EitB Strategy Discussion/FAQ Thread

[Ellimist]

For ease of access, I'd ask that people do not discuss them in this thread, as this will create clutter. If you wish to discuss one, or disagree with it's content, either start a new thread or follow the link (if posted) to one.
(If enough people disagree that I think it's not worth putting here, I'll move/delete it.)

I guess it makes sense to use this thread for discussion about the other one, then.

Does anyone have any suggestions for topics? I'm willing to write more articles on FFH strategy but am not sure where to start.

[Bobchillingworth]

Upgrade paths. Some are very useful but not particularly intuitive, like Savants -> Mages or scouts(?) to PoL (unless EitB changed the former). I doubt most new players realize that you can do stuff like get city raider and/or defense promotions on a HA.

[Ranamar]

Can we get some of the more important event chains listed somewhere? I used to know some of them, but I always have to look them up and I'm having trouble making sense of the xml files this time.

[Qgqqqqq]

I have a link I'll dig up. It's not going to be well formatted, though.

[Terkhen]

Vis a vis The Deepening, I was under the impression that it was supposed to hit 25%, rather than 75% of tiles. I don't know where I came across that, however.

It is 25% after a More Naval AI bugfix. See http://sourceforge.net/p/tholalsffhaimod/code/1409/

[Kragroth]

Reading through PBEMs, when is it not advised to go for Aristocracy? This is a very common theme. I can only think of a couple of situations.

1. You're Lanun or heavily sea based and the ocean Commerce is more than enough
2. You're rushing for a something.
3. You have plenty of floodplains to make cottaging more viable.
4. You're running a FoL or elven cottage economy and the impact of aristocracy is small.

Otherwise it seems that Aristocracy beelining is a no brainer.

[Bobchillingworth]

Aristocracy is the best choice for most civs in most circumstances, but I can think of several exceptions (some in common with your list):


* Lanun, most of the time.

* You're the Clan or Doviello and don't have enough commerce from resources to get to Aristocracy before units / sprawl + the Barbarian research penalty crashes your economy.

* You're either elven civ (although I've read some people on Civfanatics swear by aristoelves; never tested them myself).

* You want to run Conquest effectively (the Illians especially have good reason to go this route, although they also do pretty well with Aristocracy; it's a matter of favoring production or growth).

* You're the Infernals and don't have +2 (or more) hammer workshops unlocked (and even if you do, you'd still never want farms).

* You're in a rush to get something absolutely vital online early, and can't delay until you've researched Aristocracy nor ignore putting down economic tile improvements.

* Your empire is a strung-out trainwreck, and not adopting city states will murder you in city maintenance.

* You're the Bannor and intend to fully take advantage of Crusade.

* You're the Kurios.

* You're going to be stuck with a very small number of cities for the foreseeable future (example: playing with the "No Settlers" setting), and thus want to run Godking.

[Mardoc]

In general, you're right, aristo usually is the way to go. Sareln and Q have tried to boost the other options to compete with it, but so far that hasn't worked.

'Beelining' - you need worker techs too. Not much point in having commerce without food or hammers. But Code of Laws would usually be quite early, yes.

Kuriotates don't usually want Aristocracy, due to Enclaves and God King. Bannor is theoretically an exception, but building towns for Crusade doesn't seem to work in practice. And...if you are running tight on food, maybe you don't want it until you fix that problem. I wouldn't pair aristo and conquest, but I pretty much only run conquest when I expect the game to end before the tech situation changes.

Edit: That is, Conquest is for two situations.
a) Ok, I've basically won, time to make it official
b) I'm going to die if don't

In neither case do you really care about getting more tech, you just want to pump a lot of units. So you should leave aristo when you go into conquest to maximize the units

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Hmm. Had a possible balance idea, not sure if it's possible technically. What if aristo converted food surplus to commerce? It'd be a real pain when you're still trying to grow, end up more like Conquest as 'good situationally'.

[Bobchillingworth]

So cities under aristocracy would never grow, in exchange for one gold per excess food? I can't imagine that's worthwhile to run ever, except maybe for some spiritual leaders temporarily... I mean, even if your excess food isn't being used to build units under conquest or otherwise grow onto other tiles, 2 food for a 3 beaker sage or something similar would still be a better deal.

[Mardoc]

Well, you could make it still the 2:1 ratio. But yeah, it's perhaps an over-nerf.