This isn't an official report, I finished the game weeks ago but spaced out on sending the report in.
So I'll preface this by saying I played one (1) game of FFH2 before this one. I managed an excruciatingly slow domination win in a test run with the Svartalfar, but at least got the hang of the basic game mechanics and the dark elves' specific strengths and weaknesses. Since this challenge I've played through two more full games, so it's already embarrassing to relate this given how noobish the game went.
Capital looks like an amazing commerce city. Set research towards Education, build another scout, and send out the starting units to explore nearby stuff.
Meet the slow-to-develop dwarves nearby, great target for first good kill!
Meet the orcs to the west, good perpetually backwards nearby ally
Yikes, Ljosfar to the north. That's going to get ugly fast, and they appear to have a very strong start, too.
Huts- Gold, gold, gold. Better than maps, I guess, but terrible luck with random stuff this game. Later when I explore dungeons/ruins I get nothing but heartache from it.
Ridiculously close call early: wandering Lizardmen show up with their two moves, not far from my undefended capital. They can make it to the capital in two turns, scout (which won't have great defending odds, anyways) isn't complete for three. Fortunately they decide to wander off rather than kill me turn ~35 and give me the honorable mention for "dumbest game".
Turn 51: after a couple minor annoyance-level bad events, I get a great one: 50 gold for a great prophet! Since I'm now beelining towards Fellowship of Leaves, this is a great get: I can either pop an early golden age if I'm afraid I might not found FoL, or I can save him until after founding for a quick shrine.
Turn 75: after a huge flurry of barbarian activity, Orthus spawns about equidistant from me and the dwarves. Fingers crossed I don't have to try to take him down with warriors.
No luck: Orthus marches up to our capital as I frantically crank our warriors and ship one down from our northern city. He's smart enough to plant himself on the forest south of the city. The bad news is that gives him a fat defensive bonus and takes away our best commerce square, as it's where our oldest cottage is. The good news is he wastes some time pillaging.
Unfortunately the barbarian horde keeps up, and between their attacks and Orthus', the city can do nothing but crank out warriors. Orthus is smart enough to sit there and heal, won't be baited by a worker dangled in a square without defensive bonuses, and I don't have anything close to enough firepower to kill him from full health.
I really started hating Orthus this game, to the point that I was ready to put down FFH2 in frustration. In subsequent games I learned that a decent number of warriors ambushing him in the open before he's heavily promoted can take him down fairly painlessly.
FINALLY, after he has a relatively unlucky attack against the city I manage to take him out with a stack of forester promoted warriors. Just hope I can recover from the ridiculous handicap he gave me, as my capital has seen its best plots pillaged and built nothing but warriors for the last ~40 turns.
One bit of good news, though: the forest hill SE of the capital got a random +1 food/+1 trade bonus, making it an insanely good cottage square. If I survive long enough to exploit it, hoorah!
And just as I'm starting to recover from the Orthus rape, the Calabim are nice enough to cast their UA and re-cripple me. Thanks, guys! So far this has probably been the most frustating and least fun game of Civ4 I've ever played. Hopefully that will make my eventual turnaround and victory all the more satisfying?
Turn 136: Found FoL. Go back to picking up all the worker techs I skipped.
Turn 138: found Nameless Tower in a nice denial spot against the dwarves, and the FoL shrine in my northern town. Hopefully the religion will enable quick expansion to claw back up from my terrible start.
Turn 139: Newly founded city "rightfully" requests to be ceded to the dwarves. Any way to turn this mind-bogglingly stupid annoyance popup off? Has any player, ever, in the history of BtS said yes to it?
Turn 168: Four barbarian warriors come within a couple combat rounds of capturing a city defended by three max fortified, highly promoted bronze-wielding warriors, two of which have +40 vs melee. Uhm.
Turn 237: Captured all but one of the barbarian towns, finished poison, switched to conquest/apprenticeship to start a push against the dwarves.
Turn 257: Army assembled, I make the stupid mistake of demanding the dwarves' map and gold. They comply, and thus I am blocked from declaring for 10 turns. Doh. Don't know if this was a BtS addition, but I don't remember tribute forcing a peace treaty like this before. I find out shortly afterwards that the Calabim are absolutely tearing through the dwarven cities, and I'm going to be lucky to get scraps.
Turn 264: The orcs declare on the MUCH stronger Ljosfar! Great news for me no matter what happens.
Turn 267: My army is camped outside of a small dwarven city that Alazkan has long since depopulated. The same turn the peace treaty ends, the Calabim take the other remaining dwarven city and leave the one I'm camped outside of as the capital. That's a freebie!
The dwarves die turn 268. Same turn an adept hits level 6 from free xp. And while it's not part of the scoring, Alazkan is level 8 and climbing quickly.
At turn 268 our economy has fully recovered from our initial expansion. Very quick research with only a small deficit at 70%. That of course means time for more expansion! There's still some room in the southeast corner, past Yggdrasil, and it looks like the Calabim haven't moved much into the northeast of the continent. Since they are the current score leaders and I don't want to fight them any time soon, it seems like a logical move to start cranking out settlers to send up there, figuring our Summer Palace and/or City States can keep the maintenance from killing us.
Turn 275, my modest attack stack is in place to start hitting the Ljosfar, but it looks like the first Orcish incursion into their lands did little to nothing. Their border city still has decent defenses, and they have a huge roaming stack of their hero and a bunch of swordsmen and hunters to worry about. I figure it's safer at this point to slowly add to my stack (with my assassins and soon-to-be illusionists trumping their hunters and adepts soundly), and wait for the Orcs to either send in another attack force, or invite me along for the diplomatic boost (they are only at cautious, as they founded Octopus Overlords and don't want to convert). I content myself with depopulating their border city of defenders with Alazkan and his shadow.
Turn 277: The Calabim declare on Ljosfar! Feeding frenzy on the good civs!
Turn 280: Alazkan has taken out the last longbow(!) guarding the closest Ljosfar border city, and the Calabim have succeeded where the Orcs couldn't and brought down another. I figure it's now or never and declare myself.
Turn 281: I finish the Tower of Necromancy, bringing my Death Mana count to a healthy 4. My specters are going to lay some hurting on the stupid goody two-shoes elves!
Turn 285: Alazkan kills Gildaen Silveric in single combat! Well, two against one, but both of the two were Alazkans. Next turn the Ljosfar burn a huge attack stack against me, proving entirely futile against my strength 8+ specters sitting on an Ancient Tower and Alazkan's defensive strikes.
Turn 291: Capture a big Ljosfar city, their army is badly depleted. Bribe the orcs to switch to FoL. At this point a diplomatic win is looking very feasible.
Turn 292: Walk into the Ljosfar capital after spectres, assassins and Alazkan make short work of the longbows protecting it. Gets me the Great Library, which the stupid goody goody elves kept building even after the entire rest of the world had declared on them. They have one more semi-threatening stack roaming around but are otherwise done. Only question now is how many cities I can gobble up before the Calabim and a newly arrived Orc stack.
I pause the offensive briefly at this point so Alazkan can kill off some highly promoted Calabim vampires that got separated from the main stack. Sorry, guys, we ARE evil you know!
As the war against the Ljosfar winds down, I look at the diplomacy screen an notice something disturbing: the Calabim are friendly with the orcs, and only pleased with me.
The Calabim have a humongous military. While I'm certain I can outpace them economically with my forest cottage spam (Priests of Leaves have coated almost my entire core area with forests, many of which are ancient by now), I don't want them to send their scary stacks at me after the Ljosfar fall. So, I decide to change gears and bribe the Orcs BACK to Octopus Overlords. They become more dangerous to me in the process, but also lose their religion bonus and are no longer friendly with the Calabim, who I figure I can sic on them later.
296: Found Council of Esus, immediately revolt to Undercouncil and, belatedly, Foreign Trade.
Unfortunately the stupid Ljosfar managed to send a settler off into the ice to the north, conveniently right next to the Calabim troops. I take what I think is their last city, and instead the Calabim get the kill on the interturn by walking into their size one icebox.
At this point I figure there must be a final good civ on an island or something. Then a scouting Satyr reveals some cities with suspiciously non-Calabimmy names. I check, and sure enough those were Elohim cities. Looks like they had an awful start, got eaten by the Calabim very early and I entirely missed it, since all the scouts I tried to send east were gobbled up by giant spiders. So with the fall of the Ljosfar, that's it for good guys.
Around this time I notice something that I was utterly unaware of: my religion is very close to winning me the game! FoL is at 69%. If I had realized that was a victory condition I would've been more aggressive about spreading it, and the game could've ended right around the same time that the Ljosfar died off. So I switch all my cities to missionaries and hope I can convert enough population to finish the game soon.
I Purge the Unfaithful from my cities and send out Inquisitors to my neighbors. After the purge FoL is 79%, so close! I have inquisitors working in enemy cities and I have all of my own cities going full speed ahead growth in a golden age.
Turn 317, between inquisitions and population growth, FoL hits 80%.
Strange victory option. I feel like it was absolutely handed to me, as FoL had managed to spread to the religionless Calabim without my help, and they proceeded to spread it to all of their own cities while neglecting to spread AV (which they founded) or RoK (whose holy city+shrine they conquered from the dwarves) at all. They were ahead in score and massively ahead in power at the end of the game, it likely would have been a matter of out-racing them for the empty Ljosfar and Luchuirp lands and growing fast enough that I could win a diplomatic victory with the votes of the orcs. If it had come down to war, there's no way my defensively weak civ could have stood up to their ridiculous hordes.
I was a pretty distant second in all demographics except crop yield, thanks to having ancient forests over my entire core area.
I did learn a lot this game. First and foremost, build LOTS of warriors early. I started my first settler way too soon, and then wasted some time on inessential buildings. Even without Orthus making my life miserable, if I had the warriors to spare to fogbust I would've had a lot fewer barbs running around pillaging my agonizingly slow-to-build forest improvements.
Secondly, scout really aggressively. I got frustrated when a few of my scouts were ett, and ended up missing out on the Elohim entirely because of it.
Attack earlier. Militaries seem to grow in power very slowly early, and it's hard to cast aside the Civ4 idea that warriors aren't any good as attackers. I probably could have had parity with the out-of-control Calabim if I had rolled over the pokey dwarves after cranking out a dozen or so warriors.
Thanks for running this, Square Leg, got me interested in FFH2 and I'm really loving it! Look forward to the next FFH2 adventure!
edit- I was banking on a diplomatic victory most of this game, and just noticed that there isn't actually a diplomatic victory in FFH! I would've hopefully figured out eventually that the undercouncil wasn't going to elect me Supreme Evil Being any time soon and gone for Tower of Mastery, were the religious route not there. Also remotely possible I could've eventually out-militaried the vampires.
So I'll preface this by saying I played one (1) game of FFH2 before this one. I managed an excruciatingly slow domination win in a test run with the Svartalfar, but at least got the hang of the basic game mechanics and the dark elves' specific strengths and weaknesses. Since this challenge I've played through two more full games, so it's already embarrassing to relate this given how noobish the game went.
Capital looks like an amazing commerce city. Set research towards Education, build another scout, and send out the starting units to explore nearby stuff.
Meet the slow-to-develop dwarves nearby, great target for first good kill!
Meet the orcs to the west, good perpetually backwards nearby ally
Yikes, Ljosfar to the north. That's going to get ugly fast, and they appear to have a very strong start, too.
Huts- Gold, gold, gold. Better than maps, I guess, but terrible luck with random stuff this game. Later when I explore dungeons/ruins I get nothing but heartache from it.
Ridiculously close call early: wandering Lizardmen show up with their two moves, not far from my undefended capital. They can make it to the capital in two turns, scout (which won't have great defending odds, anyways) isn't complete for three. Fortunately they decide to wander off rather than kill me turn ~35 and give me the honorable mention for "dumbest game".
Turn 51: after a couple minor annoyance-level bad events, I get a great one: 50 gold for a great prophet! Since I'm now beelining towards Fellowship of Leaves, this is a great get: I can either pop an early golden age if I'm afraid I might not found FoL, or I can save him until after founding for a quick shrine.
Turn 75: after a huge flurry of barbarian activity, Orthus spawns about equidistant from me and the dwarves. Fingers crossed I don't have to try to take him down with warriors.
No luck: Orthus marches up to our capital as I frantically crank our warriors and ship one down from our northern city. He's smart enough to plant himself on the forest south of the city. The bad news is that gives him a fat defensive bonus and takes away our best commerce square, as it's where our oldest cottage is. The good news is he wastes some time pillaging.
Unfortunately the barbarian horde keeps up, and between their attacks and Orthus', the city can do nothing but crank out warriors. Orthus is smart enough to sit there and heal, won't be baited by a worker dangled in a square without defensive bonuses, and I don't have anything close to enough firepower to kill him from full health.
I really started hating Orthus this game, to the point that I was ready to put down FFH2 in frustration. In subsequent games I learned that a decent number of warriors ambushing him in the open before he's heavily promoted can take him down fairly painlessly.
FINALLY, after he has a relatively unlucky attack against the city I manage to take him out with a stack of forester promoted warriors. Just hope I can recover from the ridiculous handicap he gave me, as my capital has seen its best plots pillaged and built nothing but warriors for the last ~40 turns.
One bit of good news, though: the forest hill SE of the capital got a random +1 food/+1 trade bonus, making it an insanely good cottage square. If I survive long enough to exploit it, hoorah!
And just as I'm starting to recover from the Orthus rape, the Calabim are nice enough to cast their UA and re-cripple me. Thanks, guys! So far this has probably been the most frustating and least fun game of Civ4 I've ever played. Hopefully that will make my eventual turnaround and victory all the more satisfying?
Turn 136: Found FoL. Go back to picking up all the worker techs I skipped.
Turn 138: found Nameless Tower in a nice denial spot against the dwarves, and the FoL shrine in my northern town. Hopefully the religion will enable quick expansion to claw back up from my terrible start.
Turn 139: Newly founded city "rightfully" requests to be ceded to the dwarves. Any way to turn this mind-bogglingly stupid annoyance popup off? Has any player, ever, in the history of BtS said yes to it?
Turn 168: Four barbarian warriors come within a couple combat rounds of capturing a city defended by three max fortified, highly promoted bronze-wielding warriors, two of which have +40 vs melee. Uhm.
Turn 237: Captured all but one of the barbarian towns, finished poison, switched to conquest/apprenticeship to start a push against the dwarves.
Turn 257: Army assembled, I make the stupid mistake of demanding the dwarves' map and gold. They comply, and thus I am blocked from declaring for 10 turns. Doh. Don't know if this was a BtS addition, but I don't remember tribute forcing a peace treaty like this before. I find out shortly afterwards that the Calabim are absolutely tearing through the dwarven cities, and I'm going to be lucky to get scraps.
Turn 264: The orcs declare on the MUCH stronger Ljosfar! Great news for me no matter what happens.
Turn 267: My army is camped outside of a small dwarven city that Alazkan has long since depopulated. The same turn the peace treaty ends, the Calabim take the other remaining dwarven city and leave the one I'm camped outside of as the capital. That's a freebie!
The dwarves die turn 268. Same turn an adept hits level 6 from free xp. And while it's not part of the scoring, Alazkan is level 8 and climbing quickly.
At turn 268 our economy has fully recovered from our initial expansion. Very quick research with only a small deficit at 70%. That of course means time for more expansion! There's still some room in the southeast corner, past Yggdrasil, and it looks like the Calabim haven't moved much into the northeast of the continent. Since they are the current score leaders and I don't want to fight them any time soon, it seems like a logical move to start cranking out settlers to send up there, figuring our Summer Palace and/or City States can keep the maintenance from killing us.
Turn 275, my modest attack stack is in place to start hitting the Ljosfar, but it looks like the first Orcish incursion into their lands did little to nothing. Their border city still has decent defenses, and they have a huge roaming stack of their hero and a bunch of swordsmen and hunters to worry about. I figure it's safer at this point to slowly add to my stack (with my assassins and soon-to-be illusionists trumping their hunters and adepts soundly), and wait for the Orcs to either send in another attack force, or invite me along for the diplomatic boost (they are only at cautious, as they founded Octopus Overlords and don't want to convert). I content myself with depopulating their border city of defenders with Alazkan and his shadow.
Turn 277: The Calabim declare on Ljosfar! Feeding frenzy on the good civs!
Turn 280: Alazkan has taken out the last longbow(!) guarding the closest Ljosfar border city, and the Calabim have succeeded where the Orcs couldn't and brought down another. I figure it's now or never and declare myself.
Turn 281: I finish the Tower of Necromancy, bringing my Death Mana count to a healthy 4. My specters are going to lay some hurting on the stupid goody two-shoes elves!
Turn 285: Alazkan kills Gildaen Silveric in single combat! Well, two against one, but both of the two were Alazkans. Next turn the Ljosfar burn a huge attack stack against me, proving entirely futile against my strength 8+ specters sitting on an Ancient Tower and Alazkan's defensive strikes.
Turn 291: Capture a big Ljosfar city, their army is badly depleted. Bribe the orcs to switch to FoL. At this point a diplomatic win is looking very feasible.
Turn 292: Walk into the Ljosfar capital after spectres, assassins and Alazkan make short work of the longbows protecting it. Gets me the Great Library, which the stupid goody goody elves kept building even after the entire rest of the world had declared on them. They have one more semi-threatening stack roaming around but are otherwise done. Only question now is how many cities I can gobble up before the Calabim and a newly arrived Orc stack.
I pause the offensive briefly at this point so Alazkan can kill off some highly promoted Calabim vampires that got separated from the main stack. Sorry, guys, we ARE evil you know!
As the war against the Ljosfar winds down, I look at the diplomacy screen an notice something disturbing: the Calabim are friendly with the orcs, and only pleased with me.
The Calabim have a humongous military. While I'm certain I can outpace them economically with my forest cottage spam (Priests of Leaves have coated almost my entire core area with forests, many of which are ancient by now), I don't want them to send their scary stacks at me after the Ljosfar fall. So, I decide to change gears and bribe the Orcs BACK to Octopus Overlords. They become more dangerous to me in the process, but also lose their religion bonus and are no longer friendly with the Calabim, who I figure I can sic on them later.
296: Found Council of Esus, immediately revolt to Undercouncil and, belatedly, Foreign Trade.
Unfortunately the stupid Ljosfar managed to send a settler off into the ice to the north, conveniently right next to the Calabim troops. I take what I think is their last city, and instead the Calabim get the kill on the interturn by walking into their size one icebox.
At this point I figure there must be a final good civ on an island or something. Then a scouting Satyr reveals some cities with suspiciously non-Calabimmy names. I check, and sure enough those were Elohim cities. Looks like they had an awful start, got eaten by the Calabim very early and I entirely missed it, since all the scouts I tried to send east were gobbled up by giant spiders. So with the fall of the Ljosfar, that's it for good guys.
Around this time I notice something that I was utterly unaware of: my religion is very close to winning me the game! FoL is at 69%. If I had realized that was a victory condition I would've been more aggressive about spreading it, and the game could've ended right around the same time that the Ljosfar died off. So I switch all my cities to missionaries and hope I can convert enough population to finish the game soon.
I Purge the Unfaithful from my cities and send out Inquisitors to my neighbors. After the purge FoL is 79%, so close! I have inquisitors working in enemy cities and I have all of my own cities going full speed ahead growth in a golden age.
Turn 317, between inquisitions and population growth, FoL hits 80%.
Strange victory option. I feel like it was absolutely handed to me, as FoL had managed to spread to the religionless Calabim without my help, and they proceeded to spread it to all of their own cities while neglecting to spread AV (which they founded) or RoK (whose holy city+shrine they conquered from the dwarves) at all. They were ahead in score and massively ahead in power at the end of the game, it likely would have been a matter of out-racing them for the empty Ljosfar and Luchuirp lands and growing fast enough that I could win a diplomatic victory with the votes of the orcs. If it had come down to war, there's no way my defensively weak civ could have stood up to their ridiculous hordes.
I was a pretty distant second in all demographics except crop yield, thanks to having ancient forests over my entire core area.
I did learn a lot this game. First and foremost, build LOTS of warriors early. I started my first settler way too soon, and then wasted some time on inessential buildings. Even without Orthus making my life miserable, if I had the warriors to spare to fogbust I would've had a lot fewer barbs running around pillaging my agonizingly slow-to-build forest improvements.
Secondly, scout really aggressively. I got frustrated when a few of my scouts were ett, and ended up missing out on the Elohim entirely because of it.
Attack earlier. Militaries seem to grow in power very slowly early, and it's hard to cast aside the Civ4 idea that warriors aren't any good as attackers. I probably could have had parity with the out-of-control Calabim if I had rolled over the pokey dwarves after cranking out a dozen or so warriors.
Thanks for running this, Square Leg, got me interested in FFH2 and I'm really loving it! Look forward to the next FFH2 adventure!
edit- I was banking on a diplomatic victory most of this game, and just noticed that there isn't actually a diplomatic victory in FFH! I would've hopefully figured out eventually that the undercouncil wasn't going to elect me Supreme Evil Being any time soon and gone for Tower of Mastery, were the religious route not there. Also remotely possible I could've eventually out-militaried the vampires.
Those vampires seemed to do pretty well in almost all the reports (excluding the ones where they got rushed with bronze warriors).