Bob's FFH Adventure 9: HELLo, Operator!

[Bobchillingworth]

This report will be almost all images; I had started writing a separate narrative in a Word Doc, but the mod's stability issues meant that alt-tabbing became an increasingly perilous process, and honestly what I had going wasn't particularly good anyway. 




I started the game off right with a lucky hut pop. 



Captured a barb city.



I like the new EMM events; this one was particularly amusing. 



I was slightly worried when someone beat me to founding the Veil; it meant I didn't have time to putter around collecting random techs for Hyborem to inherit.



Another city capture.



My Warrior was addicted to adopting Goblins.



A torrent of Barbs recaptured their city.  Also, note all of those Disciplines of the Leaves Hafghan is spamming...



Pricey, but worth it for Hyborem to know where to find his first victims quickly. 



For some reason the Luchiurp had founded the Veil. 



Farewell, Lanun!  I could have done a better job spamming Death 1 Adepts prior to abandoning the civ, oh well. 



Spawned in a good location; isolated by land, lots of production. 



The first of many disasters to strike the mortals of the world.



Built the Grimoire, landed this vital tech. 



AC rose fast this game, around one point each time I settled or captured a city. 



Hyborem is collecting evil books the way some collect Goblins. 



Getting ready to invade the Bannor by sea. 



Surprise!  I forgot the check the diploscreen prior to declaring, and found myself at war with most of the goodly civs. 



First blood. 



Main strike force.



Captured Sabathiel's excellent capital. 



First step in setting up a game-long Good vs. Evil conflict. 



The Bannor's main counter-attack.  They were wiped out fairly easily. 



As I said; crunch crunch. 



I forget why I took this screenshot, I guess it's supposed to show off the early state of my core cities. 



Around this time the game was becoming really unstable, and in frustration I stopped taking screencaptures for a while.  I had conquered the Bannor, plus a few Luchiurp cities, and shortly after enforced peace with the Dwarves ran out used my WS to set up a multi-pronged invasion of their territory.  Oh, also the AC hit 100 around the time I finished the Bannor off, but that didn't effect the Luchiurp much since their army was like 90% golems anyway. 



The aforementioned AC 100 event. 



The disasters never end!  I bribed Hannah into war with Varn / Basium, who were becoming rather strong devouring the Illians.  I preemptively moved my kill stacks away from the coast, knowing she would trigger her WS immediately.  Was annoying having to replace many of my tile improvements, though. 



This diplomatic dynamic would define the rest of the game, though the traitor Keelyn would convert to the Order after the Forces of Good captured all but two of her cities.



Finally bringing the fight to the Malakim.  At this point I had three large stacks running around the map, two tearing up the Luchiurp and then this one spearheading the assault on Varn.  He and Basium were very powerful, but their armies were stuck off in Illian land, trying to finish off Riuros. 



Garrim finally sees reason, albeit too late to save himself.  Got a good number of Manes as a result, though. 



Around the time I started capturing Varn's isolated colonies at the margins of his empire, Hannah finally moved in her main stack, and the Clan started speeding somewhat terrifying armies of Ogres, Chariots, PoL, and Mages to the front lines.  I was impressed that Hannah's AI had managed to preserve both of the hero units Qg had so kindly left us, by upgrading them into Armageddon-immune demons. 



Varn finally responds with a legitimate army of his own; I had the initiative though, and cleaned them up with few loses. 



First time I had seen an AI refuse to join a Permanent Alliance; I realized that Hafgan thought he could win the game somehow, and since he wasn't close to domination or the Tower, and couldn't declare on like half the remaining civs for conquest due to being "friendly" with them, that meant he was likely going for a religion win.  Checked the religions tab, and sure enough, the Disciplines of the Leaves he was pumping out every turn had converted most of the world, and only my settling new cities every turn and auto-converting my captures was keeping him in check.  I cued up Ritualists in several cities to start purging the Leaves. 



I'm still not certain why Dain declared on the Clan, but it did grant me an income of around 10 Manes every turn. 



Luchiurp are destroyed. 



Religion screen showing the situation as around two dozen Ritualist builds completed. 



Took this screencapture to highlight that Varn's weird settling pattern left huge gaps between his cities, and some rather nice land between them being abandoned to the barbs. 



Just another day in most-apocalyptic Erebus. 



This guy is one of the coolest units in the game IMO, albeit completely impractical. 



This giant army from Basium was wiped with very few loses on my end; as ever, initiative is everything in FFH. 



And the big man goes down!



Hyborem will be taking that, thank you. 



At some point I decided I needed to stop puttering around and win the game; I started working on the Tower, and around the same time formed a Permanent Alliance with Riuros and liberated his cities in rapid fashion, putting me in position to win via Domination in around a dozen turns.



And then the game ended!


Was I upset that I unexpectedly lost a game I had invested at least a dozen hours in? Nah, I actually laughed when I saw Dain's victory announcement. For one, I could have won by Tower 50 turns prior if I had pursued it with any sort of urgency; that I frittered away time instead with spamming the globe in cities and marching armies across the map was because I was enjoying myself and wasn't ready to end the game. Plus, I had no idea the AI even knew how to win via the Altar; I've never even seen them attempt to do it in hundreds of hours playing FFH and its various modmods, and didn't realize the game doesn't give you any sort of notifications that an Altar win is imminent (unlike, say, the Tower, where the AI will automatically declare en masse on the civ building it as they near completion). Dain was next on my kill list after I finished liberating Illian lands from the Mercurians, but in retrospect he had almost 400 turns to generate Prophets, complete the tech tree, and then build the darn thing, even though from my perspective the game had only been running for a little over 150 turns.

Well, thank to Qg for a fun romp; I've complained about it enough, but I would urge us to just use regular EMM for the next game, since I was having to save multiple times every turn in case the game crashed on me (or, worse, locked up my entire desktop). I'm also certain that playing as the Infernals, with greatly simplified logistics (free gates), peace with the barbs (until I allied the Illians, anyway) and empire management (nothing but workshops and mines!) made the experience of playing on the enormous map much less onerous, though it also came to bite me in the end, in that I didn't feel compelled to wrap things up 100 turns in with a Tower victory.

[Qgqqqqq]

Great and amusing report Bob! Really sorry I missed it for almost two weeks - I lost that point in your post because I was focused on the crashing element.

Anyway, thanks for playing to the end and posting about it. I'll gin up another Adventure in the next few weeks. I may offer both a EMM unofficial and a EMM official version - I really would appreciate if you could check in with Ifgr in the future.

I had intended to run a shadow report, but i got lost in playing MagisterModMod. I think also some of the admin of organising this one made me uninterested in it.

[Bobchillingworth]

Hey Qg, sadly I uninstalled the unofficial patched version of the game, and the saves were lost when I started up another Infernals game on a new map almost immediately after the Adventure attempt concluded. I don't know what I was having stability problems, but they haven't reoccurred with regular EMM. Given that the unofficial patch doesn't improve the game in any substantive fashion I can discern, I see no reason to continue using it.

[Qgqqqqq]

No worries, thanks for trying. I think I will upload two saves in future.