really do. Right, let's just do some moandoor. First, trying to get a sense. I want to see if it's safe. We can assume all these have been done. Do I care? The answer is no. Sceptiana, back to 315 spell points. Thank you very much. Stick your head in there. Have a look at this beautiful place. Look at this. Look at this woman here on top of the, oh that's the oceanid fountain waterfall. That's just cool. I'm sorry, but that is really cool. Graphics, the pixel density, the frequency of which with the way the flames and the whirlpool, the ripples looks like, look at these, the rippling. The graphics is just tuned to be slot right in and look like it's part of straight out of 1999. Really, really good. We can walk around with these because the zombies are that slow anyway. Okay. Do I want to take any of these with me? That's sad. Am I off to the dead end? She hooks back around. Waste of day. I think I have to try it right because the alternative is really bad. You know, like her default is, you know, I'm hoping this connects through down to here and there might be some more portals or undergrounds, something or other I can do here, something here maybe that connects into here. Anyway, Stig's the next most exciting person and there's no one at home for Green.  Once we make this official, there's no way to avoid that. I can't bring them back. Whatever. I can't bring them back. They're immune to resurrect. I remember that. And I don't know what. Can't hypnotize. Nothing I can do right here. Never mind. We'll just pay the toll, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. Pop in. Have a look. Here we are in the fortress. Let's have a look at the Mage Guild. Oh, it's level one. All right. Rather pointless to have the first day turned. I do. I've got all these things. I'm pretty cool, didn't you know? I don't need to defend this. It's come straight back out again. Yeah, it's come straight back out. Okay, this is the underground to that. No one ever bothered unlocking. Okay, I'm here doing this and kind of just controlling this region. Waiting for reinforcements, I think, wasn't I? Go and learn Ballistics. I love Ballistics. I beat you. Yes. Stand here. She do this. Yeah, Nagashi, we're going to go for a jog. I think Troglodytes will be in their native terrain down here, right here. Sorry how much they're going to slow my army down. Okay, come back. She might end up being, just do this. Yeah. So end of day seven, she'll be out of range. Okay, maybe we'll ignore Wyrmwood and come back to here. I don't know. We're in control here. We just need to make sure we don't slip up and let accidentally blue back into the game or let them catch us by surprise in water. I think they've still got the best army by army count kind of thing, you know. So I have to respect that. I feel like, yeah, we can ignore the capital. Randall is still here, but we can pretty much just let it go now. And we can just focus on Cold Soul and Wyrmwood. And I think that's what I'm going to do, which means I need a hero here for day one. There's some dead here. You could get first, day six. That's perfect. Well, actually, come to there. What you got? Bluey two shoes? Are you landing on my home island there? Okay. Suicide, as predicted. I think I might just let this resolve. I'm not going to watch it again. Galar just kills himself. We don't know if he fled, but I don't think it matters, right? Okay, Alkin is serious. He's actually serious about this. Okay, fine. All right. Let me just double check how good that green hero is. The other green hero? Not good enough. And I may need to invest a little bit more there. Who is this? Okay, so Randall who can just defend that right. Can he? Really? 39 wraiths? Is that enough? See what I mean? 39 wraiths might not be enough. I mean, if they accidentally die, if, you know, if Aerys doesn't find the town and attack it right now on this turn, I get a new fresh week of troops, but could be sketchy. Okay. I'll try to defend it. Old Randall doesn't have any skills whatsoever. In combat, he's never fought before, ever. Now, if they take our town, do I lose the grail? Oh, this could be quite high stakes. There's no one who can help him. I thought we were in the clear. There's, yeah, no one near him. So we could be about to lose Dark Eternal. Now, let it again. Arrow towers hit the sea dog right up front. Aerys needs to be a good spellcaster to pull this off, I think. Yeah, Aerys does need to be a good spellcaster, but it's possible we will lose. Lose the grail there. She's too far, way too far away to help. A throng of pixies is no match for me. Don't you know who I am?  Just take that. It's not a problem. Do this. I'm on an adventure. Lots of master genies are actually quite annoying. I don't really want the Wyverns. Okay, Sceptiana. No one ever wants anything that I've got, that I know that I've got. Ah, it's a dead end. Well, it was worth a gamble. We were hoping it connected through, man. All right, that stinks. Moandor, can you find me a portal or something, man? Ooh, the library would have been good. I wish you'd come this way. Well, am I supposed to go up that way now? Yeah, well, that must be the way that that connects through there. So she could try to head up down, down this way now. Has to be some other way out of here. Yeah, Ryss is waiting to receive a great big amazing army, and we want to get ready to take... Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember this now. So, Tamika comes to here. Go ahead. Give me these. Yeah, you'd look at the good work now. Go on, take it. Take it with my blessing. I am going to need you to... Okay. Yeah, all right. Hang on. So these are going to need to go there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then again, we're not doing... Maybe I can this time, but get the whites right. You wait here.  Okay, well, one of you's standing there. Who has better moves? G is the one with the better moves. Actually, you can stand there. Aiden goes, gives you the thing there. You go as far along here as you can. All right, that's not too bad. It's a bit of a, not quite exactly right, but it's all right. Ryss, you've still got time to kill, eh? I guess for tomorrow. Next week, we're upgrading Cold Soul to a fully upgraded Necropolis, so we don't have to keep doing that. Back and forward. I'm going to need to wind up here soon. All right. I think this is okay. Done everything we've... Done everything, yeah. All right, let's see what they want to do. Wait a minute. No, hang on. Sorry. Yeah, I did want to just reinforce. I can afford that now. Just make absolutely sure of it. Okay, that's it. No, no, not enough moves. Messed about flagging windmills and getting windmills and stuff. Idiotic. Looks like we might lose a stronghold now, though. This is fine. Oh, I never reinforced the... I was meant to... That's why I'm so panicky, right? It's why I'm so panicky before I hit the end turn button. I meant to reinforce this. And they've bought the Titans that are there. All right. Well, it gives that challenge something to come back and do, doesn't it?  My window. Tell me what's down here, man. What is all this? How do I get out of here?  I'm just coming back. I'm just getting out of here. Going the long way.   Sorry, everyone. Do this, do this. What? All right. How do I lose two things? How do I lose two energy elements? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, oh man. How can I challenge the tower quickly? It's here, right? It's up through here. So if Rissa came down to here, how many moves did she have left after that? 329 on the other side. Did she get to about there? I pop out, get back to about here. If I ride to there, I can get to about there maybe. It's big back and forward. It's a whole extra day of mucking around to try to get Rissa's army up to challenge Aiken. I think we need to do that though, right? There's nothing better for her to do. Well, I was going to get her ready. Okay, let's just do what we were going to do. Let's just do what we're going to do. Buy everything. 33k. Couldn't get it all. Do what you were going to do. Hey, folks. Random thing happened there as I was galloping along. There was a crash, the game crashed. Okay, so one thing to be aware of is that that can happen. Thankfully, the game does auto-save. So the last save point I had was where I clicked the end of turn button. Now sadly, it means we're going to have to watch Aiken walk in here and take Athenaeum again, because I have this kind of no do-overs rule. Yeah, hopefully it doesn't keep crashing at the same point. I hope it was just a glitch of the system. Sometimes the AI doesn't actually do the same thing every time if you reload an auto-save. Anyway, so that happened. We know all this. We know that that happened. Who's that orange hero? I missed this. Rissa, where did you come from? I missed this last time. We actually, she just came out of nowhere. He's slippery devil. Okay, now the crash happened as Tamika was about to give Aiden the army. It might have had something to do with when I clicked the maximum button. So let's just do this the old-fashioned way. Okay, Tamika rides to here. Okay, Aiden, I think it was just as he was talking to her. It crapped itself. Okay, right. Well, I completely understand what happened. It's okay though. I'm willing to forgive that. It's not a deal breaker for me. All right, Nagash. I can quite get that right. Um, Nagash does Swaperoo. Yeah, can't do the Trogs now because we have one of everything.  Well, I don't care. If Brissa comes out and kills one of us, that's not really a problem. As long as we've done that. Then why don't we do that? Because I'll try to upgrade them. Yeah, all right. G pops in here. Yeah, I'm going to get you all these guys back today anyway. We've got 38k in the bank. What do they cost to upgrade? A fortune, I bet. It's not too bad. Hey, Brissa, are you still on the trading post? Yes, you are. Do this. Come here. I'm going to need money. So I'm going to do everything I can do. Right, I'm happy to just spend money now. Let's do Dark Eternal first. So what do I need to defend this? Okay, I can't venture out. That's okay. That's all right. Zombies are good value for meat. I might as well pile into them now. All right, Brissa, I need quite a lot of money, babe. I need like least five grand, I would say. Crystal in abundance now. No, wait, go back to Dark Eternal. Just to make sure of it here. Who is that idiot? Let me go back and have a look. I don't need to go crazy if you see dogs. Probably got enough already even. Grab me these. I might leave it at that. Eris, you're going to have to have a great day at the office. Boom. No, get it right. Hang on. Is that right? Here we go. Upgrade. Ah, can't afford the upgrade now. I've run out of money again. I need even more money. It's expensive for what they are. Not a fan of Raith's. Can't kill her today. Who's better at killing me or Nagash? I'm level 60. He's level three. He's a bit of a noob. I'm going to get back to here. The reason I'm in a hurry is I want to run up here to at least trap Aiden. Do I have time to do both things? If I come down here, there's no one left back here to defend against that army. It's an annoying army in terms of size. I am actually going to do this because I don't think you can. Yeah, so she knows where I am.  So she'll run out that way. Nagash is already nearly perfectly placed. I think he's perfectly placed, right? If she runs past me and takes the town, how much do I care if she takes the town? I don't actually need to worry about that too much. It would annoy me if she killed Nagash and all these three skellies. It would annoy me if she could catch either of these two bros. That's okay. Now, we've seen this already. I'm sorry, everyone. Pre-crash. Thankfully, the crash didn't really, you know, it's not like we did this epic, epic fight.  And I click the wait button there rather than the defense. That's even more time wasted. I will wait. Yeah, so 24 satyrs. Don't mess with them. Yeah, we did this. Everyone just pretend that this is the first time this is happening. Yeah. It's never good. It's never good. And Moandor did all this, which I'll continue to do. Yeah, we did everything backwards when I reloaded. Yeah, I came down here, didn't I? Yeah, okay. And we decided, Septiana was just getting the H out of here. She's, you can picture her storming back down the road, furious that we left the tower unattended. The rest of the team are desperately scrambling to try to sort it out before she gets back. Front times. Happy with this? I bought the 12 magic alleys. That's going to be tons for that. Stronghold is being threatened by, oh. Oh, very fun times. What am I going to do? Let him have it. I've left the trading post now. What do I, what do I realistically need, right? I need, I've already got four behemoths. All right, let's do this. Let's just do it. It's not, it's not ideal. I'm playing sloppy here. Um, let's sell everything right down. Right down to the bone. I'm not building a lot more buildings now, so I'll make this hard for the AI to deal with. And to avoid a crash, we'll just do the same thing. I think ogre's a really good VFM. And by them, rocks. I feel like maybe rocks, a rocks that great. Orcs health 15. These are health 10 for 100. I'll go for the rocks, I think. And I will get rid of this for morale reasons. If Taza really wants it, he's going to pay a pretty heavy price for that. That's not an easy, that's not an easy army to chew through behind the walls there. It just occurred to me that he'd been trotting around down here. Isn't there a second hero down here too? Yeah. Yeah, it's between the two of them. If they want the stronghold, maybe let them out of it. Okay. Nearly getting there-ish. We just need a few things to happen, right? Like brisser and everything. Alright folks, we're back. And I think we said we were going to hit the end turn button, so rather than trying to refresh my memory of everything, let's just do that. Blue hero thinks twice. This was, yeah, this was at risk of happening. So blue, doing a lot of different things. Green. A glorious victory. Ignisa commits, make the ultimate sacrifice in front of the walls. I think I will play it out for flavor reasons. For flavor reasons if nothing else, but this is, yeah, the AI does do this. Let's wait and shoot these. These guys come to here, I guess. And is that worth doing? Move the conversation along a little bit. Let's take this shot here, as we'll do this. That's it.   Okay, Ignisa. Okay, we've got it down to one, seven, three. That's not too bad. And green has been vanquished. Ooh, that's the end of you. And then there were three or four, I can't remember. Maybe five. Let's have a look, see who else is dead, but that's the end of green. All right, orange, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're not serious. What? Didn't we want this fight to happen? Okay, that's terrifying. Well, I'm obviously not going to apply a battle result. This was, I wanted this to happen. So what is this? She's 3, 3, 13, 12. So it must be that she's just going to do him, like, meteor showers and implosions and stuff. Chain lightning, maybe. What is she? We never found out what she is, like, but it's got to be just direct damage, right, with 124. How else can we possibly have that auto-resolve result? So I'm gonna guess that it is meteor shower, maybe implosion, maybe chain lightning, maybe all, well, one of them is, because there's just no way she can deal enough damage quickly enough. So it's got to be AoE. It could be, yeah, that's not Armageddon. It couldn't be Inferna. Five or Inferna because they're not going to do enough damage. It's got to be one of them, maybe meteor shower. So we'd love to get, is there a way, what can she do? We're not chain lightning. So one way to deal with that, if I slowed, she has nothing, she's such a bad hero. She's, okay, just basic slow. That would slow the Titans, the Dreadnights, my Vamps. No, hang on. Yeah, so his wraiths go before my liches. So I'd like to get my 19 Vamps out here. So you're speed 11. If I cast haste on these, they become speed 12. Sorry, these Vamps, they become speed 12. They'd run out of here. I could also raise haste these guys to speed 10, and then they'll start acting first each round as well. They'll become a proper pain in the backside. So my rationale is I don't want to leave any, well, I don't want to leave high quality meteor showers and the Titans go first. So I think on that basis I'm going to haste someone, just to figure out who's better, these or these. It's definitely these, right? That's actually my most valuable stack maybe, and I need to move the bone dragons, the ghost dragons now. Which means we could do this, kill zero, what?  C-men, they're pretty dangerous. Although triple negative morale, and the same with the Titans, okay. Do I just go for every, do I just go for this? I might just go for this, because I can't escape the C-men Titans, everything anyway. So, yeah, I'm going to do that. It's pretty high value attack. Okay. Okay, so it didn't work. Oh, the Titans still went, I thought I had speed. No, no, no. Okay, logic bomb there, sorry. I guess what was happening, but I didn't, I didn't address it well, which is annoying. Flying over to here at full speed doesn't do anything. Now that she's cast, and I've cast, so I might as well just wait. We're going to lose so many. Well, I'd rather the C-dogs came and hit me, but they probably won't. Same with the vamps, right? How much will a C-dog 400 damage? I'm going to lose almost all of them. Go for the cannon, and the C-dogs will C-men, yeah. Not good. Cannon goes off. Okay, well the wraiths do have a hit. I need to get stuck in, don't I? I don't have the luxury of waiting around. So we're in amongst them, it makes it harder for, makes it harder for chain lightning for what to do. We have mixed ourselves around. I'm going for the best stacks I can find. You know, so chain lightning doesn't look as good. Well, she hit everyone there. Really good chain lightnings. There's only 12 of them left now, so that's good. Okay, that's an interesting exchange. That's great for us. The morale is huge. I just don't think we can win. There's too much meat here. Titan's going next after that. So let's just keep the best units.  What's this unit here? 8? 8x18, that's a waste. I'm going for this. Should I work on these maybe next? Yeah, that's not too bad. Okay, we did lose one. Yeah, I'll have to crack at these. They seem to be better. Standard lightning bolt. She's got tons of them left though. I can't believe we're losing this fight. Like, it's so annoying. Terrible man that's woeful. Can't make this attack, it's just suicidal. Out of spell points here. It's amazing though that she could be so much stronger than I...  That's a bit better. If she accidentally dies, how sad am I? I guess I'm pretty sad. Yeah, I'm not going to flee yet as I can here.  Oh, I'm really mad. I'm really mad. That's shocking. It's just she's so much stronger than I realized. Yeah, pointless. Kill two to three vampires. I guess I'll go for sea dogs here. All right. Oh, woeful. But okay, she's burned up spell points at least. She's stuck down there. Damn it. Terrible couple of turns. Woeful decisions. Terrible oversight on my part. The... So now am I going to lose this town? Yeah, if she can do Wishingwell or something, I could be in big trouble I think without Wishingwell. We might be all right. What's left in here? No, I've got no reinforcements down here at all. So I need Zephyr to come roaring back down. Let's do that. Dreaming back down. Take the well off because you're back to full. Where's Alkin? He's here with a pretty formidable army of his own. Yep, okay. So if he comes down under here and makes to threaten me, I can get to here tomorrow. Looks like I can get underground. Yeah, she's here so she can help. Can she beat Alkin? It's not clear. Tough fight. Probably just about Pippen. She's here, right? So she can come down to here. Yes, yes, why don't you do that now? Come now because... Tell you what. All right, you boys are going to need to try to defend this town against Brissa. There's the Skullcap. Nagash, what can you do, mate? Gather them all together for me. Hop in the Transformer. She will annihilate this army with... So the Arrow Towns won't, yeah, there's just no way that's enough. Okay, we need to think about this. Okay, so looking at it as well, the way we've laid this out, this is just perfect for chain lightning, which we don't really want to do. But she did 600 and something damage. So she's just going to be able to walk in and take this, you know, without any... Like there's no point... There's no point trying to defend it, is what I'm saying. By doing this we force her to use... Not even, she has liches, right? So do she have liches? No, Titans. Yeah, so the Titans killed one. She has to chain lightning the other two if she wants a one turn fight. But there's no point wasting Nagash's life here. We're going to have to just keep a scout on her and then come back another time with Sceptgen or someone else. So we have to abandon Wyrm Wyrm. This is not good, people. We are going in the wrong direction. Faken comes down under here to challenge. If he can make it all the way to me, good on you. I think what's going to happen is Sceptgenna is going to... Yeah, so we want to leave Tamika here in case Sceptgenna can come down and war Alken. If she can't, we could just give the army to Tamika, who is a level one definitely. I don't think Alken's all that crash hot though. And in fact, Tamika can have a very, very good army for that fight against old Alken. Ideally it's Sceptgenna that gets to do the fight that run. If he gallops down here, brings war to here, I'm probably just going to chase him, put Sceptgenna here and then that way I'm kind of blocking Brissa from doing anything as well. I think he might be okay just exactly where she is. I'm just going to leave her exactly there. Moandor. Get the gems. Get this, I guess. Never found a way out of here. Tower of the Seas, I think is where you get sorceresses. That looks like it's free, so I might pop in there. What's Lizzie up to? Horde of Horned Demons. Is this a quest she wants to do? Yeah, she has spell points. Let's have a fun fight that we actually think we can win. What? What? Oh, how many are there? 100? People. People, people, people. What is happening to me? Look at the damage. I do 666 to the demons. It seems appropriate. I think I'm going to be using all of that. Is there any reason to do anything other than this? I'm expert air, so it's air only. Haste is something. Your speed's 6. I'm speed 7. I don't think I'm going to be hasty. I think it's just this while we can, right? Oh, I thought I sort of arced 3 times there. 1, 2, 3. Yeah. Okay, well thank god for stick. Infellas. Should have waited with the air allies. That was a mistake. I'm playing so badly tonight. I'm so sorry. Sloppy. Chalopy. I'll just stand here. Same again, because the first bolt goes there. Chain light. It's good to be able to use it on the enemy instead of having it used on me. Wow, what a difference. A couple of chain lightings made, okay? Hence what we saw before with Prisa. Nasty business. Losing all that investment, all those creatures. I mean, I gave her a pretty big headache. You know, I definitely put the hurt on. At least to a degree, but 100 rates, like it's a pretty bad outcome. Okay, well, that's something. We lost some spell points, but anyway. Sure, I want Wyverns. So if I move, if I have the first move, what are these serpent flies? No, I won't get the first move, will I? Dragonflies and stuff. I don't think I'll bother. I very often just don't bother with... This would have been good, actually. A Horde of Familiars in the Naga Bank. Yeah, that could be meaningful. Let's do this. Take the free hit here. Two ellies, no way. Not unless they get a morale flash. So 18 of them are going to deal at most 30-something damage. You know, I got defense 14 versus... He's not, he's not. He's not going to do anything to me. Plus, I get to shoot first anyway. Yeah. This is fine, right? Even if they Naga Queens, I'll have time to do expert haste. I think lots of Nagas. Yeah, with my spell casting, I can do it. Come on, man. All right, they're all speed five, so all my people go first. And it's probably just lightning bolts. I guess once we're all over here, I can chain lightning. So that'll arc to there. So I need to move the Warder Elementals before doing it. So one way to do this would be to wait with these. Move, move, move. And then when it comes back to them, these three will have plumped together. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, that might be better for now. That's just lightning Volta. Sword of coming over. I retaliate. Oh, I don't retaliate. That's right. Nagas don't have retaliation. I'm pushing the alt key here. So what you can do in Horn of the Abyss, like let's say I wanted to walk up in melee. See how I've turned it into a sword there? By pushing the alt key, it changes from an arrow to a sword, which is just functionality that we all wish had been there at the beginning when the game was first invented. So I'm thinking if I move this guy to here, I can then chain lightning cast. Start here. No, I need to start here. So there's a risk that the first jump goes to the Satyrs instead of to these guys. So I can't do that. I have to start the lightning bolt here. So I was going to doof doof doof and then I'll cop the fourth one. I still think that's better. So let's attack in melee up here. See, that's so nice. You can't do that in the vanilla game. Oh, actually I have a chance. I have an opportunity to move. So I could, if I move to there and the Satyrs move out of the way, by my calculations, if I chain lightning here, it'll hop to here, then here, then here. So let's see. Yeah, on the water elementals turn. If I can do this, get out of the way. She's like, get out of the way. Please work. Yes. That's the first sensible thing I've done since logging back on to me. Now these guys can get to the Satyrs. At the moment, I can be hit by everything. So I think I just want to run again. Yeah. Let's stick to the heavy lifting. This will hurt, but not too bad. Three's not too bad. One, two, three, four, five. They're back in the game. 122, so I can bolt that. I can't get away though, right? One, two, three, four, five. The Satyrs can act first. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I can't run. No. What else can I do? Can I blind? Blind slow. Blind isn't much better than just lightning bolt. I can hypnotize somebody. That's not bad. Yeah, let's do that for once. Let's do that. Okay, I'll wait till the water elementals don't see how much damage we're going to do. I guess we'll soften up this. Yeah, I guess I'll wait with these guys, actually. Who do I care about more? I care more about these living, I think. I'll make this attack. Okay, so that's 84 and that's 85, but that's the one that goes first. So I think it's actually that one that I want to hypnotize now. Now, to rub salt in the wound here, on her turn, she can walk down here and with no retaliation smack this one. She can then go one, two, three, four, five. So she can get to the water elements, but she probably won't. Well, I just do this or should I do this? I'll go for this. It's 13 left on that stack. I don't kill any if I come down here, but I can kill one if I come here. That's worth doing. And you never know. The two of them might turn around and attack the hypnotized. No, okay. Oh, we only moved to there. That seems odd. Should I do this? I don't know. I'm taking rather a lot more damage than I have wanted to. Okay. Sorry, just checking. 36 health left. I should actually be able to make this attack. Okay. Oh, what happens now? Do you snap out of it? Because I'm not going to be very happy if that happens. I'll tell you what, just in case let's make you walk all the way over here.  That's excellent. What happens when I attack? So she won't retaliate, right? Because she's hypnotized. And why did I have to experiment? Run the H away. So they do retaliate even against friends. I suppose that's fair, because when you berserk them, if you cast berserk, I was going to... Yeah, she's completely hypnotized for as long as I want.  Sorry. I had this thing where she was waking up next to her in my head. I'm going back to being less intelligent. Okay, that's really painful. I hope the rewards are good. Yeah, mysticism's good for me now. Yeah, okay. Well, 12 grand's quite nice. And third, well, that's a lot of gems too. So we'll get very good prices for them at the trading post as well, if we can get back to there. Okay, so we have a plan. The stronghold is safe. They decided against it. We've got another whole day if Tizar changes his mind and wants to have a go. The main necropolis with Randlu is safe. Eris realized that that's just way too hard. Yep. So we're saving our money. Conflux is safe from harm. Just have to undo this silly mistake I made. What else could I do? Is there anyone here to hire? Do you have an army? So I could throw money away on Zarfax just having enough stuff here to have seven stacks of random guys who she'll have to cast chain lightning 1234. She'll have to cast it twice. Is it worth spending two and a half grand for the arrow towers to get an extra turn shooting? Not really, right? It's just fiddly. Yeah, we've really handed them ascendancy here. Blue gives up an area and goes away. Not an area. Elgar, whatever he was. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay, so Teal is all but given up. Teal's out of ideas. We can kill Elkin now. There's absolutely no way I'm not. He's run all the way in there, the little sod. Look at him. There's no other way I can fight him. So that's a huge problem. All right, because it's just going to rob us of all our movement through the snow. With skeletons, taking skeletons through the snow. He knows full well how much of a nuisance that is. Annoying defenders there for me to try and retake the town when I'm ready. Oh, man. What a disaster. What happened with Thingo with Brissa? Where'd she go? Hello? Where did Brissa go? This is the guy who was hassling Rand Lou. This is the other one. This is that one. This is this guy who I haven't seen how strong he is yet. It's flying through here. I have to get the army down to that. She's gone up there. Okay. Sorry. I missed that. I missed that, everyone. Worth having another look. So she's run up into the, she's run up into here to maybe recover spell points or do something. Yikes. Okay. Now the next biggest threat to us is this guy. Eovacius is here. I don't want to fight that army without Sceptiana. These are my terms. I don't care to live by any other. I am going to abandon Wormwood, I think. I just can't defend at all. I've got too much going on. Sceptiana pops, comes, pops out of here. She doesn't have time to kill Thingo. We let him live. We let Orange have this. Okay. She comes out of here. I don't think we can defend Cold Soul either. So we have to let Blue take Cold Soul. I will annihilate him though if he is stuck behind the walls there. And Ran Lu has a decent chance of defending the Necro. Not really. No, he doesn't. We've overstretched people. I think that's what's happened. Let's be real here. For a moment, shall we? I could go and fight Eovacius right now with Rissa. Give her everything I've got, the best of the best artifacts. She would have 114, 126 Vampire Lords, 175 of Zombies, 76 Liches, 42 Dread Knights. Any clue of how strong Eovacius is, I can't remember. Well, he's worse than this. 17, 20, 11, 9. Tiny bit left after. She'll get to about here. And she'll only get to about there tomorrow. I'm not even sure. So here's the thing. I don't actually think I can war him today with her. Because I can't get the army to over there fast enough, even if I wanted to. So it's not how it's supposed to go. What a mistake that was before. Right. I think we know that we're definitely doing this move. Just going to have to leave him to it and come back another time. All right. Tameka, she'll only be able to bring everything back to about here. So I probably needed to, well, okay, sprites do your best. And we're just going to depend on Sceptiana now. If I just give you everything, babe, you're going to have everything. Give me the crappy skeletons. But apart from that, you take everything. Just keep everything together. I'm just not going to take any chances here, right? Just in case he has amazing logistics and he can do amazing things with them. Did you ever get logistics? You did, right? Disguise. Okay, we're sorry we have disguise. Right. Take the greatest of the greatest stuff I've got. Take it, take it, take it. 75 boring skellies of them as well. Actually, I could keep the 75 slow skellies because I don't have um, wraiths. Where's we'll do that? We'll learn something. Just trying to get free stuff at this point. It would have been great to send Sceptiana up there. I wish he had time as we'll just scout these areas. What's this thing? I forget. Can buy pirates here? Okay, well Brissa is not here. Why don't I come down scout this area? Grab this. All right, just see if she's interested in coming back around. Nagash. Not much good to me, mate, really. Stiggies. We've run out of skills, but she would have tried to teach me ballistics. A lot of infernal trogs. Yes, don't say that I lose one. Ah, sorry. I have to do this. I think just money now is fine. Lots of arch magi. That sounds a bit nasty. Lots of arch magi. Oh guys, I really want to just get on with the rest of the game. Lots of arch magi. Is it worth it for the flavor? Yeah, why am I chicken? Please be spread out. Okay. That looks like it was painful. Oh, maybe I should have gone for it now. Wasted lightning bolt there. All right. Excuse me. You stand on a field where a large battle was fought not so long ago. Yeah, five minutes ago. You are troubled by the complete absence of corpses. Amongst the broken swords and armors, you discover a ring. That's kind of thematic, right? Because the way the mages die, they kind of vanish like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Complete absence of corpses. Where are they all? The ring of oblivion when worn makes all losses in the battle irrevocable. Corpses disappear right after the unit's death. Spells that may revitalize creatures are banned for use. Vampirism does not bring back dead units and undead cannot be raised using necromancy after battle. Wow! That is a horn of the Abyss artifact I have not seen before. All losses are irrevocable. No resurrection. Actually, we'd be in handy for Xi to have that against Brissa. What an interesting artifact. Cool. Okay, I like it. Right, we're still completely on our haunches waiting to find out whether we're still winning or losing. Sceptiana has our forces and we have an economic advantage but a pretty big military deficit. If Astra comes around here, we're cool. There's another one galloping around down here too, isn't he? Yeah, that's Tzar. Okay. All right, let's keep going. He's their good hero, the one that's got the better army. Okay, okay, okay, that's fine. Thank you for that. I guess maybe why did you do that though? That's just perfect for me. Okay, that's perfect for me. Eovacius ran up here. I can't force him to fight because he has fly like I'd need to. He can't fly through these walls though, right? So the main thing I really want to do is kill Brissa actually so that I can seal this area off. Okay, so we'll just do the fight and then we'll make a decision. Yeah, let's do the fight. Okay, it's a solid fight. Good looking fight.  Yeah, let's just wait. Yeah, okay. You all had a bad morale event. Let me see. Oh, wow.  No, I only killed two Titans. If I go for the vampires though, don't I hit all of these? What happens here? Do I hit everyone? Oh dear, oh dear. That's annoying, right? Having lost the stack means I might not be getting my stuff back. All right, so with this in mind, I could animate dead that stack. How slow is slow? Not that slow. They're dead. Implosion kills the Titans. Did these act first with speed 12? Okay, right, right, right. Okay, I think I've decided I'm just going to go for implosion on the Titans. The more I stare at it, I'm just trying. I don't know. If they just flee on the Haspid's turn, I'll feel pretty sad, but I'm still doing this right. He's out again. Okay, so I did lose 24. She's expert of states and they all come back, but as morals, we'll make contact with Brissa today. Could Aiden go and visit her right now with my whole army? Is that something I would want to do? Ceptionic can come back this way without the army and then we do a huge production line to try to set ourselves up. I don't really want to kill her with Aiden. I don't have a credible viable secondary hero that's in the area. She's all the way over here. Killing throngs of Pykemen. Now hardy fellows, these guys. I didn't actually think they'd do that much damage. GG's. She's having a great time down here, but she's so far from home, like she's so far from helping. I'm just going to go with it. It's my little B story. I'm just going to keep playing. All right, someone needs to go kill the tower as well. Ideally before day one.  And I'm going to use Brissa on the other end as a person of interest. All right, who has more moves? How many moves will you have left? Nine, seven, five, two, eight, four. Yeah, so to me, just the one who's doing the actual job. To me, you better not let me down. I'm giving you everything I've got. Okay, accept this. I'll keep that. I'll keep these bone heads. Half them. Don't let me down.  These are the wages of incompetence, and we almost certainly want two stacks of these. So do it this way. All right, so tomorrow, let's have a look at how fast she can typically move. She's got all that movement. So that's about the same as to there to there.  So she can go easily back to the underground tomorrow where someone is going to be waiting for her. Who is that someone? Either Aiden or Rissa. I think I like the idea of bringing Aiden to here. He's going to receive the army off to make it tomorrow. I will be waiting in position here. Rissa cannot kick me from there. Oh, Nagash is going to come and grab those dorks. You may as well take these, my queen. Well, actually, see Chainlight. So is there a world where she does chain lightning? Kills four. The AI won't be smart enough to put the two Titans in two piles. Even then, I think I still have one left. I think it's fine. Like there's this horrific world where possibility where Briss is able to kill Sceptiana. And that would be the end of the end of me. Now you're going to go here because that will allow us to change our minds and fling the army in this direction if we absolutely have to. Okay, my andor is just checking things out for himself. Trying to figure out how this part of the world works. So I was going to leave it for the thingy there. Okay. I could rehire G. I haven't yet, but I could rehire her in order to do what exactly. If she got up down here with Sceptiana tomorrow, does that do nothing? Right? Doesn't do anything. I don't need G back in particular. So I'll wait another day before I worry about getting her back, where I'm going to get her. It's nice having the option value when you've got a hero to hire back. If you don't need her right away and you've got a big empire, she's kind of got a free town portal, a free teleport right at the very beginning. So don't rush to make your decision if you don't really desperately need the hero back for anything in particular. Or do what you want. I mean, what do I know? Okay, so there's Aiden. Okay, Rissa. Don't take my advice. You saw it. You've seen the sloppiness.  Right, no whammies. No silly whammies. Yeah, this guy's fine. Who cares about you? Who are you? Yeah, Vassius has a town portal. So we should bear that in mind. He has a free escape from Alcatraz. Teal, you must be joking. You're not completely joking, but I am ready for you. Just buy the rest. Is that enough? Yeah, it should be right. We're up to a hundred grand here, people. Oh no, my Serpent Fly. Finally time to say goodbye. An easy fight for Algar, unless he's got some spectacular spells up his sleeve. I think I'm pretty confident we should hold there. Stiggy, let's do you first. Look at our kicking goals. There's just rather a lot of them. They look like very easy week one fights, but there's this many of them.  Well, what if I do this first? How about now? So I can hypnotize this lot, or I can just bolt them again. Which is of course the problem with hypnotizers is there's almost something, almost always something better you could do instead. I'm happy enough with this, even if morale happens, right?  That's terrible. Terrible decision making on their part. I just think we'll stick around here, get these shots off. I should have waited. It's not going to matter. Okay, lightning bolt to the rescue. Let's get through this nice and quick. I know this isn't the main event. Right, Sceptiana. Yeah, so she's gone and buried herself right up in the corner here. Just really annoying. All right, so we'll do what we came here to do. The losses here are going to grieve me. You know, I'm going to be so annoyed as we're taking them. That's just going to hurt so much more than I want it to. Now I'm back in second thoughts actually. So the vampire lords have nothing to worry about. Is there a case for making... Oh no, there isn't, because I'm in a room. What I'm worried about is losing two ghost dragons to a combination of arrow towers and whatever. Do I have the bow? Do I have the bow? There's what we'll put that on. You have no positive morale. You didn't anyway. No, you got terrible morale as things stand anyway. Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. It's not where we want to be. Okay, I think we have to do a bit better than that. It's just, yeah, there's no hero. Okay, so as usual, they pick on the little guy. Okay, now Master Genius goes second, unless they're blind of course. Where do my liches go after the naga queens? 235, 235 lightning bolt. Let's try the lightning bolt something. Okay, that's actually bad for us. Naga's don't do anything, all right. That's not going to be good for you if I do this. You're not going to like that. So 235, you said. Kills about 11 of them. Really want to be able to do it all next turn right here at 400. That's the biggest stack there, but again, they're just getting like annihilated, so 500 HP there. Vampires are hitting things with delight. Yeah, so then on my turn, I can do a second bolt to finish off the vampires. I don't even know. It just doesn't feel that bad to do this. I think these guys are staying back and hitting the defend button. Why are those idiots? Now you just die now, so I don't think it may be. This is fine, right? Oh, no, it's not. I did actually lose two as a result. Okay, fine. Yeah, well, I can't do anything about that. Yeah, I forgot that that would be the way that would go down. All right, so quite a lot of Skellies and two Vampire Lords. Does that kill all of them? Yeah, it's not great, right? Do it. Take that. What? She brings 28 back. It doesn't feel too bad. Should she pop her head in here? I can't carry any of these away with me. Really don't have time to invest in your upbringing. 200 movement points remain, which will get me to here. Aiden collects the army, gives it to Septi. Septiana gallops down to here to trap Brissa. You know, Vassius is still mucking about. There's a good chance he just portals back to his home and we don't hear from him again. So I have time. Aiden, how many points would you have left after doing this? What's he got up his sleeve? Nothing. He's got no time up his sleeve at all. So Septiana has to double back. No, she doesn't because Nagash can do it for us. So on that basis, we have Nagash up our sleeve. So go ahead and take a look in here, learn something. Now, I do have a slot. So I could buy Gremlins to turn into Skeletons. That sounds particularly cruel. Yes. Come with me, my fellows. Let me show you a whole new world. Right, Aiden, you're going to have to come back. Swap a roo. Swap a doo. Okay, with this. And we will begin to try to load the other hero up this one. She already has a crown and a great, she's got good crown, good weapon. She's got nothing in her left hand. This is a better weapon than the one she has. And that's nice. Yeah, she's going to want to wear that. Okay. Aiden, this is the most tooled up version of Aiden you're ever going to see. He's going to do his best to get it to here. And Nagash is going to pick up the pieces. It seems all right. Nag, have a chat to your old mate. There we go. You take the stuff. I understand you'll be wanting this back. I don't think I'll bother drinking from it today, just in case Brissa wants to fight me. Okay, so Septiana's back on the scene with everything ready to rock. One on the finger to decrease morale. Yeah, having the minus 10% power level would have been better. Is it too late to change my mind? Who has it? It's cool. No, we've left it with Tim and Ikea. All the way down here. Okay. Never mind, never mind. It's probably not as good as it could have been, but whatever. Coming to get you. You may as well give me these hapless idiots. And I will head west with them. Okay, so that's that. Here's this girl. She's ready. Ikea Vassius comes down here. I just, I'm not going to defend Cold Soul, you can just have it. Yeah, I think I know what I want to do with Z now. G, I want to bring her back at Dark Eternal. Have her sitting here. She's never been there. Good old combo. Power straight into Will. My land or to do stuff and get stuck. Hang on, mate. It's so baffling this area. Okay. Yeah, I'm still really confused as to how we're actually going to bring Blue down. You can take the fortress down, but how do I find your, how do I get to here? This is the problem. I can't figure out how to get in here. Other than just galloping down through here, which is all the way up down this way. Like this is way out of the way. It has to be another route in.


Hi, my name is David Heath. In this talk, I'll be presenting stacked garbling for disjunctive zero-knowledge proofs. This is research done by myself in my advisor, Black Kolesnikov, and the two of us work at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Our work is in a paradigm that uses garbled circuits to construct zero-knowledge proofs. This paradigm was established by Jorak et al. in 2013, and they showed that there's an elegant protocol that uses garbled circuits to build zero-knowledge proofs. The interesting property of this protocol is that the computation and communication costs scale linearly in the size of the proof statement. This means that compared to many modern proof systems, this garbled circuit technique is extremely efficient even when faced with very large proof statements. More modern systems tend to focus on small proof size and fast verification time, and these properties often come at the cost of super linear proof or scaling. So for this reason, this garbled circuit for zero-knowledge remains a very interesting technique even today. In our work, we extend this paradigm by reducing the communication cost, which is the primary cost of this JKO paradigm. We reduce the communication cost if the proof statement itself contains destructive statements. So in other words, if the proof encoded as a program contains conditional logic, then we reduce communication, and in particular, we reduce communication by up to the branching factor of the program. So if the program contains 10 branches, our communication improvement can be up to 10 times. Next, I'd like to motivate this technique a bit. The question perhaps is, why do we care about improving the performance of large proof statements that have conditional logic? And what I'd like to show is one interesting use case for this technique that we discuss at length in our paper, which is about proving the existence of a bug in a code base. So to motivate this, let's assume that we have two players, Alice and Bob, and Alice has a collection of code. Perhaps Alice is some large corporation, and Bob is an outside observer who takes a look at this public code base and notices that there is a bug in it. So perhaps Bob would like Alice to know that there is a bug in her system. Perhaps this means that he can exploit her system somehow. And he'd like to tell her that this bug exists, perhaps to gain leverage over Alice, but he doesn't want to disclose where the bug is in her code base because that would allow her to immediately fix the bug, which would cause Bob to lose his leverage over Alice. So the idea is here, what we can do is we can run Alice's program as part of a zero knowledge protocol where the proof statement is basically an execution of the program that says some undefined behavior was exercised. Perhaps an array was accessed outside of its bounds, or some other problem was exacerbated. The point here is that Alice's code base is arbitrarily large. And so if we want to build a system which can scale to very large code bases, we need a proof system which scales elegantly in the size of the proof statements. So this is why we want this to use this garbled circuit paradigm. And in addition, normal code tends to have lots of conditional logic. So this is why we're interested in this notion of disjunctive proofs. Because in reality, the bug that Bob is going to demonstrate will only exist on one execution path. We would like that the cost of constructing a proof scales with the size of execution paths, an individual execution path, and not with the size of the entire program. So this is the improvement that we achieve in our work. And what I'll be showing for the remainder of this talk is how this is done. How do we decrease this communication cost in the case that the proof statement has conditional logic in it? Now to begin with, I'd like to start with the JKO protocol and therefore also with a bit of background on garbled circuits, just at a very high level, because we're going to extend the protocol of JKO directly. So just to remind ourselves how garbled circuits work and to explain how JKO uses garbled circuits to achieve zero knowledge, let's start with this simple circuit on the slide. In the JKO paradigm, the garbled circuit generator is the proof verifier. And the garbled circuit generator's core purpose is to construct an encryption of this circuit that will be sent to the prover. Then the prover will run this circuit under encryption. And the key idea here is that only if the prover has a valid input, a satisfying input to this proof statement, will the prover be able to construct an output in label of a logical one, and hence successfully getting the garbled circuit to output a valid label for one constitutes a zero knowledge proof. So let's look at that idea in a bit more detail. So in garbled circuits, first, the verifier will choose keys, labels for all of the wires, where each label either is an encryption either a logical zero or a logical one. Here, I've depicted encryptions of zero as red keys and encryptions of one as green keys. Her job is to take these logical keys and then connect them by the semantics of the circuit. So in particular, for each gate, she considers the function of that gate and encrypts an encrypted truth table corresponding to the logic. The idea here is that the prover, later on, when he gets only one key per wire, will only be able to unlock one of these rows and so can only get an output key for a particular gate if it corresponds to his input keys. Therefore, by induction, he can only get an output green key, an output encoding a logical one if he indeed has something that satisfies the proof statement. So this is how Alice encrypts the circuit and she does this for every gate. This is really just garbled circuits that I'm showing you at the moment. The key point is that in the garbled circuit protocol, Alice constructs these collections of encrypted truth tables, which we refer to as the material. She takes this material and she has to send it over a network to Bob. And this sending of material is the most expensive part of garbled circuits, and therefore the most expensive part of this JKO paradigm of using garbled circuits to perform zero knowledge. So decreasing this communication, this sending of material, is what our work is really about. And again, the idea is that we will need to send less information over the wire if the program contains conditional branching. So now let's have a look at what Bob does, the prover, once he gets this circuit encryption. So he gets some input keys to the circuit. This is achieved by using oblivious transfer. So now he has his input encoded in this garbled circuit construction, and he has all of these tables. And the idea is he can just step through this circuit gate by gate, decrypting and eventually producing a green output key. Now, the idea is that in order to turn this garbled circuit into a zero knowledge proof, all we need to do is have Bob send this green key to Alice. Again, the key idea here is that the properties of the garbled circuit ensure that the only way that Bob can get one of these green keys is to follow the protocol and have a satisfying input to the circuit. Now, what I have shown you so far is truly only honest verifier zero knowledge, so there is nothing from preventing Alice from constructing an invalid proof challenge. JKO go on to show how to enhance this protocol to also account for malicious verifiers zero knowledge. However, that's outside of the scope of this talk. Our paper also works in this malicious verifier setting, but I want to skim over those details for now for sake of time. So now I've shown you how JKO established this paradigm about using garbled circuits for zero knowledge. And next I'd like to explain why the solution of previous work, why is this JKO solution not quite satisfying in this use case of zero knowledge bugs. First, I'd like to say a bit more about exactly what we mean by proving that there exists a bug in the program. The arbitrary statement that we encode in our garbled circuit will be of the form your program exercises some unintended behavior on some input. And so some examples, as I mentioned earlier, are things like accessing arrays out of bounds, division by zero, triggering some debug assertion in the code base, or any other problem that you can imagine that can be directly encoded as a circuit. So in other words, what we're doing is we are compiling the verifiers program into a circuit instrumented to output a logical one if some unintended behavior occurs. So now that we've defined this problem more formally, let's talk about what the issue is with trying to just throw JKO at it and where things start to become very inefficient. Again, returning to our problem, Alice the verifier has this collection of code and Bob knows a bug in it. So one simple way we can think about representing this problem just to start getting a handle on what's going on is to say, well, let's let Alice break her code base up into a number of snippets. Each of which is separately representable as a different circuit. And then Alice and Bob will perform a proof that says indeed one of these circuits, it is undisclosed which one, but one of these circuits exercises a bug in the code base. Now the problem here is that as Alice's code base grows, as in as the disjunctive nature, the amount of code paths through her program grow, the cost of the JKO paradigm grows as well. And again, the reason for this is because the amount of material that Alice has to send to Bob is proportional to the size of the overall circuit. This is where our work comes in. Again, it's about reducing communication programs with conditional branching. Now traditionally, it has been assumed that the garbled circuit generator has to send material for every branch separately. After all, we have to make sure that the verifier can't tell which program branch is actually being executed. So the natural way to make sure that this is the case is to have the verifier send enough material for all branches and therefore she cannot distinguish which one is actually being proved. But our work breaks this assumption. We can still keep the same property. It is still the case that Alice will not be able to tell which branch is actually executed under Bob's input, but at the same time we only have to send enough material for the single longest branch out of any number of disjuncts. Now, I'd like to change our problem slightly. In our original problem where we looked at JKO, we were considering only one circuit. Now, because we're talking about conditional branching and disjunctive proofs, we're going to consider more than one. For the purposes of these slides, we'll just look at two circuits. The idea here is that because Bob is the prover, he has all of the inputs to this program and therefore he knows which of these branches is actually executed in a run of the program. Whereas on the other hand, Alice the verifier does not know and should not learn which of these branches is actually taking. I'll start by discussing two of the key ideas which are the backbone of our approach. The first is about viewing these collections of encrypted truth tables, this material as just a string. And in particular, we can manage these as strings and as we'll see, we can take two collections of material and we can add them together using Bitwise XOR. So this is the first high level idea of our approach. And the second is to view a circuit encryption and garbled circuits as the expansion of a pseudo random seed. So in particular, we will allow Alice the verifier to start from a small seed and use this as the source of all of the randomness that she uses to encrypt her circuit. The idea is that by doing so, a seed becomes a compact representation of the circuit which can be sent directly from Alice to Bob. Now in general, it is not secure for Alice to send a seed to Bob because by sending the seed, Bob is able to derive all of the keys and therefore can forge a proof. However, what I will show you shortly and what we prove in our paper is that in certain cases and in particular, if a seed is only used to generate a branch which is not taken, then it is secure to send one of these seeds directly from Alice to Bob. Let's return to our two circuits. Again, Alice knows that there are two circuits but she does not know which of them is supposed to be executed, only Bob has that information. So what we will do is we will have Alice generate starting from pseudo random seeds, both of these circuits. So she'll use some seed one to generate this first circuit and some seed two to generate the second circuit. And what I'm indicating by this blue arrow on this slide is that the first circuit is the one that Bob knows is going to be executed. So now Alice has all of this material and so what we'll do at this point is use Bitwise XOR to so-called stack this material together. So we have these two strings of material M1 and M2 and we construct this aggregate M1 plus M2. The idea here is that now Alice need only send this sum. The key point is that sending this sum is cheaper than sending M1 and M2 separately. So Alice sends this sum M1 plus M2 and then what we need is for Bob to obtain one of these seeds from Alice, in particular to obtain the seed for the branch which is not taken and we'll see why shortly. To do so, the two players will use oblivious transfer where Alice will be the OT sender and she'll put into the oblivious transfer both of her seeds and the prover will put in a selection which says that in this particular case, he needs seed two. So in general, if there are many, many circuits the players will engage in multiple oblivious transfers and the prover will select seeds corresponding to every branch which is not taken in the course of the proof. So as a result of this oblivious transfer, the prover receives the seed two and the idea is that from here, Bob can copy the actions of Alice in constructing an encryption of circuit two. He can do this of course because he has the seed, the compact representation of the encryption. So he uses a seed to expand an encryption and therefore obtains M2 which he can now unstack to obtain M1. The key point here is that although Bob was able to obtain this material M1, he never saw the seed corresponding to circuit one and therefore he is unable to forge a proof in this first circuit. So now Bob simply takes this material M1, applies it to the first circuit, steps through it as normal in order to obtain an output green key, completing the proof. So this was stacked garbling for zero knowledge. The key idea are about using material as random strings that can be stacked together with bitwise XOR and in addition, viewing material as the expansion of a pseudo random seed. And by using these two ideas together, the generator, the circuit verifier can efficiently send circuit material by stacking together the material from multiple branches and then obliviously transferring seeds. I claimed at the beginning of this talk that this gives us communication improvement proportional to the number of branches. And of course the reason is that we're sending only enough material for one branch rather than B branches. And so I'd like to show what kind of improvement that yields. So here are some results from our paper. In this chart we are comparing the prior work of JKO with our work. Again, JKO for this setting of extremely large proofs is the best way to construct proofs very efficiently. If the cost you are interested in optimizing is wall clock time, the amount of time from the start of the proof to the verifier being convinced that there is a proof, then JKO was the prior state of the art in this setting of large proofs. As you can see here, our work very clearly improves over JKO in the case of this conditional branching. So what I have plotted here is along the X axis is a branching factor where there are up to 15 branches. The contents of these branches for the purposes of these experiments are randomly generated circuits. And on the Y axis you can see the amount of time, the wall clock time it takes for the prover and verifier to complete a proof from beginning to end. What you can very clearly see is that our communication improvement is improving the total wall clock time by a proportion related to the number of branches. So to relate this back to this zero knowledge proof bugs example, again we had Alice who had this corpus of code split up into all these snippets. And now the idea is that we don't in some sense care how many snippets there are because our approach will efficiently stack together all of these snippets and thus our communication cost is proportional to only one snippet. So this was stacked garbling for zero knowledge. Again, our key contribution is a communication improvement in the case of disjunctive zero knowledge proofs which arise from conditional branching in the underlying program. I also showed you one exciting use case for this improvement which is to prove the existence of a bug in a code base. To give you one more piece of evidence that our approach is efficient, we performed an experiment where we simulated 1,000 snippets of code with between 30 and 50 lines of code to simulate a medium sized code base with tens of thousands of lines of code. And this proof was completed in around seven seconds on a wide area network. So this was stacked garbling for zero knowledge. Thank you.