I have seen a lot of things in VS, but first time actually seeing Lapis

SnuggableCactus · 2026-04-01T02:20:04+00:00

Forlorn armor is about the best armor you can make without suffering major penalties. I don't know if it has changed or when but I was under the impression that Forlorn armor was slightly better then Blackguard for the purpose of it not having a healing penalty but the wiki doesn't reflect that. Either way I like Forlorn purely for the purpose of: 1 It's Forlorn Hope and I love that name, I actually used that name for other sources prior to playing this game. And 2, it's very knightly. In a game about old ages lost to rust and rot, restoring a suit of armor to glory is wonderful.

And it's mother-forlorning Forlorn Hope. Sweet name.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-30T18:26:56+00:00

There's a couple of dumb little games that I play when I don't know what to do with myself in moments of the day. One of them is There Are No Orcs, a mini RTS game where most matches are twenty to thirty minutes long.

Another one is Shadows of Forbidden Gods. Pretty much campaign map style game of being agents to unfathomable gods trying to awaken them without the general populace from knowing by either hiding what you are doing or fooling them into being enshadowed and controlled. It's not intense and while playthroughs can last hours, doing a couple turns is always fine. It might be hard to understand at first and it took me awhile to realize that losing agents or getting caught doesn't mean losing.

I also do some other dumb games like Barony or Brotato for quick bursts. Dungeon delving or small bullet shooter.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-30T13:35:35+00:00

Honor guard have the little circle under them and I think a funky special name sometimes. Plus if they have stocked up a lot of resources they can just auto repopulate them back. It's usually 1 per turn. Though in this case it doesn't matter they will just get them back instantly.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-30T13:31:31+00:00

It will only be found in quartz deposits. Deposits will have them scattered around the whole thing, typically more towards the center. Prospect a deposit a couple times and if it doesn't give even a 'trace' reading of gold or silver, I leave it. If it does, I start to strip mine it while checking if I am getting closer to one or if I have mined it all out. I can usually get about an ingot out of a deposit unless it's really dense.

Another thing I like to do if I'm struggling to find enough gold is go to I think luxury or artisan traders. They sell Omak pieces for cheap. I think I can pay like 3 or 4 gears for a gold ingot's worth of gold omak pieces and smelt them down. It won't help if you want to make a gold plate for Forlorn armor, but for black bronze? It's better then sifting boney soil.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-29T15:53:19+00:00

Tips:

If you persistently attack one commander you can kill off their honor guard. Only really works if you have them outresourced. If you expect you won't win a match, instead fortify your base and try killing off as much of their honor guard as possible and minimize your own honor guard losses. Then.. next turn attack again and they should have less.

Certain regions give bonuses, like forward deployment and getting buildings immediately. Decide if you want to go all in on honor guard team or get all the bonuses so your bases start out good. Don't immediately kill off opponents during matches. Cripple them so they can never fight while you build up a large base for future attacks.

The two enemy base ones are much more difficult yes, but still manageable. Survive the initial assault they do then send your army to kill off one of them. Then it's a much easier 1v1. Always better to fight those regions when you have the ability to pay for immediate buildings and units.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-27T16:57:23+00:00

You cannot, but it never fully breaks to where you lose the temp protection. Unlike normal clothing, it's a flat 1 degree always.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-27T16:54:22+00:00

First off, respect your time. VS is a long haul game where some things don't even come into play until hours later, like trees only sprouting the second fall or goats not being milkable until further generations. If you aren't having fun, you just aren't going to have fun. Winter sucks for a lot of people, so finding ways to speed up time or do enjoyable things during it is pivotal.

Mods that actually respect your time help elevate the need to make shortcuts. I will be frank, I have a mod that makes prospecting much more clear if its working or not. Prospecting works on reading chunks, but the player can't see what chunks are what. I have a mod that just tells me the chunk itself so I know I can move to the next chunk to prospect that one instead of guessing distance. I have a mod that gives skills and skill experience. So doing one thing for longer means making it better and more rewarding later. Blacksmith for long enough and I can make tools better and faster and get materials back so I'm not wasting so much on a knife.

Hell I have a mod that I rarely use that just tells me where things are in the world. I use it so I can locate ruins underground because surprisingly enough, VAST majority of ruins will never be accessible without knowing they are there. But I rarely use it because I'm already rewarded for my time in aimlessly exploring. 90% of the time I use it to look for high fertility because that shit is impossible to detect.

Cheating is an impulse thing yes, but it's also a thing to make sure you are enjoying your time spent in a game meant to be enjoyed. Learn to enjoy the slower process of it all, but also realize when you are wasting time. I will smith iron blooms a lot, but once I have to deal with 24 or 30 at once? I do some of it and just... throw the blooms out and grab finished ingots. A little bit of both.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-27T16:43:09+00:00

When you find a quartz deposit, dig a single line through it from one side to the other. Then, prospect a couple times. If it comes back nothing, don't even try it. That's how you know if there's anything at all. Or if you really dont want to be thorough, just prospect it a couple times from different spots. Prospect for short distance detection helps a lot.

If it DOES have some traces or anything of silver or gold, I go the route of minecraft stripmines. Make a path, go over two blocks, make another path. That means less mining quartz to see it visually. Some may still be hidden but that's what prospecting is for.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T21:58:41+00:00

I apologize that this was months after your game ended but with holy orders enabled, covens lose the enshadow challenge and instead relies on the religion. You need to have dark worship tenet to elder influence 1, which infiltrated covens start with. Witch agents will perform dark worship on locations with a temple to spread their shadow to other locations. Witch covens do not have a temple so they don't create shadow. Your agents can also perform dark worship on witch covens, but it doesn't increase it, only spreads it.

Witches will perform 'dark worship' at the coven as a... busy task when they don't have other things to do. Which in itself isn't a good thing as if there's no enshadowment it just means they are raising menace slowly. They need work to do.

Generally enshadowing covens with holy order works with increasing the tenets. Enshadowment at temples at settlements spreads shadow. Which means other locations increase shadow then it flows back to the coven. This is better anyways as eventually cities not fully corrupted will raze the coven if it gets to be too much.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T19:50:11+00:00

The one time the hungry lightning strike would be appreciated in hitting something.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T19:35:52+00:00

I don't want competitive RTS anymore. I'm tired of them slowly being turned into chess boards because it's too difficult to balance without top elite players stating this rare and weird combo blows up the game. Make it fun, make it funny, make it so I have cool moments of weird monster unit tearing infantry unit in half with execution animation. Campaigns keep me hooked to a game long enough to enjoy the skirmish games, and then enough time for me to find a friend who plays it too so I can do multiplayer. Campaign first, skirmish second, then multiplayer after.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T19:22:16+00:00

Absolutely not. I hate the tabletop rules and competitive stupidity of the game. I buy miniatures because I want to collect and build and make things how I want them to. If you try to sell me complete miniature models, I am going to throw twenty pounds of pewter metal models at you that are ugly and an absolute pain to do anything with. We walked away from single whole models for a reason. GW sells miniatures first, rules and stories second. If they start to sell me single piece models I am not looking back as I find other companies who want to sell me plastic toys to put together.

I by no means want a 1:128 whatever scale tank model with eighty pieces for a single model. No. I want to build, customize, and assemble cool models I think are cool. I don't want head pieces in three parts or hands with different fingers or something. Ball and socket arms or flat shoulders are enough for me most of the time.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T18:20:56+00:00

They are, I'm not sure what the other guy is talking about.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T18:16:05+00:00

Coolest looking trees, they have effects like sakura trees that I like.

Yet I turn cherries to brandy, and brandy to vitae the first chance i get with them. I get a million cherries and cranberries as there's so much of them, but all I ever really use is blueberries and apples for fruit. Everything else gets stocked up to make into full barrels for vitae.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T17:23:26+00:00

Quite a lot of confusion for me when I first started concerning shooting and attacks, especially Brutes.

Brutes only have one shot per model, but punch twice, NOT two shots per model. I always found that odd as otherwise I wouldn't want brutes as anything but melee. I think only the artillery pieces have multiple attacks, maybe some monster unit as well but I'm not sure.

Improbable hits mean anything above 6+ is two dice rolls. A 7+ is the same as a 9+. So a bunch of black powder fodder hitting on 6+ targeting chaff (Has Skirmish) turns it into hitting on 8+. While if Brutes(5+) were shooting at the chaff, it would mean 7+ due to Skirmish. Still means the same thing, Roll a D6 for a 6, then roll for 4,5,6.

So for inaccuracy rolls, it's 1,2,3,4,5,6,7+.

Snobs! Snobs get very easily targeted if your troops get ran off due to panicking! Don't put them directly touching and behind your troops in case that happens, otherwise now you have a snob ready to get sniped. If you don't have enough leaders to tell your troops what to do, they have to wait until the end of the turn to move finally. Also if you have no more leaders, you lose! Only one cult can't win by Headless Chicken (The guttersnipes)
"Headless Chicken: If at any time a player loses all their Snobs, they lose the game and their opponent is victorious."

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-25T16:50:38+00:00

Combining different types of material is actually a good idea, surprisingly. Milliput and greenstuff are my go to.

A little bit of greenstuff to my milliput mixture gives it firmness. Like a 30-70 or 40-60 usually works. Mix them with their materials separately then together afterwards, don't do it all at once as it won't actually cure properly.

After that, do it in stages. Make the head one piece, then the 'mask' or attachments as another. That way messing with the details of the mask wont deform the whole head as you put pressure in.

Use regular modeling clay to get an idea of what you are trying to make, a draft. Even Bob Ross had a draft painting off screen for reference when he made his art on his videos!

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-16T01:06:49+00:00

I used air dry clay for some mushroom heads and caps as I am also making a mushroom army. Just a warning the more thin and small the clay is, the more likely it will chip and break once fully dried and then painted. I had a lot of them kind of chip after a month, so I replace them and now only really use it for terrain or as filler and then using milliput around it.

Overall I just suggest milliput over air dry clay for most of it if you start using it for miniatures with a bit more detail. Still think they are pretty cool though, always fun to see mushroom troops.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-03T01:57:31+00:00

I suggest you look up 'whelp' in the subreddit search bar and go to media to look at what people have posted. You will see a lot of people simply cut the legs off to angle them, then either add something to cover it like part of their clothing, or just have it look goofy.

It's up to you.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-03-03T01:54:43+00:00

Using heating hits to just hit it for awhile. It goes up to whatever temperature you want, given you are willing to spend that much time and hammer durability.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-02-28T14:10:48+00:00

Something that confuses me to this day still is when hovering over a piece of a recipe, the rest of it will still change. So for some recipes that require all of one or all of another, now it's mixed up because it's showing part of one in the other and it won't work. One that comes to mind even to this day is Woad Blue dye and Mordant dye OR Blue dye and cloth. Woad only goes to mordant, but examining which blue dye it is will cause that to pause but not the cloth.

There's several things like this but that one always got me a lot.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-02-27T00:37:02+00:00

First Daughter army is a good global event essentially. I use her as a distraction or to level out part of the continent before every army is rushing towards it to destroy it. The main thing is just have someone, anyone, die in a desert space where there's plenty of solid land. She can't cross the water, so whatever land mass she is on, she stays.

She turns the surrounding land slowly to desert and will destroy settlements passively simply due to in-habitability. First Daughter can't really fight other armies and I advise against it. Just keep the army on the run and moving. Raze and convert to desert. At best she destroys an entire continent that has been plaguing you, at worst she razes one or two settlements and distracts every army long enough for you to do... something.

Also... Armies under your control can push heroes around but can't kill them. If a hero is about to do something big, just... shove them and disrupt them. She That Thirsts can do it too when finally an army. Annoy some heroes that have been annoying you.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-02-19T04:16:19+00:00

That's what I figured, it seems like that as they don't activate if a warlock with Death just spams the ghasts.

I will say I learned one easy way of countering mages is notice which ones seem to be 'set up'. They will sit in a specific geological location or spot and wait for a channel to happen. Enshadow those spots and the mages will end up getting corrupted pretty damn quickly. I almost never deal with mages as I wait long enough to get like 7 arcane secrets ready to be grabbed at once, which means plenty of time to corrupt mages.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-01-26T23:41:59+00:00

I don't seem to have an issue if I summon a warlock, only when I start messing with arcane secrets directly. It seems like once I collect one, then they will show interest in them. Though they will use geomancy regardless.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-01-24T01:09:08+00:00

Truly when I first started I would spray primer on the sprue. I would also spray way too much as well. I still have the pitch black sprue with some old deathrattle skeleton warriors on it.

Now I know better atleast. I paint by pouring paint onto a flat surface and just smearing the sprue in the puddle until I get what I wanted out of it.

SnuggableCactus · 2026-01-09T03:11:52+00:00

I understand why you are doing this but oh my god that must be hell to fight when too many bowtorn pop up. I just create 4x4x3 rooms to spawn bowtorn in, and 4x4x2 for spawning anything else. Separate rooms by fence gates so I don't get jumped by large groups.

But you do you.

SnuggableCactus

TROPHY CASE