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Irgy · January 6th, 2011, 16:48

Ok, my title would have worked better if I'd picked Os-Gabella (which I nearly did). Or if I was female myself, which unfortunately I'm not. But what can you do.

Lurkers welcome! I'm new to this forum, so I don't have any friends. So please someone keep me company so I'm not just talking to myself.

Don't I look spooky!

Irgy

Note: The original content of this post has been moved to post #3 below.

Diplomacy summary:

Communication History:

Nyktorion as Thessa of the Ljosalfar
Located far to the north. Quite friendly diplomatically for the most part.

Founded and running Fellowship of Leaves.

Current deals:

Communication History:

Mr Yellow as Sabathiel of the Bannor
Elminated by first the Malakim and then the dogpiling Ljosalfar. They made contact with everyone before being wiped out, and we made a few deals with them.

No religion.

Deals made:

Communication History:

Thoth as Varn Gosam of the Malakim
Despite the civ being temporarily taken over by Sciz while Thoth was having technical difficulties, he appears to be a bit of a runaway at the moment, with the top score and general demographics values. Has an NAP with the Lanun until T170, the Elohim until T160, and the Ljosalfar until T150. All of us are planning to try and deal with him by T170 at the latest.

Currently at war with us, which started with him killing Rosier. He has since harassed me with cultists, two of which I've now killed with privateers. I've told him he's burned his bridges, meaning I have no intention to ever co-operate with him in the future.

Founded and running Runes of Kilmorph, although switched breifly to Octopus Overlords to pop his worldspell. Has also founded the Empyrean religion.

No deals made, and currently at war.

Communication History:

Mardoc as Hannah the Irin of the Lanun
Made contact

Founded and running Octopus Overlords. Also founded the Council of Esus.
Current deals:

Communication History:

[/SPOILER]

Tech plans:

Production plans:

Just whipped a Planar Gate. Should grow back to working all the tiles again before whipping. Building a temple of the veil now for four reasons; the well mutliplied free beakers, the extra sage slot, the ability to build a couple of acolytes for culture in the new cities, and the gate unit. After that build at least a mage guild (again, gate unit). If there's no infrastructure worth slotting in then just build adepts. Once the Tower of Necromancy is available though this is where to build it. It can be interrupted by whipping away excess population into either infrastructure or an adept, but otherwise concentrate on it fairly consistently.

Grottiburg:

Must work those two sages to try and pop a sage here for the Arcane Lore bulb. The library is to give a third sage slot, and three should be worked constantly once it's possible to. There's hammers in a privateer here but no urgency, the smokehouse should be built sooner rather than later. Need to get some workers here to fix the water-damaged tiles. This is also a city in which the acolytes could be built. Could also consider building Ritualists, one of which might be worth using for a temple in Tongurstad.

Tongurstad:

Building adepts mostly. Whipping them every 6 turns or so, no more or the unhappiness will get out of control. Consider throwing in a gate if it can be built in reasonable time (with a high population whip most likely). Working at least a sage, and ideally more. This could well be the best city to pop a sage/priest in for the Stigmata of the Unborn, although it might now pop a merchant as well. Ideally it should be just below the GPP required for a great person when Grottiburg pops one, and should then try and get one out quickly after that.

Graelingvig:

Just keep slowly building adepts here I think.

Steinvik:

Adepts, and a planar gate at some point.

Kuldevind:

Might as well finish off the privateer I suppose, but otherwise Mage Guild, adepts and gate for now.

Vargstad

Whip the granary next turn and start on a smokehouse. Need an acolyte here to work the tile 2W as a farm. This will then also allow the two forest grassland tiles to be farmed, at which point the city becomes useful finally.

Skadistad

Finish off the smokehouse with a whip when possible.

Nidhoggstad

Granary+Smokehouse here as well. Hopefully will get a free AV spread rather than order again.[/spoiler]

Great Person Plans:

Irgy

(this text originally from post #2)
First a bit about myself, since I'm new here. If you couldn't care less about this stuff feel free to skip this one, I won't be offended.

I'm 29, live in Sydney, and have a wife and a small daughter, with another little one who'll be on the way out any day now. I work as a kind of hybrid between researcher and computer programmer. I enjoy spending time with my family. I have nothing like the spare time I used to have back when I was single and at uni, but I squeeze in computer games and board games where I can.

Back in the day I played a boatload of Alpha Centauri and loved it. My only previous PBEMs in fact are two Alpha Centauri games, one of which unfortunately never completed, and the other of which I won so I can consider myself undefeated! smile

I played civ3 but never really got into it, not sure why. By the time I found civ4, a couple of years ago now, it was already up to BTS 3.19. I fell in love with it almost from the start, and have been basically addicted to it ever since.

I've been hanging around civfanatics for quite a while now, just lurking at first but up to nearly 1200 posts there now. I've done a number of Immortal University challenges there. I was involved in SGOTM11, although I found it too much like hard work in the end. I'm on the team Sirius in the Multi-Team Demo Game II. And I've played two pitbosses associated with that - the ongoing and currently extremely close and interesting MTDGII Warmup, and the Sirius intra-team game in which I finished second to Lord Parkin's very dominant domination victory. The closest thing I have to multiplayer experience otherwise are two self play games - 7 player hotseats where I control all of the civs. Works better than you might think. One in BTS, the other in FFH (not yet written up though).

I normally avoid mods, but in a conversation with Lord Parkin he strongly recommended Fall From Heaven, so I gave it a go. I fell in love once again. I love fantasy themes, and this one is just beautiful, full of flavour and awesomeness everywhere you look. I love the variety between the civs, and the increased tactical complexity available, that comes thanks to flattening out the base unit strengths and adding in all manner of different magic. Other than being arguably a little disbalanced in places it's basically computer game perfection as far as I'm concerned.

I did get somewhat sick of the idiocy of the AI however, so I started looking for multiplayer. PBEM and pitboss fit my time schedule the best, as I rarely have a large stretch of consecutive time for a real time multiplayer game. So here I am.

(and here starts the original post #3)

So, why the Sheaim?

My first love is the Calabim. In my first ever FFH game I got Flauros at random, and Alexis was the winner in my self-play game, so I'm more familiar with them than the others. I thought they seemed really very good, so I wanted to either find out why not the hard way or fail to find out by winning the game smile

However, it turns out that they're well established as being good, so there was nothing really to find out, and picking them would have just been cheesy. I was then saved the trouble of deciding what to do this game because they were disallowed (mostly for variety).

So, what next? Well, no matter which civ I play, I tend to feel strongly inclined to go up the magic line. Even playing the Calabim, I found myself stocking up on large numbers of skeleton summoning Adepts, building the Tower of Necromancy, and running the Ashen Veil. There's one civ that's actually designed for doing all those things, and that's the Sheaim. If you're free to be spoiled on the Illians in FFH PBEM1, take a peek at post #15 on page 2 of Selrahc's spoiler thread, where he sums it up quite nicely (I won't link it because it's a spoiler thread so it's a little dangerous, even as a single post link since there's some spoiler info in the post itself).

I've been running a couple of single player test games with them, in what little spare time I have. Haven't got far yet, but I've already fallen in love with pyre zombies. They're undead, and they're on fire. They look awesome. There's really nothing more that needs to be said about them.

Selrahc · January 6th, 2011, 18:13

A slightly edited version of the post referred to, which was part of my "What were my other choices?" series:

Selrahc Wrote:The Sheaim

Dead moon rising

The Sheaim are your standard apocalypse cult. They want to bring about armageddon or die trying. Backing them up they have an array of demons and beasts from beyond the mortal plane and armies of corpses at their beck and call.

Where the Sheaim excel however is in raw magical power. The casting game is taken to perfection by the Sheaim.

Death mana mages summon spectres, and various promotions give them and their summons extra movement. Adding death mana powers up these spectres to very respectable levels. Sheaim are summoners, meaning that their summoned units stay around twice as long. All of this combines into the Sheaim summoning hordes of powerful undead, with casters sitting a mile away from any prospect of counter attack. It is practically unbeatable. Especially when supplemented with all the other powerful things magic can do.

This magic is the meat and drink of the Sheaim game, but they do have a few other powerful tricks.

The first is the Planar Gates. These will summon in powerful demon allies, whose type is determined by the buildings in your cities and whose frequency depends on the Apocalypse counter. At higher apocalypse counts these units could work to entirely replace your conventional military force. Some of the demons are quite powerful(Manticores, Minotaurs) or useful(Tar Demons, Mobius Witches) while others are just.. there(Chaos Marauders). Either way, no point saying no to free units and it makes a nice change from the undead.

The other big trick is the pyre zombies.

Take one hideous mockery of creation. Apply liberal amounts of flame. Leave to settle.

Pyre zombies replace axemen. They also replace every melee unit after axemen. The sheaim tech tree for non-magical units stops at pyre zombies. Because when you have zombies that are on fire what is the point of trying anything else? Pyre zombies are cheap disposable bodyguards for your casters. Their main selling point is that when they die they explode! This heavily injures units in the attackers stack, which means that despite the low strength pyre zombies never go out of style.

Honestly the Sheaim work perfectly well ignoring magic, loading up on pyre zombies and demons and going on a rampage, but to do that misses the true beauty of this civilization.

I think that basically the reason I like the Sheaim so much is because I'm a big fan of zombies and the undead(as you can probably tell from my avatar), and the Sheaim appeal to my urge to build a big horde of shambling corpses and take over the world. And really, who hasn't wanted to do that from time to time?

I think I kind of undersold the Pyre Zombies in that post, they are some truly scary units.

Irgy · January 6th, 2011, 20:47

Thanks for that Selrahc! smile

Finally, what do I plan to actually do?

Well, unexpected as this may be, broadly speaking I'm planning to found the Ashen Veil, and head up the magic line. I'll probably go for a Tower of Mastery victory, but I'm happy to just try for conquest or domination instead, if circumstances dictate.

There's a good chance I'll summon Hyboream, but I'm unlikely to switch to him. Actually, summoning him is a bit of a penalty if he's going to be human controlled, as I'll have another rival to worry about rather than an AI ally to help me. I'll probably do it anyway as the tech that summons him comes with some good stuff. I really hope we decide that we can make pre-sumonning contact and I can make a deal with him, but we'll see how that goes I guess (for what it's worth, I'm trying not to let this bias my opinion in the discussion, I do genuinely like the idea of contacting him early on its own merits, and it fits the flavour well).

My intention economically is basically to run a food economy. A "food economy", at least as I understand it, is where you build a lot of farms, make frequent use of the whip for production, and use specialists for commerce. I'll focus on sage specialists particularly, as I have a number of uses for them. In particular, I'll want:
* An early academy in the capital.
* The Ashen Veil shrine "Stigmata of the Unborn", which a great sage can build.
* An academy in the Ashen Veil founding city, since the shrine gives beakers. Lets just hope it's founded in a good science city.
* I have a vague plan to use scientists to blub Arcane Lore, followed by taking Strength of Will from the Infernal Grimoire (or failing that the Tower of Divination), in a bit of a civ5-style blub-chain. I haven't really worked out the timing of this though.
* The rest I'll probably settle in a city with an academy. All in the one city, so I can put the Crown of Akharien there if I get it.

With all these sages, I'm quite keen to get The Great Library, which is why I seriously considered picking Os-Gabella. Industrious is an under-rated trait in multiplayer, at least in ordinary BTS, not as sure about FFH. People get turned off it in single player because on high difficulties it's difficult to really spam out wonders because of the bonuses the AI gets - although Obsolete has run a series of games on civfanatics demonstrating it can be done even on deity. However in multiplayer Lord Parkin has aptly demonstrated how good it can be in both the pitbosses I've played, wonder-spamming himself a huge lead playing the Incans in both games. In the end though I stuck with Tebryn as a leader a little more focused on the main plan.

My tech path?
1. Key worker techs. What these are will depend on the start. If I'm next to irrigated corn, then agriculture. If I have two seafood resources then fishing. However, I'll probably leave things like Calendar and Animal Husbandry until after an unusually early...

2. Mysticism. I have a head start on this with Ancient Chants. Mysticism gives God King, which is pretty damn good when you only have one city. The specialist economy means I'll likely be running a high gold slider as well once I have a few cities, so the gold bonus will be better than usual. Mysticism also gives me an Elder Council. 2 beakers is a big boost to early research, and lets me run a sage. I'll take the opportunity to switch to Pacifism at the same time as God King, and get a super-early academy in the capital. The pacifism military production penalty does bite early in the game, but with god-king it's just taking +150% down to +130%, in the capital at least, which is a lot better than taking 100% down to 80%.

3. Mining. Reveal copper, let me start chopping, and give me some better production tiles for the God King 50% boost.

4. Other worker techs, as required and if justified. Some maybe before mining, I'll decide based on circumstances.

5. Bronze working. Particularly if I have copper, or nearby jungle. If I have neither, I might consider skipping this for now, but I'm not sure. If I do skip it I'll get Knowledge of the Ether earlier to make up for it. Otherwise though, bring on the burning dead. Once I have pyre zombies, I'll feel significantly safer. I will seriously consider rushing someone with them as well if the opportunity presents itself, but it's not something I have to do.

6. Education->Writing. As I said, I'm hoping to get The Great Library, so I shouldn't put this off for too long.

7. Masonry. If and only if I have marble available. Otherwise I'll try my best to trade for it.

8. Knowledge of the Ether. For adepts, and to start building those expensive gates. The earlier I can get some adepts the more experienced they will be, and death magic makes them good value. However, I've found so far in my test games that I tend to be too busy building settlers, workers, libraries and pyre zombies to actually make use of this straight away though, so I might delay it until a few more economy techs.

9. As many economy techs as I feel like I can get away with. Any remaining worker techs will probably go now. Festivals gives markets for gold and another specialist, and carnivals which give me another population under the happy cap and bring in another gate unit. Code of laws will give me courthouses, and aristocracy, which I will likely switch to at some stage. Cartography gives me open borders, but I'd rather the other civs researched it for me smile

Construction lets me build farms off the rivers, and gives the option of catapults - with pyre zombies I don't need catapults quite so much, but with the 80% withdrawal chance in FFH they're still an extremely powerful unit. Sailing (if I'm coastal anyway), Trade, Mathematics and Currency are all techs I'll get at some point but probably not until after...

10. Philosophy->Way of the Wicked->Corruption of Spirit. Hopefully I'll found the Ashen Veil, in fact I'll be a little upset if I don't. Oh and notice that I get the whip on the way.

After this, I'll pick up some of the left over economy techs, and make my way through the magic tree. I'll need to get all of the magic spheres eventually if I want a Tower of Mastery Victory, but there's no rush. You do get a bigger pre-requisite bonus on Sorcery though the more you have, so there's a trade off between beaker efficiency and getting an earlier Sorcery.

I'll get Necromancy fairly early. The tower is a big boost to skeletons, and double boost to spectres and eventually wraiths by way of both the strong promotion and death affinity. The second death mana is good value, as I want to put death 1 on every adept, as even if they never cast summon skeleton themselves it ups the total skeleton count. Plus I have a head start building it - with death and chaos from my palace and entropy from the AV shrine I only need to build a shadow node. The down side is that necromancy therefore doesn't unlock many new options when it comes to mana nodes.

And of course I'll get Infernal Pact at some point, but maybe wait a while to let the Infernals be relatively weaker. I need to get it in time for the plan to Grimoire into Strength of Will. It also opens up "sacrifice the weak", which I haven't got much experience with yet but I would imagine goes quite well with a food economy.

Strength of Will is particularly good for me, for three reasons. One is that I have a UU archmage, although I confess I'm not entirely sure what their ability is good for. The other is that, because I'll have death magic, I can work around the 4-Archmage limit with Liches. Thanks to my Arcane trait and planned magic focus I might really even have enough experienced mages to make use of this. Finally, it also unlocks my intended victory condition.

After that, well, who knows. There's a lot of other good stuff to be found in the tech tree though. Or who knows, I might just stockpile cash to rush the victory tower.

Of course I reserve the right to do everything completely differently based on the circumstances. The beauty of civ is reacting to the situation, I actually kind of dislike having plans laid out so far in advance. So we'll see how it goes.

That's probably all from me for now, until we find a mapmaker and I have a start to look at. Or unless of course someone says something I want to reply to. Assuming there's someone out there reading all this anyway smile

plako

I'll dedicately lurk here. I don't have played many FFH2 games, but I had made decision to follow anyone courageous enough to choose Sheaim. So bear in mind that nothing I say come from experience wink

. Tebryn seems only real leader of Sheaim to me so I'm glad you picked him. If you play to Sheaims strengths it should be pretty hard to find friends. This is usually very bad in MP game and getting dogpiled is a big risk. I would put up Bronze Working very high in the priority order and spam some Zombies before heading to KotE.

Selrahc · January 7th, 2011, 03:34

Quote:Strength of Will is particularly good for me, for three reasons. One is that I have a UU archmage, although I confess I'm not entirely sure what their ability is good for.

Frick... its fantastic man. It lets you convert population into spells. Say you conquer a size twelve city from the enemy. You can snack on it until its size 1, summoning an entire army of powerful creatures in the process. With that army you can swiftly murder any military forces lurking in the area.

Similarly it means that on defence if you're willing to sacrifice populace you can easily pull off a crazy level of defence.

Irgy · January 7th, 2011, 05:01

plako Wrote:I'll dedicately lurk here. I don't have played many FFH2 games, but I had made decision to follow anyone courageous enough to choose Sheaim. So bear in mind that nothing I say come from experience . Tebryn seems only real leader of Sheaim to me so I'm glad you picked him. If you play to Sheaims strengths it should be pretty hard to find friends. This is usually very bad in MP game and getting dogpiled is a big risk. I would put up Bronze Working very high in the priority order and spam some Zombies before heading to KotE.

Welcome plako, glad to have a lurker! I have never actually played through a game with the Sheaim yet myself, so don't be shy to criticise things I do or say. I talk a lot but I don't know much really.

As far as diplomacy goes, if it was the AI and I had 3 goods and 2 neutrals as I do here I'd certainly be off to a bad start. But I don't see why humans should really be less inclined to ally with me than anyone else. The AC hurts everyone equally, even me, although it helps me in other ways as well. It might annoy people, but if they act rationally I'm just as good an ally as anyone else. In the same way I can't count on Hyboream being friendly I'm not worried about everyone else automatically hating me. I only expect to get dogpiled if I handle things very badly. Although I certainly don't want people to get too carried away with roleplay.

Diplomacy, even without tech trading, is absolutely critical to multiplayer. I've done quite well with it in both MP games I've played so far, but that doesn't mean much.

Still, all those good civs is terrible news when it comes to the game mechanics. Two civs with life mana, Basium is likely to be extremely powerful and will auto-declare on me if I have the AV, religious civs likely to run the good religions, Donal Lugh getting a bonus when killing undead, the Elohim who keep putting down the AC. It's enough to make me consider running a good religion (while controlling the AV still) and summoning Basium myself. They won't see it coming that's for sure.

You've reminded me anyway, I should do a thorough analysis of the other civs in the game.

Selrahc Wrote:Frick... its fantastic man. It lets you convert population into spells. Say you conquer a size twelve city from the enemy. You can snack on it until its size 1, summoning an entire army of powerful creatures in the process. With that army you can swiftly murder any military forces lurking in the area.

Similarly it means that on defence if you're willing to sacrifice populace you can easily pull off a crazy level of defence.

So are you saying I can do it multiple times a turn? Or do you mean by way of multiple Eaters over multiple turns?

See the problem I had was that I couldn't see what spells would actually help you to cast more often away from the battlefield. Which is still true, but you make a good point that sometimes you control cities that are in the battlefield, and when you do it gets good.

I assume they keep the ability as a lich too right?

Selrahc · January 7th, 2011, 05:06

Quote:So are you saying I can do it multiple times a turn? Or do you mean by way of multiple Eaters over multiple turns?

Multiple times/turn.

Quote:I assume they keep the ability as a lich too right?

No. Liches lose the ability. And are vulnerable to Destroy Undead. Keep the more valuable casters as Eater of Dreams if you can, since it's unlikely that the few points of bonus strength will be much help.

plako

Irgy Wrote:As far as diplomacy goes, if it was the AI and I had 3 goods and 2 neutrals as I do here I'd certainly be off to a bad start. But I don't see why humans should really be less inclined to ally with me than anyone else. The AC hurts everyone equally, even me, although it helps me in other ways as well. It might annoy people, but if they act rationally I'm just as good an ally as anyone else. In the same way I can't count on Hyboream being friendly I'm not worried about everyone else automatically hating me. I only expect to get dogpiled if I handle things very badly. Although I certainly don't want people to get too carried away with roleplay.

Diplomacy, even without tech trading, is absolutely critical to multiplayer. I've done quite well with it in both MP games I've played so far, but that doesn't mean much.

Obvivously humans don't care much about their alignment when looking for allies. However the unique features of the Sheaim might not be very popular among other players unless you promise to play it nice, but where is the fun in that wink

. AC counter seems the main obstacle. After all Sheaim is the only nation getting substantial benefits from raising it: Worldbreak gets stronger, planar gates give more units and summons gets stronger. You'll also get indirect benefits: big part of your army should be non-living and you're probably running civics that can take advantage of excess population in severe unhealthiness cases.

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