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Re: Spiders, time, mad myrks, etc.

Posted By: SiliconDream (anton-mates.hip.berkeley.edu)
Date: 11/14/1999 at 6:56 p.m.

In Response To: Re: Spiders, time, mad myrks, etc. (Milk Man)

: A) Remember, the Summoner never really has much more than
: 30 myrks around, and there a LOT of spiders in the
: tain. You only fight small spider gangs in the
: mission.. as your not there for that long... but
: think... a spider QUEEN (or are they just the only
: spiders that can reproduce?).. this implies that
: (though real spiders dont do this) some groups of
: these spiders are much like ants... with hundreds of
: spiders following one or two queens. Now this can
: SERIOUSLY hurt myrks. The summoner must have had to be
: really careful not to venture too close to any of
: these nests.

Yeah, incautious exploration would be ill-advised. But the small size of the Tain world, and the narrowness of the passageways connecting the open caves, makes a hundred-spider army much less dangerous. Pick a small corner of the Tain (like the spot where the Summoner is), and put a line of myrks across every entrance. Not more than a dozen spiders can attack this line at one time; the entrance is just too narrow. Arranged like this, a dozen myrks could hold off an army of hundreds, I think. Not to mention that any time the spiders mass into a really huge horde, the summoner can just teleport them away while the myrks hold them off. I'm not saying that the spiders wouldn't do any damage; I'm just saying that it's not very advantageous for a pack of dog-sized animals to lose fifty of its members just so the other fifty can take a single bite of myrk and then escape. I think evolution would work against this sort of behavior.

: Has anyone ever considered that you cant control things
: while there in the tain? I mean look at what SB sends
: into the tain... intelligent units such as myrms and
: fetches... not thrall and souless that he needs to
: control which maybe he cant do while there in the
: tain. As for myrks.. who DO need to be controled, they
: were probably controled by the Summoner, which, as he
: is not very powerful (or IS he?), is another reason he
: couldnt have too many around at once.. because he cant
: control all of them.

Myrks don't need that much control; they're not geniuses, and they're a little excitable, but they're not mindless like the undead either. They probably have about ape-level intelligence. Notice how they're always running around randomly when you first see them? Then they remember their orders, say to themselves, "Oh yeah, Soulblighter said he'd disembowel us if he found out we hadn't followed orders," and fall into formation. Plus they've got a few of their bosses there. And they aren't going to attack the Summoner; they're smart enough to know he's their ticket to immortality.

The control argument is a good one, but as duckyjo pointed out, there are undead in the Tain in TFL, and they aren't wandering around mindlessly. So it must take a while for their motivation to wear off. Or maybe without direct control they tend to shamble about aimlessly and can't execute any complex formations (which would make them undesirable guards for the Summoner), but if they do see any living beings they attack them automatically, as they did in TFL.

--SiliconDream

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