Let's talk strategy

[timelyTurnabout]

What do you think is the best strategy?

Personally, I like to Salamander-Rush prospit, before they can get their second prototype. It’s hard at first, but if you master the build order then you can do it reliably almost every game. Then, I switch my homeworld to producing a Secret Wizard hero, and devote as much resources towards throwing Prospitian Balls to boost my approval rating. I’ll capture the crocodile world if it’s convenient and easy cuz crocs are the most cost-effective midgame units IMO, or else I’ll just build up footsoldiers. I give PM the Tectrix of the Arbiter (you get it when you conquer prospit) and send her on a mission to Derse because she needs the XP more than Ms. Paint and she’s a beast in the endgame. When the Wizard is done, I’ll send him and the crocs/footsoldiers to the Frog world because that’s a mandatory objective. The secret wizard sometimes dies, but that’s okay I switch the homeworld back to salamanders during this time, and kick the prospitian economy into Approval Rating Overdrive. Masquerade, Free Ice Cream Day, the works. I always have PM do some dangerous mission during the Masquerade. Finally, when the genesis frog is complete, I sacrifice all of the consorts to get Nrub'yiglith’s Mantle. I give the Mantle and White Ring to PM, and give the Tectrix to Ms Paint, and send the two off to maul the Black King.

Some people say that Ms. Paint isn’t good because she’s a prepromote but they’re full of it. She is hands down the best unit in the game.

[ventricularPipefitter]

...did someone make an RTS based on Sburb?

While stuck inside the game?

...I don't know how I feel about this.

[casualUcalegon]

Nice wall of text there. What's it all mean?

[horrorTerror]

This appears to be a reference to the Strategic/Tactical version of Sburb. It is an extreme rarity but it usually leads to Seers doing this huge awesome fight against the Black King with a big army. One of the guides mentioned it as something Seers or tacticians can do but I don't know. It usually requires tacticians to do all the middle management and your Land Rep has to be so far through the roof that the consort king goes lol-screw-it and throws you the crown, and even then it is usually hinted well in advance you'll have to resort to it. And to be honest, most tactical sessions usually have a pretty high playercount, nasty-but-not-too-nasty prototypings abound, and Derse and sometimes Prospit being very very willing to attack your planets and thus provide motive to do something other than win consort-rulership, build a huge army, do the game normally, and then zerg rush the BK with a gigaton of consorts to soften him up before doing anything. If a 'wraith happens, it will totes mess you up because those things can and will crush an army, especially yours.

I....don't think he actually played it however, at least not WELL. I don't think Ms. Paint's prepromote status would make anyone annoyed with her she is really that good and dealing with the Denizens violently is almost always mandatory and hellishly inefficient when you're running consorts as main troops because of how many quests this just screws over in a billion ways. Taking prospit by force is terrible for white carapace rep (unless you mean doing those salamanders diplomatically? ouch that's a lot of diplomats. If you did mean by force, holy kegnarfl how did you deal with WK and the prospitian insurgencies planned so players don't do this? Like, did you have all your consorts gain prospitian citizenship and then abuse a ton of glitches to get WQ's position?) and I could have freaking sworn that mass consort sacrifice for Nrub'yiglith's Mantle would mean way too much corruption for both you and PM to be a viable strategy like 30%+ of the time depending on prototypings. What kind of mind-control were you slapping on PM to make her work with you even through Prospit insurgency scripts and corruption and being a ringwraith like holy shit did you do all of the mail quests all of them and then promise her the sanctity of the mail service in the new universe if you actually get there (lolno) or something?

Depending on available consorts your consort strategies are kind of iffy and version-specific, and if your Aspect isn't one laden with direct damage abilities it's no wonder your Secret Wizard keeps dying sometimes. Pirate follower's 99% damage resistance and bodily formidability might help as a tank, try doing his recruit questline during the waiting game moments and then send him along with the Secret Wizard as a personal bodyguard of sorts or something.

Ms. Paint and Tectrix is kind of nyeh she's untrained in penkind, featherkind, and swordkind so unless you've got a specibus for her it's kinda ew, but she gets this decently big bonus for paintbrushkind even in variant form weapons so the Skeleton Brush w/ palette /Skeleton Flail && Tectrix is worth it to capitalize on this if you've got the grist to alchemize it (slows the game but if Prospit already has enough prototypings to make WQ a serious threat and the prototyping-responsive forces markedly better than even zerg rush consorts, you can just have your consorts farm imps for the grist and try to recruit Prospit's more remarkable population through alternative means. Not sure if there's a quest chain to make her a follower without seizing command but I think if your white carapace rep is super super high and you gift her the Skeleton Paintbrush or an aspect-charged paintbrush she would like (Dreams, Rain, Coins, and sometimes Light work pretty well) she might be comfortable with adventuring if you slip her a few boonbucks or something.) but seriously a 2p party is kind of not always going to cut it even if you're stacking all players with it (and let's face it, you're almost always lower-tiered in tactical sessions since using consorts to do a lot of stuff, hell, virtually everything after the quest chains to tactical up your session besides a few dream moon quests and game-essential Duties means less personal echeladder and godtier-tier experience for you) even if you've exterminated all consortkind for the Mantle, you can at least send Prospit if you control them and some captcha-monster-whatevers and in tactical sessions it is not totally unheard of for the Space player's Denizen to march on the Battlefield themselves as superhero cavalry if the BK is just too strong plus most of Derse's army production structure is still in place for whatever reason and you need someone to mop up the huge swarm of Dersite battleships, or if you can get them to make a deal for direct combat assistance.

...I know all this because mass alchemy of corrupted items tends to be a lot more of a thing during tactical sessions, especially due to the whole mantle sacrifice thing this guy advocates and using alchemiters for good old fashioned mass duplication is a thing given sufficient grist, and given squiddle treats and payment certain horrorterrors and beasts are pliable to handle even more stuff for you if you break Skaia's horrorterrors-gtfo script that makes it unpleasant for us to break into sessions until corruption is heavy. Tactician's Hubris gets a LOT bigger when there's an entire army to command and fewer opportunities for Sburb to screw you over where it counts in the traumatizing but not necessarily session-success-cancelling levels because personal detachment to the armies of cute little consorts and carapaces you're sending to their deaths.

Also, you lacked a good strategy for dealing with Derse or even their military production (a MUST if you are running tactical and thus will be bringing an actual army to bear who will have to run through most of Derse's to get to the BK unless Prospit put up one helluva fight just before WK went down). I would recommend sending some consorts to sabotage Dersite Veil-based military production (retasking Prospit's Veil-based military production at all is a super accelerator of the Reckoning unless you know what you're doing like you're an actual freaking tactician not just because the game made you one) and deal with BQ somehow (exiling her usually ends with not very much bloodshed and a mostly intact Derse. Bonus is that after you've removed BQ and subverted most of the Dersite organizations you can try to take over Derse but like Prospit the insurgencies generally make this hard to accomplish unless you can toss your carapace rep back up into the holy-shit-how'd-you-get-it-that-high level and keep your approval ratings up there too, complete with moonjacking if necessary to prompt events). For obvious balance reasons the same scripts that keep you from just having a carapace follower pick up BQ's ring and executing the BK with [RED MILES] for you without the obvious problems of a ringwraith prevent you from having anyone just use the ring without problems and it's usually best to vault it or otherwise remove it before it becomes a problem. I assume if you can get PM to use WQ's ring without ringwraithing while corrupted no less that you have actively code editing players (anyone corrupted, rage, heart, even void and mist, sometimes sometimes rain and very very rarely sometimes dreams, corruption is obvious, there's a gamebreaking guide for rage's prolific use of purple prose and general ragey commanding, heart's direct shiny manipulation capacities, the void-mist erase-refill combo was mentioned during someone's cataclysm report and a corrupted void player locally deleted portions of her game, rain can do so much absurd stuff to the game they could probably figure out something, and a less extreme version of Dreams' BT trigger crops up every now and then and even more rarely works on a game level, pick something) or the aforementioned holy-shit-PM-must-love-you stuff.

My personal strategy is corrupt-everything-blow-up-session but that's just cause I'm a horrorterror and it works for me.