Uncommonly Good: A Story of Elves

[Commodore]

Stuff that is seen...

[SIZE="1"]Meanwhile, behind you in the fog, a massive joint Grigori-Elohim invasion fleet masses.[/SIZE]

[Azoth]

Is This Broken?

I agree: you wrote a very good post on the military potential of Spiritual leaders, Man Behind the Mask.

I would only take issue with this:

Cultist, Drown and Stygian Guard: OO religion – Water Walking

Stygians in particular have interesting tactical possibilites against non-waterwalking foes, on a map with lots of ocean (and this one seems to qualify).

Stygian Guards have many uses apart from their potential for amphibious attacks. They:

• can equip Bronze, Iron, and Mithril weapons, unlike their Paramander and Crusader counterparts. This makes them the strongest Tier 3 units, better than Champions and cheaper than Rangers.
  
• start with the March promotion for free. Stygian Guards will never need to waste turns healing, especially when paired with priests.
  
• have the Demon racial promotion, giving them Immunity to Fear, Death, Poison, and Unholy damage. They will treat Spectres as Strength 2 summons, no matter how many mana nodes [redacted] may have.
  

Ultimately, Stygian Guards are better on defense than offense, unless you are attacking amphibiously or have slow collateral (Khazad Trebuchets or Luchuirp Fireball Golems). They are very versatile for all that.

Dude, Where's My Future?

I agree with Mardoc on all points. We should plan to conquer the Sheiam, make nice with the Hippus, isolate [redacted] diplomatically, and build the Tower of Mastery. (Remember, Uberfish chose to face the Calabim head-on in the end game, though things didn't quite work out that way. With our start, we don't need to be nearly as honourable and ambitious: there's a good chance we can rush the tower before [redacted] hits domination.) If we can't found Esus ourselves, I would definitely try to convince the Hippus to do so. With the only Financial leader in the game, they have the best shot anyway. Anything to keep Gibbeon away from [redacted].

[Mardoc]

Azoth raises a good point about Stygians - they do have nice Str - and almost as importantly, nice resistances. They can make a nice bread and butter unit.

Something else that I think needs a mention here - why we're still in it. Of course, it's clear that we're behind the leaders at the moment. But! There are several countervailing forces.

First, and foremost, is our vertical expansion potential. Why can we do this better? Well, the biggest reason is that we have easy access to the second best tile in the game - the ancient forest town. Only a Pirate Cove or (some) resources provide better yields. 3/1/5 on every tile is awesome. And we can turn just about any terrain into these, given time. Coves are limited to 1-2/city, resources are limited to the mapmaker's fancy, but ancient forest towns can go literally anywhere.

Yes, aristograrian farms can produce more, now. As long as we can keep the game going long term, though, we'll produce much more later. And even with Slavery and/or Conquest, an aristocracy economy becomes bottlenecked at production. Pretty much only Calabim have an easy way around it; Slavery and Conquest, while they work, have shortcomings.

FFH provides lots of ways to increase the happiness cap, several of which we're best suited to employ. You can capture animals for cages/maybe menagerie. Build wonders. Run a lot of religions and the Religion civic. Build normal happiness buildings - Public baths and carnivals, for instance. And, of course, in the end there's also Guardian of Nature waiting for us. Most civs can do most of these; we're the only one who can do them all, easily. Most civs don't have a lot of reason to do these, either - they get to grow onto Desert scrubs, or maybe a plains farm. We can put each and every population point to work on an excellent tile. Finally - we have that excellent hammer production to let us have the production to spare for happiness enhancers all over the place.

It means, although we probably would like more land, true, and would like to remove the Flaming Zombie threat, starting as soon as we have FoL, we ought to be able to punch above our weight class. Which also, hopefully, means that we ought to be underestimated, which will help diplomatically.

Finally - apparently Commodore needs to be scared straight. Can you go ahead and organize a 5v1 stab in Diplo2? :neenernee

[Gaspar]

In a bit of a rush, so I'll get something more comprehensive up tonight when I play the turn, but just a couple of thoughts I'd like to lay out.

Spiritual Units:

My current thought process - we want FoL, OO, AV and Empy. FoL will be the default religion until we get ourselves mostly Ancient Forested, but we'll want to take advantage of 5 and 10 turn stops in the others. This is all probably best suited for post-T100 stuff, though the rate at which our economy improves will also be a factor. We're only 1 tech away from OO so I'd guess we'll get that first after FoL. I think ending in Empy with Rathas and Chalid might be the best long term military option, but that's well down the road.

Diplomatic Relations

I think the Nicolae situation is hopeless, so I'm not all that interested in pushing it until we get some hawk intel. The Hippus situation, keep in mind, they still haven't replied to our last missive, and I certainly think I've used a good amount of effort in that diplo. Regardless, I'll try and draft a short note congratulating them on founding Pramalot and inquiring about the 5 clown cities. Ultimately, I think that <redacted> has had too much luck to go along with his natural skill and we're screwed, but hey, lets give em as much hell as possible.

That's all I have time for. Thanks everyone for getting the conversation back flowing, it really makes the game a lot more fun, and I think it makes me play better as well. Quick question for the council - after this worker completes in the capital - warrior, warrior, settler while building the Lodge in Hash Pipe? Or go for a Lodge in both places and use Hunters as garrison for the next city?

[NobleHelium]

Hunters as garrison is probably not a good use of hammers. Building the lodge in Hash is probably a good idea since it'll have more hammers than the capital once it grows a bit more.

[Gaspar]

Turn first, responses later.

Score increases: Grigori 5, Elohim 6

Barb came to the forested hill outside the city. I decided I'd rather try and grab for more XP as well as keep the workers on the tile they're currently on, so I promoted 1-2-3 Kid to Woody I and attacked at 70% odds, figuring Lanny could clean up in a worst case scenario. He won, picking up 5 XP in the process.



This allowed Almond Joy and Doritos to complete the cottage at Hash Pipe. Butterfinger and Cheetos began work on cottage #4 at the capital this turn as well. Unfortunately, we won't be able to work the cottage at Hash Pipe for a bit, as its just silly to pass on the high yield that the Remnants tile gives us.

Here's a clearer look at the barb city in the north, that the Capital's 4th ring expansion gives us:



Hunting comes in @EOT, onto Animal Husbandry, due in 5T. Worker completes at the capital at the same time, so we'll pump out the quick garrison next couple turns followed by the settler for city 3. As Calendar will take 4T and WotF 13, I think I'm inclined to do Calendar and then WotF, just to bump the happy cap a little sooner, but we have some turns to discuss this. Here's the demos from EOT:

[Gaspar]

Ok, ready for a gigantic spam and answer post!

Good job we’re getting Hunting soon, as Tigers, Bears, Spiders and Griffons all seem to find this part of the world more hospitable than us and the Sheaim.

Yeah, I'm hopeful we can get ourselves a pretty decent army going the same way <redacted> apparently has. Unfortunately, the later we get, the more likely we are to see real barbs than animals, which, while softer generally, also don't let us subdue them for a quick army.

Well the 1-2-3 Kid could be on his way to Unlocking Form of the Titan. I’ve seen in a few places that the barbs pick on players with a higher score, so that may have influenced that warrior’s decision.

Good call. This motivated my using 1-2-3 to attack out this turn.

There is one easy way and (I think) one tricky way to test whether the Sheaim did pick up Bronzeworking. The easy one is if they also got a 2k power increase which shows up in the graphs next turn. For the tricky way, I can’t remember where I read it to check if my recall/understanding are right, but I think this is the gist. BW is the same beaker cost as a couple of other techs (e.g. construction and the early religions). If hovering over it shows fewer turns/beakers for BW than construction, then I think that is factoring in a “known tech bonus”. Will need to investigate in-game, as. The time-gap definitely looks about right, though, and I don’t think they even need a Training Yard to get the zombie production line flowing.

Forgot to include this in the turn report, but here's the latest power graph:



So maybe not Bronze Working? Unless I'm misreading that graph?

I think your summary at the end shows that, although there are options available, there is a clear path which seems more prosperous than the others. I’m going to get on your case a bit here, because I think there really needs to be more diplo flowing if you aren’t going to narrow down the options even further. You know that others are trying to make their voice heard. In this respect, I don’t think the uberfish victory in PBEM2 (as deserved and well-played as it was) has done us any favours. There should be some stuff in my C&D guesswork to use as hooks, e.g. you can ask either of our contacts if the Balseraphs really do have 5 cities?

Can't stress enough how useful the C&D guesswork is, both in diplo, and in general for planning. KUTGW!

The Hippus are doing quite well. Their expansion is second quickest, they’ve already got Agristocracy up and running, and the graphs make it look like they’ve got reasonable land (aside from also having a chronic shortage of happiness).

We, however, look like we’re a little behind the curve and have a few barbarian issues to deal with. We’ve still got expansion room, the land on our peninsular looks universally green, and we have a civ that is just starting to get going with its strengths. We have a presentational challenge to make ourselves look like an attractive junior partner, but not one who is so weak that the Hippus should just stomp us.

Yeah, I'd say the Hippus are a strong 2nd right now, not just on the scoreboard. Definitely be an excellent ally against the Clowns if we can keep them steered that way.

I actually think the best way of preventing the Clowns from taking Gibbon would be to convince the Hippus that they want the religion. Shadowriders at Warhorses allows them to double their civ-boosted allocation of Tier 4 units, and we discussed a long time ago the need for some kind of powerful magical collateral to help out the mounted hordes. Even Horseback Riding is fairly close to Deception.

This is a pretty good idea. The idea of maybe grabbing Gibbon ourselves for a minute and using him to Vitalize around say, the Remnants city, before killing him off does appeal, however. Still I doubt we have the beakers for quite so many detours, and Esus is at best 4th on the list of useful religions for us.

It seems from a lot of games, and I hope it even comes across in this thread, that there is a lot more fun to be had in playing with people, rather than against them. RG has come across as a creative and funny guy in his diplo, but it also shows he’s willing to put the effort in. I believe he and Gaspar are on the same timezone, so there is every chance that a closer relationship could be effective and fruitful.

If we’re destined not to win this thing, which is still a long way from a certainty in my mind, then we should do our best to squeeze out some enjoyment along the way.

I have nothing to add here, but I couldn't possibly agree with this more. While I've had better shots to win, this game has been by far my most fun game here, and that's because of you all. RG seems like a decent guy, and certainly the sort we could work with.

Hippus alliance secures one flank but does very little to help us out if Nicolae decides to attack. If we’re not going to be able to decisively win that war, we’re out of the running anyway. I suppose the one saving grace is that we might be able to get Nicloae on our side in an alliance against the Clowns if we already have one friend. However, I’m not sure we could even mention this, for fear of it being leaked back to <redacted>. The disaster scenario is that the Balseraphs are acting as a go-between with messages between the Sheaim and Hippus, who are already plotting our Turn 101 downfall.

I got the sense from RGs messages that they're not working all that well with the Clowns. One of the reasons I decided against making it easier for RG to meet the Zombies is because I don't want them conspiring together. I've struck out with Nicolae, I'd like a few more turns at bat with RG before he gets to shop around to the competition.

Lurker piping in to say that I'm really enjoying the thread, especially all the detailed analysis you guys do. I also want to remind you not to get discouraged by ugly-looking demos--the elves are supposed to start slow. Other civs' snowballs start sooner, but the elves' still ends up bigger.

Didn't want this to go unnoticed, really appreciate everyone letting us know they're still reading, certainly keeps me motivated to continue the hijinks. The demos don't worry me, other than the Clowns soldier points combined with weak neighbors and <redacted> ability to do diplo. I'm afraid the game could be over before our snowball really rolls down hill.

This is exaggerated . I'm still learning, too. I may play the expert, but I still have lots of learning to do.

I know, but I was being nice because I appreciate that you put as much effort in here as you do your solo games. And you're definitely further along than me.

The chance to gain Potency mages by way of Savant is also extremely tempting. If I remember correctly, one of the AV priest units also has Sundered, which gives a bonus to summons based on the AC - but that might be the Ritualist, not the Savant.

Virtually zero chance we don't spam out a few Savants. They're just a smarter way to mages for us. We'll need a few normal adepts, for some utility casters with the Level 1 spells, but I suspect most of our mages will be upgraded Savants.

The only caveat I have is that, well, we're the elves. We'll have a hammer on every tile, the Remnants, the choice to have mined forests, large cities...and meanwhile we are still behind a vanilla aristocracy economy, let alone a Financial one. Trading gold for hammers isn't something we want to be doing, most of the time. Of course, there are exceptions, but for the most part we ought to be building our military, not buying it. And, perhaps once (if?) we make it to late game, our financial position will have improved enough to change my mind on this subject. Cottages do eventually catch and surpass Aristocracy, after all, and we will have oodles of them.

Well, by the time we're ready to upgrade mages, I suspect our economy will be in full flow. If it isn't, we're in trouble anyway.

I definitely agree with this. As long as we're giving you assignments, I've got one more - make an index post to our various 'episodic' posts, so that we can find them for reference later on. Preferably by editting something on page 1 .

I'll work on this tomorrow. By the by, Mardoc, aren't you due to come up with a new series?

Ritualists get Unholy Taint, which basically changes one regular strength to one unholy strength, and makes them gain experience faster (and raises the experience cap). If you could upgrade them to archmages (or mages I guess, but that would be a sidegrade) that would be nice, but you can't. So it doesn't do too much other than make them gain promotions a bit faster. Although you could upgrade ritualists to druids and keep the experience bonus I guess. Sundered is a promotion that Sheaim units get (after researching Corruption of Spirit IIRC) and demons can promote to. I don't think you can get it otherwise.

See, your one liners are plenty useful.

[SIZE="1"]Meanwhile, behind you in the fog, a massive joint Grigori-Elohim invasion fleet masses.[/SIZE]

"Meanwhile, behind you in the fog, a massive joint Russian-English-Italian-Turkish-French stab masses."

Is This Broken?

I agree: you wrote a very good post on the military potential of Spiritual leaders, Man Behind the Mask.

I would only take issue with this:

Stygian Guards have many uses apart from their potential for amphibious attacks. They:

• can equip Bronze, Iron, and Mithril weapons, unlike their Paramander and Crusader counterparts. This makes them the strongest Tier 3 units, better than Champions and cheaper than Rangers.
  
• start with the March promotion for free. Stygian Guards will never need to waste turns healing, especially when paired with priests.
  
• have the Demon racial promotion, giving them Immunity to Fear, Death, Poison, and Unholy damage. They will treat Spectres as Strength 2 summons, no matter how many mana nodes [redacted] may have.
  

Thanks for this. I'm not 100% convinced <redacted> will go down the death mana road, there are multiple possibilities, but its nice to see a solid counter if they do.

Dude, Where's My Future?

I agree with Mardoc on all points. We should plan to conquer the Sheiam, make nice with the Hippus, isolate [redacted] diplomatically, and build the Tower of Mastery. (Remember, Uberfish chose to face the Calabim head-on in the end game, though things didn't quite work out that way. With our start, we don't need to be nearly as honourable and ambitious: there's a good chance we can rush the tower before [redacted] hits domination.) If we can't found Esus ourselves, I would definitely try to convince the Hippus to do so. With the only Financial leader in the game, they have the best shot anyway. Anything to keep Gibbon away from [redacted].

I think the Sheaim lands will be necessary to compete. If we hit them early Nyktorion vs Bannor style or later, uberfish vs Sciz style, either way, I think they'll be a key part of the long-term plan. And the Tower is probably the most likely victory condition. Its basically the FFH spaceship.

Something else that I think needs a mention here - why we're still in it. Of course, it's clear that we're behind the leaders at the moment. But! There are several countervailing forces.

First, and foremost, is our vertical expansion potential. Why can we do this better? Well, the biggest reason is that we have easy access to the second best tile in the game - the ancient forest town. Only a Pirate Cove or (some) resources provide better yields. 3/1/5 on every tile is awesome. And we can turn just about any terrain into these, given time. Coves are limited to 1-2/city, resources are limited to the mapmaker's fancy, but ancient forest towns can go literally anywhere.

Yes, aristograrian farms can produce more, now. As long as we can keep the game going long term, though, we'll produce much more later. And even with Slavery and/or Conquest, an aristocracy economy becomes bottlenecked at production. Pretty much only Calabim have an easy way around it; Slavery and Conquest, while they work, have shortcomings.

I ultimately think a agristograrian economy is superior to ours, but we have the only viable alternative, I think. Regardless, I think as you all say, we're only going to get stronger. Whether its stronger enough, I can't say.

FFH provides lots of ways to increase the happiness cap, several of which we're best suited to employ. You can capture animals for cages/maybe menagerie. Build wonders. Run a lot of religions and the Religion civic. Build normal happiness buildings - Public baths and carnivals, for instance. And, of course, in the end there's also Guardian of Nature waiting for us. Most civs can do most of these; we're the only one who can do them all, easily. Most civs don't have a lot of reason to do these, either - they get to grow onto Desert scrubs, or maybe a plains farm. We can put each and every population point to work on an excellent tile. Finally - we have that excellent hammer production to let us have the production to spare for happiness enhancers all over the place.

All needs to be true, since we have all of 2 possible happiness resources.

Hunters as garrison is probably not a good use of hammers. Building the lodge in Hash is probably a good idea since it'll have more hammers than the capital once it grows a bit more.

Fair enough. I'll make a final decision next turn, but I think that's the route I'll take.

[NobleHelium]

Well, now I'm not totally sure Hash's production is really higher than the capital's. I mean, there are many hammer tiles, but there aren't any food resources to feed those tiles. Although you could start building farms on forests (or blooming the existing farms) which would make it better I guess.

[Man Behind the Mask]

Wow, it got busy in here! Did I miss the cookies?

Turn first

Barb came to the forested hill outside the city. I decided I'd rather try and grab for more XP as well as keep the workers on the tile they're currently on, so I promoted 1-2-3 Kid to Woody I and attacked at 70% odds, figuring Lanny could clean up in a worst case scenario. He won, picking up 5 XP in the process.

This was a little more daring than expected, but good work.

Cloak and Dagger, mostly some catch-up/confirmation on yesterday’s thoughts:
• I’m pretty confident on the Clown cities, as the land area numbers suggest some borders have popped this turn.
• Grigori 28 points the previous turn continues to baffle – they got the “expected” value for the next set of pop points this turn. My best guess is actually Ancient Tech (11) plus a Wonder (17), i.e. Dereptus since otherwise it would show up in the log. This would fit with the Average Approval Rate improving last turn with no pop changes, so someone hooked up a happy source, but not with the change in GNP. By the by, their capital should now show as a second Size 8 city on the Top City Screen.
• That Sheaim power graph does look like the expected rise for Bronze Working. They get 1k for a pop increase Turn 56, then 2k for the tech which takes them back up with the level they had before losing two 3k warriors (only one replaced). Our Hunting tech moves us above them again this turn to 4th on the soldiers’ demo.


All the Other Good Stuff (without Gaspar’s devotion to get links in the quotes )

Stygians…

You make a good case for the strength of the unit. Hopefully we can get a few squeezed into our production schedule during the midgame.

Hunters as garrison is probably not a good use of hammers. Building the lodge in Hash is probably a good idea since it'll have more hammers than the capital once it grows a bit more.

<Then a bit later>

Well, now I'm not totally sure Hash's production is really higher than the capital's. I mean, there are many hammer tiles, but there aren't any food resources to feed those tiles. Although you could start building farms on forests (or blooming the existing farms) which would make it better I guess.

I agree that our first few Hunters should definitely be out getting us intel and capturing animals, not sitting in cities. I’m looking forward to Gaspar finding creative ways to get their second promotion without wasting the wildlife.

In terms of production, I believe your second thought actually points more strongly to the first conclusion. Since the capital is more productive and has a good deal of food, it should be building a settler before its Lodge. On that point, I’ll suggest an alternative of going warrior-settler-warrior to get the site down a turn or two sooner. Capital can easily switch over to the extra warrior if there are barbs hanging around, and the sites are close enough and mostly within our culture to cover both with three warriors for all of a couple of turns.

And the Tower is probably the most likely victory condition. Its basically the FFH spaceship.

I think it’s clear now that the Tower is the “default” route to victory. It’s ease is decided by the availability of mana on the map, but the tech route is much shorter than Altar and takes in a load of things that most civs would be interested in anyway. I’d add that founding extra religions, as we plan to do, will also be a good thing if we are thinking of a Tower Victory. The mana from the shrines will help us with the minor Towers, and also give us some more to trade for the types we’re missing.

So this scene played out in my head and it was amusing. I thought if we were giving you a hard time about diplo I could help share the work. Feel free to disregard, as I’m not sure it’s up to the previous standards, and the “PS” might be a bit too ridiculous. I’ve left the important bit for you

A Page approaches you in the throne room of Camelot.

“I have a message from our emissary with the Elves”, he says. “It’s a little more flowery than we’re used to."

There is an odour that has soaked into the parchment, but you suspect it’s not flowers. There are a couple of extra items attached, but the message from the Ambassador reads:

“Dear High Horseness,

The Elves have been making me most welcome and comfortable in their fair capital. Their philosophical approach to the natural world has given me an even greater appreciation for the achievements of the humble swallow.

That is not to say that their cultural values have not come as something of a shock, and I describe the following scene to give you an idea of the goings on within the Elven High Council.

I had been called to the chambers of King Gaspar to receive the diplomatic missive which you will find included with this note. Our audience was disturbed by the dishevelled arrival of the one they call the C&Dfather. Seemingly unaware of my presence as he juggled charts, books and a large cylinder with a pipe on the bottom, he addressed his lord.

“Duude…. I think the crazy clowns settled two new cities a little while ago. Their population count increased from 475 to 477. That’s, like, 475 plus one, plus another one!”

Gaspar looked displeased, and asked “Why was I not informed of this worrying development straight away?”

“Dude! Were you not listening? Do you know how many fingers and toes there are in 475?” The junior elf attempted to demonstrate, spilling his notes and equipment across the room. He giggled.

Gaspar sighed, and failed to hide the impatience in his voice as he responded “I think I have a very good idea. Are you sure about these calculations?”

“Well… no. If only there were someone we could ask to confirm this kind of stuff.”

Gaspar shooed his associate away, and politely requested that I put the request for information to you directly, as he had already completed his message.

Best regards,

The Ambassador to the Elves

PS One of the younger and more excitable members of the Elven Court insisted that I send the attached elf/horse porn. He has requested a picture of the Lady of the Lake in return.

**

Attached to the covering note and rather dubious art is the following message from the Elves:

[This is where Gaspar writes some proper diplo!]

And a final thought prompted by Commodore. I have never bothered to check the map wrap. Are we assuming the usual flat Erebus Continent, or could it be that this is actually cylindrical and we can get to the Elohim and Grigori across the ocean?

[Mardoc]

I'm glad we've finally made it to Hunting, and that AH is in the queue. We should be primed for some explosive growth in soldiers, happiness, city count, etc... .

By the by, Mardoc, aren't you due to come up with a new series?

The trouble is, we've been on track for a while, there's no obvious confusion or things to worry about at the moment. What would you like to know? Maybe happiness would be a good topic?

Of your comments, I agree with the vast majority. Of course I'm going to point out the exception:

The idea of maybe grabbing Gibbon ourselves for a minute and using him to Vitalize around say, the Remnants city, before killing him off does appeal, however. Still I doubt we have the beakers for quite so many detours, and Esus is at best 4th on the list of useful religions for us.

Frankly, this is the sort of trick you pull when you're ahead and looking to stay ahead. Going to Esus/Gibbon when we're not going to use it is a waste of beakers and hammers, which in my mind can only be justified when you've got the beakers and hammers to spare, and the main goal is to deny options. But we're not in that position, and it's unlikely that we will be, at least in time for any Esus-stealing shenanigans.