FFH Adventure 2 - Uberfish

[uberfish]

We start with 3 javelin throwers, 2 Supplies (which let you build several basic buildings) and a bunch of techs pre-researched

Since exactly what is out there is unclear the safest play will be to go for Priests of Winter quickly which means researching philosophy quickly

The supplies are costing upkeep, so I decide to use them for Hunting Lodges in the first two cities. I also start a quick Elder Council to get research up, and revolt to God King, Pacifism, Agrarianism and Apprenticeship.

the Graveyard yielded 28 gold.



Meet Flauros (war automatically declared). I built a hunter after the Elder Council and after philosophy I started the White Hand ritual, then Knowledge of the Ether to freeze enemy units if needed, then Writing. I decided not to assign the Sage specialist until Garduk capped out at size 9.

On turn 69 picked up bronze working from a hut. Once the local resources were improved I connected Letum Frigus to give ice elementals +1 strength (turning down the free Aggressive promotion.)

I sent the priests of winter south, razing a barbarian city and attacking Flauros. His first city (Nubia) was on a desert making it impossible for Ice Elementals to attack his hunters, but Priests had 96%+ odds to attack (because of the desert defence penalty) so this turned out to be a decent source of experience too.

Also, I stole 2 workers and a slave from Flauros with my hunter that happened to be in the area. Didn't think I could hold the city without dedicating my priests to defence duty and it was too far from my core, so I razed it.

In the meantime after writing I went for Sanitation. With most of the research infrastructure done in the capital (Elder Council, Library, Mage Guild, Academy, Deruptus Brewery) I switched to aristocracy to fund my expansion



Flauros wasn't able to put up much of a fight, Priests of Winter are just extremely strong for the timing they appear in the game. To avoid paying tons of maintenance and have a massive defensive headache, I just razed everything and slowly expanded south with new cities



Next on the chopping block were Jonas' orcs:



In the meantime Os-Gabella had built Rosier the Fallen so I had to recall the priests up to the north after defeating the Orcs. They caught him wandering alone outside a city (nice work there from the AI) and two Ice Elemental attacks defeated him. At some point in the last year of active FFH development, the AI was patched to use spells better and they did a pretty good job with that. Unfortunately, at the same time, it made the AI very dumb in its use of basic units.

While I was distracted dealing with the purple Sheaim forces Infernal forces managed to take out a newly founded size 1 city and a Hellhound behind my lines captured one of my cities for 1 turn. Didn't do much damage, but spread Ashen Veil to the city giving it a -4 happiness penalty for being at war with its religious brethren It's clear that all this city razing strengthens Hyborem, but the longer I take to destroy the mortal civs, the more free Manes he'll get later.

Anyway I cleaned out the eastern half of the map, explored all the lairs and dungeons, and suppressed all barbarian cities because barbarian units combined with the occasional small AI raid were becoming a serious nuisance at this point. I settled everything to prevent barbarian cities respawning. Hyborem had some dangerous stacks in the computer controlled half of the map that I didn't want to expose my priests to alone so I was teching up to champions and mages.



Diseased corpse stack... I was going to get Life mages to deal with the undead but it turned out there wasn't a free mana node anywhere on the map.



And the classic 150 warrior 40 hellhound stack (lol). I had a triple length chained golden age from an event + Bone Palace + burned Great Bard at this point. I only froze about half my cities with temple of the hand (to terraform bad terrain.) Ice removes the river commerce bonus so I didn't build the temples if the city had a river and good terrain.



good to go with 10 champions + more coming, the 3 priests, 7 mages, 1 adept. With about 3 slows, all of Hyborem's warriors and diseased corpses were unable to move allowing me to attack his stack while only worrying about the Hellhound counter attack. Iron champions in forest could hold off the hellhound numbers easily. After a few turns of this Hyborem got fed up with his incompetent minions and showed up in person to stomp one of my reinforcing Champions.



He wasn't escorted though so I just threw some ice elementals at him to soften him up... oh wait suicide ice elemental #2 just got lucky and won wasting 56 XP. Argh. Gave the axe to Wilboman.

Anyway with Hyborem dead it took a few more turns to clean out the rest of the Infernal troops and conquer everything up to the wall of fire. I just kept the cities to save time and brought up some newly trained royal guards to hold cities and get a quick cultural expansion.



Hyborem's new army, 40 more diseased corpses. I just finished High Priests and had switched to slavery to whip out Temples of the Hand. The one being completed here in Poena would freeze my way through the wall of fire. I didn't have Snowfall until one more promotion for Ice III on the priests, but summoned elementals + Rust (from the captured Sheaim entropy mana) + Heal after attacking were more than enough to deal with these anyway.



Accidentally hit domination on t223 because I was keeping captured cities without thinking, but I just played on a few more turns to finish off the infernals anyway getting all stars except the Mercurian one on t232.

[Dantski]

Nice game, I was worried about hitting domination so I razed virtually ever western city.

One interesting question is whether your 28 gold from the graveyard helped more than me grabbing Mithril Working from it when the game was over.

Did you just all out attack the Infernal stacks after casting slow? I thought it to be too risky with all the Hellhounds around but perhaps it wasn't considering how passive the AI played.

[uberfish]

Yeah I all out attacked the infernal stacks once I had 10 champions or so. The diseased corpses tended to stack separately from the hellhounds/warriors and the hellhounds would defend that second stack. So a lot of the units that could retaliate were getting killed on my attack anyway. I lost some units to being swarmed by hounds as they streamed in 1 by 1 to reinforce but it wasn't a big deal.

[Sciz]

I captured every city just so I cold avoid Hyborem getting stronger. But that also made me hit domination before I could kill the Infernals, so maybe it wasn't a great idea after all