As Doyle starts to do the math, Ally knocks on the wall. Doyle bobs his core, ‘Yes?’
Ally rolls her eyes, ‘You don’t exactly have a door to knock on. Anyway, I was watching you make the new floor and wanted to know how you’re going to get the adventurers into the water?’
Doyle tilts to the side, ‘No real plan for that. Why?’
Ally shrugs, ‘I figured you were trying to make use of your sea cattle.
Doyle pauses for a moment. ‘I had completely forgotten about them, to be honest. Though I still don’t think I’ll do anything specific to push people into the water. The sea cattle are relatively cheap at 17 points each so I’ll just add a small herd of ten of them. That way, people don’t think of it as a shortcut. Not that they would after the myconids flood the water.’
Ally nods, ‘Fair enough. That should provide an interesting surprise for when someone gets clever.’
Doyle nods in return, ‘I’ll be excited to see who tries it first. Now I just need to finish with the myconids. Even after that 170 points, I still have 34,830 to go.’
For Doyle, that meant more math and a little bit of testing. To be specific, he needed to test what ratio of sprouts to everything else provides the best bang for his buck. After all, his monsters get a boost for being commanded, but there had to be a limit.
So Doyle pulled in a bunch of sprout swarms and a few of each of the other. With that, the first truth revealed itself. The lessers and the guards couldn’t be leaders.
Fair enough, they both started with a base Intelligence of 3. One more than his goats started with, but still not at the level that the dungeon’s leadership bonus would kick in. This was interesting because it pointed towards another aspect of the system.
Greater mental stats do not make a greater mind. Doyle had seen similar concepts in various stories. The whole idea that pumping an intelligence stat doesn’t make you actually smart.
Except Doyle was able to look into what the stats could actually do. Sure, the description he got when he asked the system as a human pointed towards this sort of thing. Something he double checked by pulling it up.
{The power of one’s mind. Your race does not understand the mind enough to explain fully what this stat does. However, on a basic level, this increases the speed at which you can think through things and remember stuff. It will also allow you to remember more details of what you purposefully memorize, providing a major boon to certain schools of magic and other power usages.}
And there you go. Clear as day, on a basic level, it ups your thinking speed and memory. Doyle had seen beyond that.
Intelligence as a stat can improve your mental state. A normal animal can boost their mind. In fact, this is a key part of animals developing towards natural sapience.
As for the other mental stats, you might consider something like Presence being the key to command. Except the troop guards have much better Presence and still can’t swing it. This led Doyle to dive deep into the lesser myconid’s Intelligence stat.
This was a trippy experience. He could see that at a deeper level, they would begin to develop more of a sense of self, a mind fit for sapience. Not a human mind, mind you.
Doyle knew this universe preferred the human form, but as a dungeon his origins exceed such limited concepts. Yes, he could tell that it would have a harder time attracting a soul, but that was just the unfairness of life.
The problem is how deep that light dwells. Like how humans have a point in Constitution where they gain at least a limited form of regeneration. However, the lesser myconid wasn’t some shallow fifty point goal, but rather multiple magnitudes deep.
Not that Doyle could really be sure. That was just his best guess as even stretching his ability as far as he can, he couldn’t budge the point. So with that in mind, he moves to check the other myconids.
The sprouts? Maybe there was a point, but Doyle couldn’t see even a glimmer of it. The troop guards, in turn, had it worse than the lessers they were made from. It seems that becoming one, sacrificed the mind in favor of being more able to defend the troop. Stuff like being able to process a battlefield faster.
It was only with the myconid that things were different. Doyle could tell that they needed work to be able to house a soul. However, it was disconnected from any of the mind stats or more properly they had already reached the mark. In theory, any myconid could become sapient.
Also, much more useful for Doyle is that they can be leaders. Now the question is how many can they lead? Good thing Doyle had already checked their mental stats.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
While you needed a certain mental structure to provide the leadership bonus. The quantity was based on Presence. This was quite the relief to Doyle as it fit his mental image of what the stats do.
It is unfortunate though for his myconids as they have quite the low Presence. If only the troop guard could do it as their base Presence was already twice of the regular myconids.
The good news is that the monster rancher path helped fix things to a point. It added 26 more points to the myconids Presence. Enough to get over the first hump, though Doyle was tempted to tweak the stat to allow more minions.
In the end, Doyle decided against it as while not the cheapest at 300 a pop, the myconids could cover quite a large number of sprout swarms. Though he suspected that the whole “swarm” thing might have something to do with it. It wasn’t quite as if it was treating the swarm of one entity to lead, but it certainly wasn’t counting it as anywhere near 100 individual sprouts.
On top of that, Doyle wasn’t trying to blanket the entire swarm he envisioned with the commanded bonus. After all, while the lesser and normal myconids could be outfitted with ranged attacks, the sprouts were all melee. That meant he only needed those closest to the enemy to have the bonus.
Sure, it would be nice to have the 14 bonus constitution spread to all the sprouts. It is just that Doyle wants a massive swarm instead of a tough swarm. The trade off being a greater weakness against a well-placed fireball, but in theory he can field enough sprouts to make it less of an issue.
It is okay to have hundreds die if you’re fielding thousands. And he could. Doyle has enough points right now to field just a bit over 34,000 sprouts. That would provide a true fight of attrition and an absolute money farm.
Doyle however wants some muscles involved. That meant myconids and troop guards. The lessers would be nice, but for this they’re less effective for his plan.
So Doyle got down to figuring out how best to use the two. Well, how best to use the myconid. The guards have their role right in the name, so despite the steep cost; he decided to have a couple guard each myconid.
That meant a myconid with guards was going to cost a hefty 1,500 points to field. Though, in a way, the price tag made it easier for him to balance. After all, he wants enough sprouts that the myconids can’t possibly command them all.
This limited the amount to less than 20 myconids. After all, with 20 of them, he would only have enough points for 90 swarms. Sure, 9,000 sprouts was a decent quantity, but at that point he might as well add another couple myconid groups so that all sprouts can be covered.
The command bonus doesn’t stretch quite as far as it used to, but was still worth it. After all, being able to add a third of a commander’s Wisdom to the highest stat of every monster they control isn’t negligible. Still, Doyle wants to stay true to his plan. So if not 20, maybe 10?
He does the math and frowns at the result, 198 swarms. That was a good number of sprouts, but a ratio of one myconid to almost 20 swarms felt like it was still too far. So, he does the math for nine myconids. Still not right! Maybe eight? No, seven?
Maybe! That raised the number of swarms to 243 and the ratio increased to one myconid per almost 35 swarms. Though one final test was required. Doyle flooded the eleventh floor with swarms.
Enough swarms to cover everything besides the water. Seeing the results, Doyle sighed and decided to settle for seven myconids and their guards. It is easy to forget how small the one point sprouts are.
Sure, they’re a lot bigger than a normal mushroom by mass, but that isn’t saying much. This is especially true when much of their extra size goes to having a thicker trunk instead of a wider cap. While 24,300 sprouts covered everything, it wasn’t a tight fit.
Even adding in the seven myconids and their guards wouldn’t do much. Though those troop guards do take up a ton of space. Still, it doesn’t mean the plan won’t work.
There are a few tricks Doyle starts to implement to make them stretch farther. He makes the side walls steeper and sinks some of the beachfront. This reduces the walkable space by an appreciable amount, especially the changes to the outer wall.
After the basic terrain changes, Doyle gives up on one of his goals. He wanted the area to be mostly open, only using the mushroom trees to loosely block the line of sight. Now those mushrooms are packed together.
Not tightly, but enough that it becomes hard to see the ceiling for all the caps. Though to maintain some of the feel, Doyle does have a gradient of density. With the mushroom trees much more loosely spaced near the entrance.
All together, these changes are enough to make it so not all the sprouts can fit. More importantly, with the thicker tree coverage, Doyle doesn’t have to pack the entire floor. He can instead have a dense mob of sprouts right up close and hide the fact that the entire floor isn’t like that.
The only catch is the opposite side of whichever way the delvers go. Doyle also has to send some sprouts that way so people don’t get confused when they reach the safe zone and realize there aren’t any myconids in the other direction. This caused Doyle to make one final change to the layout.
He took a bit more space from the farm area and extended the tunnel area the safe zone was in. That way, there was a small hallway of regular space. This area was tighter than the area out on the ring of land so the delvers should be tempted to retreat into it to defend.
Then it doesn’t matter where the sprouts come from, as long the pressure is kept up. A perfect area to grind out system money for the delvers since the war of attrition will certainly have them releasing all that cruft for the dungeon to take. Combined with the massive number of sprouts, the only challenge will be handling all the coins.
In fact, after thinking about it, Doyle adds one more feature to the safe room and the room that will have the exit portal. A simple chest that when closed will fill up with any drops. A little kindness for the delvers so they can retreat at any moment and still pick up their winnings. That is, if they haven’t used up all their time in the safe room.
The only things left to do is handle the farm area and how to get the myconids to swarm out of the center stalk. Both are easy enough to do. With a copy of the floor, there isn’t quite enough space, but cutting the air space in half and adding an extra floor up there does it just fine.
Then Doyle hollows out the stalk into multiple rooms which he excluded from the farm area. That will be where the myconids will wait until the delvers reach the bridge. Then they’ll just flood put into the last room and down to meet them.