DerWille's EitB Thread

[DerWille]

Opps, sorry about that Mardoc.

A SG could be fun. I'm worried about my reliability and ability to write the reports for it though. Concept wise though, I wouldn't be too picky.

Code of Laws doesn't seem that expensive at 329 beakers, less than writing which is 391 (both standard speed). Foreign Trade comes later is locked behind Writing and Horseback Riding/Sailing.

Different thing, in the game I was playing, I finally crushed that stack, but noticed that I had +26 unhappiness in my cities from war weariness. I lost relatively few units, maybe 10 or 15, and only captured 1 city. I'm assuming my 20 fireballs a turn were the cause. Are they supposed to cause war weariness like that?

[Brian Shanahan]

I remember, back in the day before EitB, playing a Monarch level High to Low game as an SG. It was an absolute blast taking over the AIs weedy mismanagement, twice, and eventually leading to victory.

I'd be up for something like that again.

[Qgqqqqq]

Code of Laws doesn't seem that expensive at 329 beakers, less than writing which is 391 (both standard speed). Foreign Trade comes later is locked behind Writing and Horseback Riding/Sailing. 

Beaker cost changes with difficulty.
Fireballs shouldn't cause WW, though I do recall hearing of a bug surrounding summons. (Possibly disappearing between turns, though.)

[DaveV]

Late to the discussion, but here's my two cents:

SP is very different at higher difficulties. I play Immortal in my SP games, and find that the most important tech goal is collateral, to deal with the AIs' huge stacks of highly promoted units.

Most temporary summons don't cause war weariness when they die while attacking, but killing an enemy unit causes some war weariness no matter how you do it. Capturing enemy cities causes a good bit of war weariness.

Civics: I use City States a lot. At high difficulties, city maintenance can be a huge financial drain, and reducing that expense and increasing the food surplus can outweigh the bonus commerce from Aristocracy.

[DerWille]

That would explain it then. I killed at least 200 units, probably closer to 300, maybe even 400 units parked outside my city over the course of those turns.

What forms of collateral do you find yourself usually drifting toward?

[DaveV]

What forms of collateral do you find yourself usually drifting toward?

I'll usually build a handful of catapults when I'm able to, since they can be very handy against small stacks. In the mid to late game, I look more for spells that apply to a whole stack. When you're dealing with >100 units, you need an awful lot of catapults or fireballs to shift the odds significantly. I usually play on watery maps, so I like to use Tsunami, but there are always some awkward situations where the target isn't adjacent to water, making Tsunami completely useless. It's the best of the level 2 spells when you can use it, though. Ring of Flames is a very nice spell, but Ashen Veil has such nasty diplomatic consequences that I tend to stay away from it. That pretty much leaves Maelstrom or leftover catapults as my backup stack collateral.

[Qgqqqqq]

I believe killing an enemy unit in your borders causes no war weariness, but it's been a long time since I read up on Civ 4 mechanics.


I was meaning to mention it earlier, DerWille, but you should check out some other modmods for FFH2, especially if you plan to stick to SP. As fond as I am of EitB, Tholal's More Naval AI mod has substantial AI improvements, BUG capability, and changes little. Terkhen's Extramodmod incorporates EitB and MNAI changes, as well as some extra features (but not tons). Magistermodmod changes a lot of things and adds a ton of features, but tries to hold true to the spirit of FFH2 (as well as including MNAI).

I play all of these in SP, perhaps Magister's the most lately. There are also a bunch of others which I haven't played, but most are pre-MNAI, and thus a real struggle to challenge oneself with.

You can find them here.

[DaveV]

I believe killing an enemy unit in your borders causes no war weariness, but it's been a long time since I read up on Civ 4 mechanics.

To be technical, I think it's based on the culture percentage of the tile where the combat occurred. A tile that's inside your borders may still have a significant amount of AI culture, since the AIs love to pump culture. Combat in a tile that's 100% yours should indeed cause no war weariness. And, in the early game, barbs never cause any war weariness.

On other mods: I gave up on MNAI when, for several games in a row, one or more AIs sent a stack of 25-30 warriors halfway across the map to attack me on turn 50 or thereabouts. You could argue that it's good strategy for an AI to attack a human player with very low power, but I found it very unfun. For all I know, that behavior has been modded out; I haven't played that mod in a couple years.

[DerWille]

Technically the units were in enemy territory. I was attacking out of the city I had just captured so the borders were weird.

I was under the impression that EitB had MNAI also incorporated.

[superjm]

I'd been thinking this mod had been abandoned by most players which is unfortunate cause I love it a lot. Nice to see a new discussion going in depth about it, I quite enjoyed the two MP games I played on it, even though I wasn't very good and trying to follow the same game for months at a time quickly becomes anxiety-building.   Maybe if we arranged a single-session MP game I'd be interested in taking part, as opposed to a PBEM, but that's just me.

As for my SP games, I always found myself torn between playing on high difficulties and playing optimally (well, as optimally as I could for my skill level) as opposed to playing easier games and just going nuts with weird and silly builds and strategies but without any real challenge. I'm also still sad that my girl Volanna lost EXP, the synergy with AGG and SIN was too much fun to exploit against helpless AIs.