Daimons cannot hop rivers.
There was once a special form of travel allowed for GMs. It was disabled during the fourth invasion, and even before then, it wasn't what most people thought.
Daimons (and any other GM-controlled troops) now travel exactly the same way as anyone else.
If you don't see them coming, then it is necessarily because you did not look in the right place
That makes sense then; explains the difference.
But... but... I still don't understand what happened. Do they just not cause "An enemy is approaching" messages to happen? I guess all of Asylon's lords could be coordinatedly lying to Terran. It's possible. I don't find it highly likely.
Hm. Now I'm wondering if maybe FangFang traveled without a unit somewhere, then recruited from rogues. I wonder if that's possible. Doesn't seem like it would be, but either Zuma have some kind of "stealth mode" where they don't trigger any of the normal warnings, or else Glaumring is actually something of a master conspirator. I am skeptical of Glaumring's conspiratorial skills, and thus am now wondering about the possibility of inviso-daimons.
Jeez, just go kill them already. I haven't heard of gigantic daimon armies on Dwilight.
The real frightening ones are on BT.
How's 50,000 CS sound?
And to hammer the important point home: There isn't a thing the Zuma can do that the humans cannot also achieve. Yeah they have powerful units. You know what though? The pen's mightier than the sword, the faith is mightier than the inferno.
Oh yeah, we could RTO all of the Zuma lands. What a great idea. Problem: they'll still have units. Maybe you missed the part about really, really big units.
No, faith is not mightier than the inferno. Religions don't give combat bonuses, as far as I am aware. Sure, maybe if something like the Light showed up, that would do something. And be absolutely idiotic: talk about making a Beluaterra-lite. It'd be all the frustration of the Fourth Invasion with none of the epic scale. And you cannot seriously be suggesting that I can write Haktoo enough letters that she will die of paper inundation.
Oh and alliances matter? Really? What extraordinary knowledge you bring. I would have thought that the Zuma could be everywhere with all of their CS all at once! Thank you for illuminating these mysteries to me.
Ooo, or maybe we should all go and convert the Zuma to our religion; maybe that's why the whole lore about the Zuma ordering the founding of two religions is significant. And when the Zuma is in our religion, our religion will have True Ultimate Power! It'll be like controlling a genie or something. Which will be awesome: then, all the strength of a GM can be wielded by religions, and the huge amount of player-created content can be rendered worthless by whichever religion happens to convert the (most) daimons. That would be SO much fun. Because everybody knows that religion on Dwilight is really, really lacking; it's got no flavor at all. Dwilight is really the continent that needs a shot in the arm in the religious game.
Not. In such a hypothetical, if SA "got" the daimons, we could kiss goodbye to anything else on the continent basically. Not because SA was so compelling, but because the combined strength just couldn't be resisted. If a smaller religion, maybe Triunism or Elrism for example, "got" the daimons: no matter how much RP has been put into SA, maybe we couldn't destroy'em but, damn, we could do some damage. Not because we were able to create an interesting and convincing religion that really stirred people up: but because we gained the favor of the GM by investing the most time in figuring out the plot. Which is kind of a lame way to structure power in a supposedly team-based and collaborative game.
Or maybe, oo, even more fun, maybe we should worship the daimons! Oh, how original! We could all become like the Zuma tribespeople themselves; have a sort of barbarian culture where we all dance around sacrificing the occasional goat. Sounds like boatloads of fun.
These are what I think of with maybe 30 seconds of mental effort. Maybe there's some even deeper and lamer plan. I am skeptical of the ability of any one or two people to come up with a more interesting world than all of us combined, and confident of their ability to seriously retard the efforts of players in investing in that world. Hence why I don't think there should be any Zuma. When the Zuma were simply a quiet, benign presence, not interfering much, not really doing anything, they were tolerable. The neighboring realms had good reason to feel secure: the Zuma had no significant track record for aggression. Only idiots got in trouble with the Zuma, and they mostly deserved it. When the Zuma responded to Barca's taking Eregon: that was pretty normal Zuma behavior. Could have been solved. But when things escalated into ever more elaborate demands, the series of forgeries, the various dubiously legitimate ultimatums, FangFang's northward march... not normal Zuma behavior. Externally, at least. Maybe the internal process is identical. I'm not the GM, I don't know, maybe he/she really is processing everything identically as before. But externally, it does not seem at all consistent with previous behavior. The end result is that realms in the area now have only two functional foreign policies: become implicit vassals (as the Zuma have effectively demanded of Terran and seem to be pushing for in Barca), or else try to do some lame "Unite Humanity! Avoid Conflict!" approach where we try to build a grand coalition. Normal politics stop.
I will have to think for a bit about possible winding-down stories for the Zuma. As much as it sounds like a lame cop-out, it is hard to know a good such story without knowing what was actually going on before or, for example, what the RPed explanation is behind Vates' leaving. In hindsight I wish I'd pursued more information about the transition from Vates to Haktoo. But, I'm more than happy to try and come up with reasonable means by which the Zuma could eventually be removed from Dwilight. Just might take a bit. I've never claimed I would be a better GM, and thus there is no real burden on me to demonstrate any such claim.