Noob ffh game.

[haphazard1]

Ryan, no problem with asking questions or taking things slow. This is YOUR thread, so do things however you like.

A lot of the commenters are contributing good/interesting ideas but are not really explaining why they are good/interesting in enough detail. After you have played a few games of FFH a lot of things that are puzzling now will seem very obvious, and people assume they are already understood by everyone. It is very confusing to a noobie -- I had the same problems when I first starting playing FFH and asked for some advice.

A few comments on various things (and I will try to explain them in enough detail ):

- What to do with early hammers?

Workers are most important, but they can be built partly with food. If you have enough workers and have some spare time/hammers, what to do? I usually build military in the early game which means warriors. You need warriors to defend against barbs, which are much nastier in FFH than in regular Civ. This game is unusual since you have a bunch of AIs very close to you, and they will be absorbing/preventing most of the barbs you might see if the land was more open. Still, make sure you have at least a couple warriors for each of your cities, and a couple extra doesn't hurt.

If you have time to buld extra warriors beyond that, you can plan aggression against your neighbors. You may also want to send a few out into the wilderness to explore the map, find more remote AIs, and generally learn the lay of the land for future expansion. I like to send warriors out in pairs for exploration, as otherwise they die way too easily and leave promoted barbs. A pair may lose one unit, but then you can often kill the injured barb and promote your remaining unit.

- Monuments. I agree with other posters that monuments are often a poor investment in the early game. Not that you should never build them -- sometimes you need one to pop borders so a city can claim more resources, food, etc. You can settle your early cities solely for the inner ring, but this limits you and sometimes there is a potentially awesome site and you just need to plant the city where an early border pop is necessary. If you do, go ahead and build a monument. I try to avoid hard and fast rules like "never build a monument" or "always pick X promotion first for every unit that can take it" -- that gets boring. The point is to have fun and try things out. If they don't work, then you learned something for future games.

- Early religion. Early religions have benefits, but going for one means delaying other things. And unlike regular Civ, in FFH you do not "miss" a religion if you are not the first to the tech. You just don't get the holy city if someone else is first. So the time pressure to grab a religion is greatly reduced, and most of the time it is better to get all your worker techs, early civics, etc. before a religion. There are some civs where an early religion can be very helpful -- Khazad and Kilmorph, for example, for the extra gold income to stock the dwarven vaults. And if you really want the holy city as part of your future plans, then pushing to get those techs first can make sense.

For this game, you are the Ilians and are Agnostic -- no religion permitted. So you don't have to worry about this choice until your next game.

Hope this is helpful. The main point is to have fun, and learn as you go. Expert advice can be useful, but min/maxing every aspect of the game is not a realistic goal for your first few times. Just play, have fun, and learn.

[Ellimist]

I may be available for a direct game soon.

My email is ellimistbeyond at gmail. I'm thinking the easiest way to learn the basics will be if we play on the same team vs some AIs, maybe using a map from one of the pbems. That way we can watch each other and freely discuss what's going on.

[Molach]

Did play through to turn 130, but had to abandon.
Won't post much about the late game, but I went for second city SW of marble, getting corn, incence and marble in first ring. You also get tiles you can farm S S and S SW (after capital reaches 100 culture and after mining). Corn is very nice for growth, and incence is great commerce. Also the forests polymorphed into workers to chop more around capital and speed next settlers on the way. Marble was not important, but city will have good production later on after you mine those hills in the second ring NE.

And if you went straight for priesthood last game you abandoned, I advice going straigth for code of laws after mining this game - to get a feel for the power of a solid economy before the attack.

[Mardoc]

I was afraid we might be giving too much advice . I agree with haphazard, the main point is for you to have fun.

[Ryan]

Thing is , I am not sure how to keep going. Every action I do in the coming turns might be wrong. Do I just post a turn and w8? There's a lot of stuff ive been doing wrong or incorrectly. I am not sure how fun would it be for you guys to just watch something like that. I dont mind your advice guys I just wish you treated me like an idiot haha and explained your advice.

[Tasunke]

You don't have to play perfectly

Only reason there was a call for reload in the beginning is because the earliest turns are by far the most important, and set you up for the rest. Mistakes are FAR more forgiving later on, down the road.

The main things to remember are

1) always keep a large army

2) army and buildings are MORE IMPORTANT than tech. In FFH2, hammers may well be more important than commerce at EVERY stage of the game.

-> there may be exceptions to hammers being more important than commerce (like GotN) and you ALWAYS want SOME gold and/or research going on ... but there will NEVER be a time when TECHS are more important than the size of your army.

3) Priests of Winter ... they tend to DIE ... a LOT. I'd maybe use them for a few battles, but only if 99% odds or higher. And then only for a couple battles each. Mainly I'd use them for elementals. And I'd never send them in alone ... you will want an army for attacking, and an army for defending if the attacking half doesn't work. Essentially, you will just want a lot of units, but if you can have some highly promoted non-priests in the army, all the better. For these purposes, I personally find Cats + Assassins to be a great combo for the Illians ... as, imho, your cats weaken everyone, your elementals try to kill, the rest of your army tries to kill ... and if your initial half of your army epically fails, you can always use your assassins to clean up 'some' of the mess, and then retreat like a mad man.

If I were you, I'd use them to take over one small civ, maybe two .. and then just hole up and build ... keep the priests somewhere safe and attack with your other units. (preferably Axe/Champ + Cats/assassins)

Then, once your safety and economy is secure (ie Sanitation and Ironworking) tech up to Theology to upgrade your priests. Then, go Snowfall the crap out of EVERYONE!!! :D

---> Well, that's one way to go about it. With the Arcane trait, this brings up different possibilities. Arc/Cha is certainly quite powerful. Assuming the Illians still have the (imho) lore killing Law mana for Auric Ulvin and his followers ... you can just spam the angelic Einherjar for the win. Yay! God of evil uses the mana of good for victory! Awesome! :rolleyes:

Anywho, with your situtaion, I'd probably go body mana, just tech to sorcery, go LAW1 + COMBAT EVERYTHING ... and once you get mages go LAW2 and invade. Maybe get a few adepts at this time to upgrade to Ice1 .... and just go crazy. While doing all that, finally tech HBR and Construction, and add Mob1 Catapults to the mix. Will make your einherjars last longer I suppose, or maybe will work better after the summons attack.

then, go poisons. And that's when you will be able to attack the relaly powerful AIs ... when you have all those mages + Cats and Assassins. Maybe it will be better for you to go Archery rather than Bronzeworking (after Aristo), because of their higher defense.

-> Philo -> Aristo -> Archery -> Sorcery -> Construction/HBR -> Poisons

this way, you are maximizing your army at every chance you can get. Maybe pick up Writing/Currency (after Archery) as needed. Or before Archery if you don't plan on rushing a second civ. (you might get away with Warriors + Priests on the first civ you rush)

[HidingKneel]

I found FFH to be a lot of fun when I had no idea what I was doing. Don't worry so much about choosing things randomly: your AI opponents are doing exactly the same thing . As long as you're not playing on too high a difficulty, you should be fine. The advice you'll get here is coming from people who play (fairly) competitive multiplayer games; there's certainly no need to internalize everything that everyone is saying in order to enjoy the single player experience.

[Tasunke]

I lost power due to the weather

[spellman]

Ryan, no problem with asking questions or taking things slow. This is YOUR thread, so do things however you like.

A lot of the commenters are contributing good/interesting ideas but are not really explaining why they are good/interesting in enough detail. After you have played a few games of FFH a lot of things that are puzzling now will seem very obvious, and people assume they are already understood by everyone. It is very confusing to a noobie -- I had the same problems when I first starting playing FFH and asked for some advice.

...

Hope this is helpful. The main point is to have fun, and learn as you go. Expert advice can be useful, but min/maxing every aspect of the game is not a realistic goal for your first few times. Just play, have fun, and learn.

For those in the know, the problem here is many vets are not employing Short Inferential Distances. (http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_sho...distances/) Don't say what to do, say why. And not "you can grow from corn" go "You will have tech X and farmed corn gives X/X/X"

haphazard did a good job of outlining some nice things that I was going to get around to.

@Ryan: Don't freak out about playing "wrong." I know the feeling of "but I gotta get this right the FIRST time" but a game this complex involves a lot of learning and developing a proper mental model. And the best way isn't through theorycrafting as much as practice.

For now, I'd suggest playing a few turns, posting about what happened, and go from there. Focus on the big important items, like what to tech, where to place cities, and why the tradeoffs fall the way they do. Ignore most of the advice about worker optimizations except for as they help you understand the mechanics (mining the gold versus mine+road revealed that you don't need the happy bonus from the connected Gold for a while, but mining the gold made working the tile super powerful).


Echoing some general advice:
* Food is very important early to grow a city. Growing a city means you work more tiles, which makes it more powerful.
* Commerce is very important throughout. You need money to support your units and to keep teching. Also, since Tech is so closely tied to commerce, buildings that give free beakers can be thought of as economical buildings for the purposes of some tradeoffs (i.e. you can crash your economy, but if you have a bajillion free beakers you don't need to spend cash on generating beakers via the Science slider).
* Hammers are very important (geez, isn't everything). Your city is useless unless it can build something. Upgrading it with buildings or building units.
* City specialization is powerful in FFH. Since many buildings have multiplicative effects, stacking these can make a city particularly powerful in one area. If a city is surrounded by lots of hammers (and you can work all those hammers) then a +25% boost to hammers is HUGE.
* Standing armies are important in FFH. Promotions are extremely powerful, so armies should move in groups. Some fodder, and some that keep promoting. Collateral is also important for stack-versus-stack combat, but typically you use disposable stuff for that (Catapults, Summons, Spells).

Notice everything, at one time or another, is "important." The goal is to learn how to balance these elements effectively, since everything can be seen as an opportunity cost. Taking a turn to do one thing means a turn not doing something else. Perfect example: how to expand!

Building Settlers stops your city from growing while it's building. Also, building a new city incurs a maintenance penalty. Therefore, ideally you need to limit the negative effects by the following:
* Build settlers when you are at/near happy/food cap. The city isn't going to grow anyways. This also has the benefit of spending fewer turns spent building the Settler.
* By this time your main city's development via workers should be nearly complete. This means the workers can move to the new city, quickly developing the tiles around it, meaning it grows to being productive quicker and meaning you need fewer workers running around (remember, building workers costs turns!). Note you can help things along by doing stuff to setup for the new city. If it will use tiles already in your culture, improve them! Build a road to the location before the Settler is built so it can get to the location faster! Don't be afraid of sharing a powerful tile between cities (regions overlap, so in City Management screen if you want to allocate it to a city click on that tile.)
* Don't wait forever though! If your workers have to sit idle, they're wasting turns! Similarly, more cities = more stuff, so the sooner they get out and operational the faster you can snowball.
* Don't try to expand too quickly. Otherwise you have a bunch of underdeveloped cities incurring massive maintenance penalties.

So, in this case study, you want to minimize the negative costs (city doesn't build, small undeveloped cities are a burden) while maximizing benefits (more cities = more stuff!). Finding that balance is fun! All while also building a military and ensuring your economy doesn't tank.

And, most importantly, HAVE FUN. HAVING FUN IS REQUIRED HERE

[Qgqqqqq]

Lots of good advice here, so I'll just suggest how you should play - IMO treat it like a SG, posting reports on blocks of 10-20 turns, reporting on them and then discussing them.
Id also add my voice to the chorus saying just have fun with it