1220 Words of Tactics. This entire post fought with me, but I did my best.
Oblique Means means me an' mean tactics mean more than the mean. I think that made sense when I wrote it, but I'm struggling to parse it now. Anyway, the summoning and consolidation are straightforward enough, but Hunger faces a new challenge- how
not to slaughter his enemies! Is his sword sharp enough to Cut Through this task? Of not Cutting Through. How does the Forebear resolve this paradox, we know he can Cut the uncuttable, but can he Cut the Cut itself? While Hunger ponders that, we'll just have to use his other resources.
Now, the option implies that Hunger can more relatively freely while casting Supreme Enclosure. I think. Because otherwise, why would the summoning necessitate a slower pace
after it was completed? Please yell at me if I'm blatantly wrong, but I'll proceed on the assumption that part of Hunger's attention is on the spell when he's fighting. This at least has the benefit of T-posing points.
[ ] Oblique Means. Consolidate the allied legions and summon reinforcements via Supreme Enclosure.
Time is critical, but the benefits of an allied summon outweigh the substantial costs of inaction here. Some Astral being capable of re-capturing Versch or nullifying the Lord Protector's abilities would provide immense utility. Also, by proceeding at a slower pace Hunger can honor Adorie's request not to slay too many of the opposing legions. With Hunger's immense Blood Rank, it should be entirely possible to nonlethally incapacitate even such heroes as these with the Ring of Blood, given enough time.
[++Adorie]
Blood Basics
Hunger's proposed method is Ringing them to incapacitation which should largely work in principle. We can heartsplode people of Rank 8.475 or below as a benchmark. The question is how to do this most efficiently. Ring magic isn't mechanical, so a visit to Wikipedia for sleep-related knowledge would be wasted. But leaving it at "Incapacitate with Ring magic" is unsatisfying.
It shouldn't be hard to debuff enemy soldiers into oblivion; the issue is keeping them there while we move on to another section of the army. Since they could just stand up again- that would be awkward. Assuming we had complete military superiority, allied Legions could just babysit them, but the whole mess we're in is because we don't.
Anti-Anti-Blood
No matter how gentle we're being, our enemies aren't just going to roll over for us while we capture them. Probably, I'm not 100% confident that Hunger's Charisma can't lead to that outcome. But they'll catch on that we're doing spooky blood magic eventually (immediately, more like), and the strongest army in the Realm of Myth didn't get that way by being unable to adapt. We'll have to deal with their countermeasures.
The first option, as usual, is to cut through. The whole reason we're messing about with Blood nonsense is because we don't want to slaughter the opposing army en masse. Or at least, Adorie doesn't, I'm not especially sympathetic towards the armies (including the oft wtf'ed about 'reaving squads') fighting for the expansionist overlord, but semantics. If there's just a few heavies here and there that aren't affected by Blood magic, Hunger can just kill them. We don't want megadeaths, but that's not the same as doing a zero-fatality run. I think this scenario is likely even from the start, with the LP's demonstration of summoning. Spirits, giant robots, individual wizards with specialized anti-blood spells, those are the enemies I imagine can just get cut.
The trouble comes when a wizard casts a Resist Blood spell over the entire legion, or something along those lines. Hopefully ADS can Ruin it, or Gisena can Nullify it, but even though we have plenty of options almost all take precious time. Outer Shadow, Edeldross, nothing else can really keep up. Raw non-Blood Pressure? Might have to skip to the less lethal parts of Step C until Gisena works out a counter.
Weapon-Defeating
The Stance was subsumed into ADS, but the mindset could still be useful. We don't have to be gentle with equipment, and destroying it will severely reduce the Legions' ability to do harm. Presumably. Everything that is not a person? Crush Them.
Holy Shitplomacy
The quickest way to end a fight is not to get into one in the first place! It's, uh, too late for that. But still, the fighting will stop when our enemies stop fighting, Projectile says profoundly, stroking his beard. They're disciplined enough to potentially resist until they're dead no matter how overwhelming we are or many of them we kill! But it takes the wind out of the sails of that kind of resistance when we aren't actually slaughtering them all. Leaves you a bit flat footed, when you're trying to kill the Princess and her friends and they're just knocking you out, with 100 Cha helping to blast the Princess's mercy and kindness over you. Makes a guy feel a bit guilty. Surely it isn't us who are the baddies?
Leave the actual speechifying to Adorie, who presumably has something idealistic to say- Hunger is there for the "If you fuck with me, I swear to god I will kill you all" points. And the actual fighting, but we already covered that. I can't say he's the bad cop, since he's being very nice, but he's the less good one?
I have ideas that I think would be cool, like blasting Adorie's Edeldross buff to 90% at a dramatic moment, or using blood debuffs and buffs for extra shock and awe during the same, but I'm not sure how practical those are.
Ideally, everyone will be like "Wow, Adorie, you're super cool, let's fight on your side against the Lord Protector!" It'd also be great if they agreed to sit the fight out. But if they don't surrender, we'll have to keep millions of high-mid Rank soldiers in time out. Even if we've disarmed, debuffed, and wounded them, the logistics are horrible. The problem with making the Royalist Legions do it is that they're outnumbered and we need them to actually be ready to fight. Hunger likewise has better things to do. I'm at a bit of a loss, honestly, please help. Hope for a Spirit capable of functioning as a prison warden, an enclosure summoned by Enclosure? Emergency Artifice?
Plan C
The C is for cut. Because we will have the option of no more Mr. Nice Hunger if we critfail diplomacy or if the LP does something that demands immediate and drastic response. Before that, though, we could delimb people as we did with the timeclone archer. Less-lethal bladewind spam is almost as fun as the actual thing! We'd have to toggle off the soul-wounds and such, maybe, but bleeding out isn't as much of a concern. Also ADS could get inconvenient, depending on how much control we have over autoblamming people with Ruin. But the point is, these guys are tough, they can take a
little abuse if the easiest route doesn't work.
We could also focus on killing the captains and generals, for a high defanging to slaughter ratio. And crunch the Tyrant if he sticks his head into our jaws, but that won't happen.
Leading Legions
We have an army on our side. I have no idea what to do with an army. They're good for beating up other armies, but that's what Hunger's doing... well, there's more than one legion opposing us, and Hunger can solo them, so they should glare menacingly at the ones not being Hungered. And protect any non-assassinated supporters. Throw buffs at them and hope for the best? I still don't know how Legions work, so I should probably be content to let the generals do their jobs, but it feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe Hunger could spend a few minutes getting a rundown on how to fight with and against Legions, if we're already taking this slowly.
