FFH2 Adventure 2: Sciz's frosty frolicking

[Sciz]

Just as a foreword, I've never made an adventure report before, so I dunno if this is too long, or has too many pictures, or whatever. Bear with me.

Prior to this game, I had never played with the Ilians. I had also never played on Immortal, usually playing on Emperor previous to this. However, emperor was getting a bit too easy, so switching to Immortal felt like a nice thing to do. I’ve also never summoned the Mercurians, so I decided to get one of those awards by summoning Basium and winning the game with him. I would not refrain from using the Letum Frigus though, as I’ve never played with the Ilians I want to use the different stuff they have to offer. I wasn’t sure when I’d switch to the Mercurians, I just figured I’d play on and see what happened.

So here was the start:



I scouted around a bit before settling my second city, deciding on a place a bit to the west, which got deer, fur, ivory and wheat. Also a bunch of river tiles, but I later learned that ice tiles don’t get the extra commerce for being next to rivers sadly.



I move one of my javelin throwers into the Letum Frigus right away to take the aggressive trait. Otherwise I just scout around in the beginning, getting some infrastructure up and starting work on some more settlers. Third city is founded to the south, grabbing marble, cotton, copper and corn, and also a lot of hills, it would become one of my best production sites.



I then realize I should start on The White Hand already, and I do so, completing it on turn 87. Using the powerful priests of winter I get, I move to the west, capturing a barbarian city at the coast.



Not much of note happened in the beginning, I was just expanding as much as I could, with the peninsula to the north getting two cities, and also expanding further south. This would start to bleed my money away fast, and I had to go down to 40% research for quite some time. At some point in time I also realized I hadn’t cast stasis yet (), so I do so, allowing me to quickly tech past the enemy. Here I would grab the #1 score spot and hold on to it for the rest of the game. At one point I get the dreaded goblin clan dumping garbage, but luckily the tile they dumped on was… a mountain! So no harm done there



Around turn 100 I was at five cities, with two of them being new and small ones. At this point I had only met Flauros and Hyborem, but I know a Sheaim player was down to the southwest, as I could see their borders. I decided they would be my first target. With a force of three priests and three warriors (together with the three ice elementals that priests could summon) I attacked Os-Gabella and Graelingvig was taken down on turn 109.



I started working on a temple of the hand there to get some nice snow, but later on I realized it was pretty pointless, the tiles didn’t get much better, if at all, but at the time I thought that hell terrain would be much worse than snow. Shows how much I knew, I guess. I was also appalled at the extreme anger in the city, which prompted me to raze the second Sheaim city I came upon, Steinvik. But that made me realize that razing lots of cities would only help Hyborem even more by giving him manes, so I refrained from razing after that, taking the anger penalty for a while instead. It wasn’t too bad anyways. I would actually never replace that razed city, and much later on a barbarian city would take its spot, which would go on to become one of my most important cities. More on that later.

By hawk scouting I find Os-Gabella’s last city, and see that she has created Rosier. I was sure Hyborem had done so, but apparently not. Os-Gabella was already out of contention anyways though, and I would never see Rosier on any offensive attacks in the game, so no big deal. I was afraid of her then though, with all five combat promos and heroic strength and defense added to that. Following the attack on Os-Gabella there was a time of relative peace. My economy had grown completely out of hand, only way my economy survived was through city plundering, I was running at a big deficit at 60% research. So I had to settle down, and build up some infrastructure. To be honest I don’t really know how I got to this situation, since I didn’t have much of an army either, my three priests of winter together with their summoned ice elementals doing nearly the whole job for me against the Sheaim and barbarian cities. I was basically only building military for city garrison duty, 1-2 per city (except for the border cities) but still my unit costs were really high. Eventually I revolted into Military State which almost by itself saved my economy, almost completely removing unit costs.

A few golden ages really helped me build up my economy too. First I popped one from exploring a barrow,



then right after that I got one from completing the bone palace, and after that I used a great sage to get yet another one. Usually I don’t use great sages for golden ages, finding them to be more useful elsewhere, but all my cities had awful beakers, I had gone with a cottage economy instead of aristocracy, because I always go aristocracy otherwise. The cottages grew very slowly, and it took a loooong while before I got a half-decent tech rate. I’m sure my tech rate is embarrassingly slow compared to the other players. Oh well. By the time my long golden age had ended, my economy was pretty much fixed. The increased hammers had helped me build some important buildings (markets, courthouses, inns, gambling houses, etc) and the increased tech rate had helped me get some vital techs, like trade, taxation and later on mercantilism. I revolted to mercantilism right away, since there’s no foreign trade to worry about in this game. I had been using conquest up to this point, so I didn’t like losing the 2 exp bonus, but I felt it was worth it.

I probably could have just continued on with the priests and axemen, just razing everything in my way, and I’m sure some players did, but at this point I decided to just take it slow and build up the empire, there’s no score given for fastest elimination after all. Around turn 160 I invaded Flauros, and talk about fertile lands!


(this was taken much earlier with a hawk/hunter pair I had running around in enemy lands)

Tons and tons of flood plains, crazy stuff. No idea how he didn’t do better, and on Immortal at that. The AI overall was much worse than I expected it to be. Never having played on Immortal before I thought it would be a bit tough, but it wasn’t really at all. I guess it could have something to do with the great lands we get at the start, but still. The enemies made a few raids into my lands, mostly it was Jonas Endain sending in 15 or so lizardmen into my lands, but they were never any trouble, the whole lot of them just kept suiciding on my cities.

Anyways I made quick work of Flauros. I thought you couldn’t summon ice elementals on desert, but apparently you can. You can’t move them to desert terrain, but you can summon them on it. Pretty weird, but it helped me defend against some huge stacks by Flauros. None of them had any really threatening units, but since I was basically just using the three priests and 7-8 axemen who were only along for city garrison duty later on, the three ice elementals really helped. Flauros was eliminated pretty quickly, and I threw out another temple of the hand, to make Prespur’s terrain snowy and white. The main reason I did this is because the burning sands fires really annoy me, and I’m pretty sure it makes turns load slower. Besides none of my units can traverse them, so they were even more useless than regular desert tiles.



What did I say about AI stupidity? Here Jonas Endain provides us with the worst move of the game, moving 10 lizardmen out of Renegade Hill, the turn I arrive with my army next to it, leaving only three units left! Now, I would have killed them anyways, but it would have taken a turn or two longer, allowing him to reinforce. No idea what he was doing with that move. That stack would go on to attack Prespur, which had three axemen in it, but not a single Lizardman would survive that battle, so that was a really weedy move overall.



I get an interesting event I hadn’t seen before, with a hunter offering to sell me that stuff he caught. I chose a gorilla, and right away get the option to stuff him into a cage at the carnival, for some happiness and culture. But I can’t do that to a poor helpless gorilla! I move the gorilla to an ancient forest, where he sleeps for the rest of the game. Speaking of ancient forests, I really didn’t know what to do with them for this game. Usually when I have ancient forests i’m one of the elf civs and can build improvements on them. But in this game any improvement would remove the forest, and I couldn’t even build lumbermills on them. So I just decided to leave them be. 3 food and 1 hammer is a pretty decent tile anyways, so I figured it was okay to leave them like that. Maybe there was a better choice though.

A while after the defeat of the Calabim, I get the option to build a hero! I had no idea about any heroes the Ilian had, so that was a welcome surprise to see Wilboman in the build queue. I wouldn’t really use him much though, for various reasons. I continued to expand by taking a barbarian city near the razed Sheaim city, which I would have big plans for later.



I also conquered Braduk the Burning, killing off Jonas Endain, but after that my first great loss arrived.

…Aaand anti-climactically enough, I don’t have any pictures of the event. What happened was my three priests of winter all getting killed in one fell swoop. Well not really one fell swoop, more like around 50 swoops. A few turns after taking the former Clan capital, Hyborem himself together with a hundred or so hellhounds and warriors showed up outside the gates. I was scared at first, but when Hyborem (the hero) left, I felt secure. I shouldn’t have. My army was really stretched out at this point, and aside from the three priests and their elementals, I only had like five axemen in the city. Hyborem’s army stayed several turns outside the capital doing nothing. But suddenly he attacked, and while my troops fought valiantly (around 60-70 deaths on Hyborem’s side out of a hundred or so) my troops finally got overwhelmed, and the priests died.

Damn. Well, not much to be done about it, I figured, and I decided it was time to jump off the sinking ship of the ilians and jump on the Mercurians wagon. The barbarian city I had captured near the old razed Sheaim city was decided to be my mercurian gate town. It had good stuff nearby (two floodplain, iron, copper, incense, dyes, silk (or sugar? I can’t tell from the screenshots) and pigs). I had also gotten guilds at this point, which made plains workshops 5 hammer 1 commerce, and GL workshops 1f, 4h, 1c. It was close to the remaining enemies, so it was as good a site as any. But I didn’t want any old town, my mercurian town was destined to be the greatest city of all! I also didn’t want its tiles to be stolen from nearby Ilian cities with good culture. So I built a bunch of wonders in it, settled a great bard, took Syliven’s Perfect Lyre, etc. On the turn before I completed the gate, I also rushed the city of a thousand slums in it with a great engineer.



On the turn I completed it, my last great Ilian act was done, my Braduk the Burning withstood a massive Hyborem attack, killing around 40 units. All was not perfect though. Since the AI is dumb, before I managed to switch to Basium, the AI fired off his world spell! Not that I’d have much use of it later either, but it was annoying to say the least. And this wasn’t the last of stupid things the AI would do. Following the switch, AI Auric would proceed to first complete the Samhain ritual, spawning frostlings and stuff all over. They weren’t much trouble, but seriously Auric was it really necessary? He then continued by completing The Deepening ritual, making the world a much colder place to live in, and ruining some of my city tiles. Ugh. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to get Auric Ascended, but luckily the game ended before he had time to do any more damage to me. My only ally was pretty much my most dangerous enemy.

The turn before I created the mercurian’s gate, I had also destroyed Tebryn’s first city (what’s up with him having the same color as Jonas Endain btw?) Not much left for Basium to do then. I wanted to kill off Hyborem, but I realized I wouldn’t have time to do that before I won domination. I didn’t feel like razing any cities, even though I easily could have and still defeated Hyborem. Anyways, after switching to Basium, I march off towards enemy lands with an army of five. Basium himself and his four angels of death. I really didn’t need any more at this point, and I easily captured Tebryn’s second city, Grottiburg.

A fun incident I must recount is the tale of the Zealot. One day a warrior of mine was patrolling the edges of a forest in the heart of Ilian territory. He heard strange sounds coming from the forest, and headed in to investigate. What he found was an abandoned barrow, and being a fearless Ilian warrior, he decided to climb down into the crypt and explore. Expecting to see dead people, he was shocked to find a live human being down there! Even stranger, the man was blabbering on about some religion called “Octopus Overlords” if you could believe anything as stupid sounding as that. Everyone knew the only religions in the world were the evil Ashen Veil and the (slightly less evil) cult of Auric. But being a compassionate man, the warrior helped the Zealot out of the crypt, and walked him to the nearest town, Deluoc, a town that was just about to complete building a great gate to the heavens.

Upon arrival, the Zealot started preaching about great tentacled horrors, but no one really listened. The Zealot was a very stubborn man however, and proclaimed himself that “Octopus Overlords has been founded in Deluoc!” Officially the religion never existed, and it’s doubtful if anyone actually converted, but he himself still walked around in the city, jabbering on about “Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep”. People forgot all about him until one day, a big temple-thing just rose up from the river nearby and plonked itself in the city. The “Necronomicon” people started calling it, for some reason, and it became pretty popular, because there was an endless supply of running water in it. Great things were achieved with this water.

So with a wholly unsatisfying ending, the story about the Zealot is concluded. Sorry about the bad writing. Basically, I got a zealot from a lair, tried spreading the religion in my soon to be Mercurian capital, failed even though it said that the religion had been founded in it (since all religions aside from ashen veil were removied) but then I got a great prophet, and was able to use him to create the OO shrine. It was actually really helpful, because even if I didn’t get any shrine money, I did get the water mana, and was able to spring a bunch of desert tiles with an adept. The only adept I built, coincidentally.

To get back to the main action, I created four paladins, and they became my second army. They easily captured an Infernal city, and just after they did, I saw a golden opportunity for some divine justice. Hyborem, in reach from Basium. 77% odds. I have to do it!



Said and done, Basium wrecks Hyborem, and marches back to the safety of his angels of death. Very satisfying, after what Hyborem’s army did to my poor priests of winter. A short while after this my Basium and friends army march up to yet another infernal city, take it, and… what?



Oh. Domination victory. That kinda came out of nowhere. I should’ve paid more attention to the victory screen, I guess. I wanted to get the medal for killing Hyborem, but oh well. It was a really fun game, though surprisingly easy. I’m sure I’m one of, if not the slowest winner of this game, but I had fun and that is what matters I guess.

So I get the The Red Star of Courage and The White Star of Revenge. If I had razed some cities instead of capturing them I would've had time to eliminate the infernals as well, but I'm okay with this result. It was good fun anyways. Thanks for this, Bob!

[Bobchillingworth]

This is like the Platonic Ideal of a report. Your description of the Zealot had me literally lol'ing


Thanks much for playing & reporting!