Little King's Diary
Day 6, continued
There are a couple more fan letters in the suggestion box, and rumours of a giant frog in the charmingly-named Upchuck Forest. Sounds like another boss. We'll check that out later.
Current items on the Kingdom Plan are a Carpenters' Hut (which, yes, lets me train carpenters), some houses for extra citizens, and a Guard Badge to increase my entourage from five to eight. I grab the badge immediately.
Heading out, I recruit four farmers (Caleb, Jaden, Mike, Lily) and four soldiers (Alice, Josh, Aidan, Letty) and go for some exploring and treasure-hunting. On the way through town, however, I'm grabbed by a weird guy who appears to be playing drums on his own head.
Turns out he's a priest called Kampbell, and he wants me to build him a church next to the no-longer-haunted graveyard. He makes some not-too-subtle threats about God punishing me if I don't do what he says. Yeah, that'll help your case.
Anyway, the sign planted next to the southern river shows the future building site for a bridge. Presumably I'll need carpenters for that. There's another sign to the north, for a staircase.
They can wait. I wander out to clear some wood and fight some monsters and...whoops..nearly stumble into the boss den. I realise where I'm going in time, though, and back away quickly to go beachcombing instead.
A few bits of treasure on the beach, but everyone is puzzled by the Lego. Again, I assume another job will be needed. We do manage to dig out a hot spring, however, which restores hit points to injured citizens. Not that anyone needs it right now.
Alright, let's take a look at that boss fight. I go back to town, dismiss the farmers, gather all my soldiers, and quickly train up Lyrica and Lunasa as extra grunts. Seeking out and recruiting citizens manually is a pain, by the way. Luckily, I'm pretty sure it's not long before I gain the ability to call an assembly.
It's getting quite dark by this point, and a couple of the soldiers have lost health, but I don't remember them getting injured. Fatigue, maybe. I go in search of the healing spring again, fighting off a couple of owls and a mad cow on the way. At some point it goes from late night to early morning, making this...
Day 7
Right. Let's go get this giant frog monster. I quickly discover three important things about this boss:
1. I'm pretty sure it's a toad, not a frog.
2. Its name is apparently Yvonne.
3. It seems to be the reason Upchuck Forest is so named, given that one of its attacks involves spewing poisonous slime all over the ground (and, for that matter, on the camera).
It's also a lot tougher than the ghost cow, with a shorter opportunity window and nastier attacks. As well as vomiting poison, it jumps around a lot and squashes people it lands on, and most distressingly it occasionally swallows someone whole for a one-hit kill.
It wipes me out a couple of times before I get the hang of fighting it. Staying behind it as much as you can is important, and sending the troops in as soon as it finishes spraying gloop everywhere seems to work, since it stops them wandering across the slime.
I get the distinct impression that I should have more, or better, soldiers for this boss. Nonetheless, we're victorious in the end. Verde puts the formal stamp on the quest completion, and it's back to the castle in triumph.
Day 8
There's a lot of new stuff on the plan now. As well as the church, we can now develop Grassland Town in what used to be Upchuck Forest. Villages for yet more citizens and a (very expensive) Hunters' Hut.
I allocate funding for a bunch more housing, the carpentry hut, and throw in the church since it's cheap. Somewhere along the line I gain access to the podium, which I snap straight up to make it easier to organise my rapidly-growing population.
There's also a callisthenics decree available, which makes all citizens exercise at night and gain health. Useful, but as with the hunters it's out of my price range at the moment.
I can't buy all the houses, either, but I do get fourteen extra people, all of whom (of course) start out as slackers. The new jobs have turned up on Liam's reports. Carpenters do the big contruction jobs, as predicted, and can be helped out by other citizens but not soldiers. Hunters are archers; they can attack at range, but have limited ammunition and are pretty useless once they run out of arrows.
Carefree Child also appears on the list. Kids can dig and climb trees, but unsurprisingly can't really work or fight. How do you get them? Well, I suspect it's related to the church, which lets you hold weddings if you spot people throwing little hearts at each other. First comes love, then comes marriage...
Current status:
26 citizens:
7 grunts (Lyrica, Lunasa, Aidan, Caden, Letty, Alice, Josh)
5 farmers (Caleb, Jaden, Merlan, Lily,Mike)
14 carefree (Remil, Nathan, Finn, Taylor, Ajani, Malia, Ashton, Alexis, Keely, Connor, Calliope, Emily, Asha, Kelsey)
Most of my citizens love me, but four hate me. Possibly they're the new arrivals in Castle Town, who are unemployed and surrounded by people with jobs? Or possibly grunts who took a kicking during the toad fight. Ah well, I'll worry about that next time.