FfH Adventure 3: DaveV ends with a (Hyborem's) whimper

[DaveV]

The scenario:

Sponsor: Bobchillingworth
Opening Date: 04/15/2011
Duration: 5 weeks
Map Script: Handcrafted
Difficulty: Deity
Civilization: Doviello
Leader: Charadon


World Size: Standard
Opponents: Five
Victory: Any
Options: Advanced era start, Always War, Living World, No Acheron, No Orthus, No Barbarians (technically), Fellowship of the Leaves is disabled.

This is an extreme Adventure. You are facing an allied team of Deity-level AI who begin with substantial advantages over the human player. Reinforcements are available in the form of Baron Duin Halfmorn and his retinue, provided that you can secure their passage through Limbo. Any and all wins are acceptable. There is no formal points-based scoring system. Similar to FFH Adventure 2, players will be awarded STARS on the basis of certain achievements:


* The White Star of Werewolves is awarded for rescuing the Baron from Limbo (the Baron doesn’t need to survive the entire scenario).

* The Purple Star of Paradise is awarded for achieving any win condition.

* The Aqua Star of Armageddon is awarded for eliminating all opponent civilizations.

* The Onyx Star of the Infernal is awarded for winning as the Infernal civilization.

* The Emerald Star of Epic is awarded for personally killing Basium using Hyborem.


Players will be ranked within STARS brackets on the basis of descending order from quickest finish date.


As a final note, be aware that as with Adventure 2, this scenario has been entirely hand-crafted, and has several significant differences from the average randomly-generated map. While Adventure 3 is intended to challenge veteran players, all comers are welcome to try a hand and report the result, whatever it may be. Enjoy!

So, an always war game against allied Deity AIs . I expect to be facing huge stacks that completely outclass me technologically. The only possible answer: collateral damage plus summoned units. Catapults are not worth considering: too slow, too weak, collateral is limited to 4 units. Arcane spells take too long to develop. Cultists (Octopus Overlord priests) are the first choice, if there's some conveniently placed water. Ritualists (Ashen Veil priests) are the second choice, and will probably be necessary for hitting tiles that don't have water adjacent to them. For summons, the obvious choice is Death: the only level one summon, skeletons. I expect to become best friends with those bony guys.

Two of the five STARS require a switch to Hyborem. It will take me a long time to research my way to Infernal Pact, so Hyborem will need a boost to get him going. The ideal boost is unlimited specialists, which requires either Theocracy (Religious Law, unlimited Priests), Scholarship (Arcane Lore, unlimited Scientists), Liberty (Mercantilism, unlimited Artists), and Guilds (Guilds, unlimited Artist/Engineer/Merchant/Scientist). My plan is to go for Theocracy; priests are not the best specialist, but they become a lot better with a few levels of the Altar of the Luonnotar, which are built by (wait for it) Great Prophets. Positive feedback.

[DaveV]

My werewolves made a more or less direct beeline to the portal, once a couple supplies scouted out the territory (and were killed for their pains). The surviving supplies were used to build forges in my first two cities.





While things were going my way, I picked up a few extra beakers!



Some exploration revealed that there were some *very* strategically positioned lakes (thanks, Bob!), so Message from the Deep became the priority tech. On turn 91, OO was founded right in my strategically positioned city (ideally, I would have liked to found on the hill to the East of the city, but then the AIs could have attacked me from the Dyes tile without being subject to Tsunami:



Here's a sample battle from turn 121, 30 turns after the above shot (David Kessler and Tony Rivers are my Greater Werewolves, named after werewolves from An American Werewolf in London, and I Was a Teenage Werewolf, respectively). This pattern of massive collateral and cleanup of the leftovers happened over and over. It's also a good illustration of one of the drawbacks of using Tsunami in your own territory - loss of tile improvements. My workers spent a lot of turns rebuilding improvements that had been washed away.

[DaveV]

The Doviello Army. Note the captured Berserker, Confessor, Stonewardens, and Vicars. All of my priests took the Command promotion, which I've never used before: I figure a 10% chance of capture is too low to rely on. In this game, I was winning very many attacks against severely weakened units, so I thought it made sense. The Berserker lacked the Mobility promotion that the rest of my army had (the AI should really place a higher priority on this). The Confessor was nice for his Bless spell; the Stonewardens were nice because their spell buffs both living and non-living (skeletons and specters!) melee units. The Vicars were, um, pretty much worthless. I probably should have deleted them to keep them from costing support and turning into angels later. Finally, the Air Elemental is from the Tower of the Elements. That was a dumb build; I would only have used Fireballs to bombard down city defenses, and I don't think the Tower helps that in any way.

Another nice thing about skeletons and spectres being melee units: they get the freee Combat I promotion from Aggressive. A nice boost. I had one adept (mage, eventually) who was promoted with Death I, Spell Extension, and then straight up the Combat line. He summoned a skeleton every turn, meaning most of my skeletons were fast and reaonably strong (I also built Tower of Necromancy, so base strength of 4 plus the multipliers).




Buildings built, units killed and lost. This was a long game already: I had to fly hawks out every. single. turn. to check for Knights or Horsemen waiting to snipe my workers (and still missed a few ). I also had to move very carefully on attack. When I did it right, I would move the stack into position, move uninvolved units out of the way, fire off the Tsunami or Ring of Fire, summon Spectres, cast Shield of Faith, attack with summons if my Werewolves didn't have 99.9% odds. Lots of times I hit my own units with collateral damage, and I rarely remembered to cast Shield of Faith after summonnig the spectres.






Doviello cities:



The graphs. Each sawtooth dip in the power graph is me destroying another AI stack.

[DaveV]

And the big switch occurred on turn 201. Basium immediately fired off his world spell, and Hyborem lost his Immortal promotion. I spend the rest of the game hoping Basium did't get Birthright Regained and finish off Hyborem permanently. The Infernal capital was behind the wall (although three wall tiles have been eaten away to give me some hills to mine), so I settled in for a nice long buildup.



One of the annoying things about Hyborem is that the AI gets to choose civics and set production before the human takes over. So I had to suffer through 9 turns with the AI's less than optimal civic choices:



Three turns after the switch, Hell terrain spread to the left column of the wall, and my defenses were gone!



I sent a PM to Bob, asking him whether this was intended, and how my no-longer-immortal Hyborem and his motley crew of T2 and T3 friends could stand up to the AI with their huge stacks and their T4 units. He replied that it wasn't intended, but I should man up, quit whining, and play out the game.

From this point on, the time between turns was anywhere from two to fifteen minutes. I assume the AI pathfinding was having a tough time squeezing through the little holes in the wall (yes, there was a second hole in the north).

In the screenshot above, you can see me researching Military Strategy, with the intention of enabling the Blitz promotion. I ended up putting Blitz on exactly zero units. Oops.

I was finally able to switch to better civics:



And my specialists could now be engineers instead of citizens, for one extra gold each:



Note that I've just popped a Great Engineer. I used him to rush the Infernal Grimoire, which in turn rushed Malevolent Designs. I really needed those T4 units to fend off the AIs, so I guess I can't complain too much about the AI forcing me to run an engineer specialist.

[DaveV]

I popped a Thane of Kilmorph out of a dungeon. Just what I needed to switch my alignment to Neutral and build some Altars. I moved him carefully back to Despero, successfully spread Runes of Kilmorph (yay!), and prepared to execute my master plan. It was at this point that I discovered the fatal flaw: Hyborem is completely locked into the Ashen Veil religion, and cannot swap to any other religion. So all this time that my Great Prophets have been standing around, waiting to build the Altar, has been wasted .

Once again, I went through a long phase of fighting off massive AI stacks. The Doviello kept feeding me a steady diet of Manes, and eventually I decided I'd better go grab their holy cities and capital (for Form of the Titan) before the good AIs razed them.

[DaveV]

The Infernal Army. Captured units aren't as obvious as before because most of them were mages or ritualists. The Confessor wasn't nearly as helpful as when I had a living army (Bless doesn't work on Demons. Go figure.). My archmages were busy summoning Wraiths every turn since they were created, so hadn't had a chance to turn themself into Liches yet.




Units killed and lost. Time played is a little overstated, because I frequently left the computer processing the AI turns while I ate, cooked, or did laundry, rather than sit in front of the computer watching the world cursor spin around and around and around and...

I think I spend an honest 20 hours sitting in front of the computer as Hyborem, though, and would have needed a lot more time to finish off the game.







Infernal cities:




The graphs. My manufacturing went way up at the end because I finally researched Guilds, giving +2 hammers/workshop.








Northern Infernal empire:



Southern Infernal empire:



Dis city screen. You can see how little attention I was paying to micromanagement; I pulled all the citizens off the workshops when I was building a settler because my production was more than double the cost of the settler. Then I forgot to put them back to work when the settler was finished.



Final civics. Note that my engineers are now giving one gold, one hammer, two beakers, and two culture .



And the financial advisor screen. Gotta love that Deity maintenance .

[DaveV]

Final judgement:

I think I played the section as the Doviello pretty well, and set myself up well to succeed with Hyborem. I made some terrible tech choices with Hyborem, and the whole Altar of the Luonnotar scheme was pointless, but I think I was still on my way to victory. This probably shows more about the weakness of the AI than the strength of my play. With the huge number of units I had, and the slow processing of the AI turns, it probably would have taken me another 5 weeks to finish this game.

Nice scenario, Bob, but it seems you can't make up for the AIs' ineptitude at FfH.