[SPOILERS]- Crazy Keelyn is trippin’ Balz: Bobchillingworth of the Balseraphs

[DaveV]

Firebows are like regular longbows, except they have lower defensive strength and have channeling II + Fire II for fireballs. They pack a punch in large forces.

They start with Fire I, so they have to spend a promotion for Fire II.

What really makes [Govannon] nasty though is his ability to cast Teach, gifting any unit with a channeling promotion the first level of any mana sphere he knows.

Oh, it's waaay worse than that. He gifts Channeling I *and* all his tier I spells to any non-animal unit. This means every Amurite unit, from workers to warriors to horsemen, can summon skeletons, cast haste, blaze, spring scorch, rust, etc.

[Bobchillingworth]

[SIZE="4"]They’re rude, they’re crude, they got bad attitudes- they’re[/SIZE]

[SIZE="6"]The Competition [/SIZE]



Today’s episode covers

Serdoa: Os-Gabella / Sheaim] (IND, SUM)


The Civ


One of the most infamous nations to stalk Erebus, the Sheaim are a disparate group of people including blackguards, cutthroats, demon worshippers, social Darwinists, outcasts, and sociopaths. All are united in their contempt for the goodly nations of Erebus and their (largely) unwitting service toward Tebryn and Os-Gabella’s goal of quite literally destroying the world. Certainly one of the more compelling and clear villains to emerge from the lore, it’s no surprise that grand battles against the Sheaim occur near or at the climax of several of the official scenario storylines. As a civilization, the Sheaim are best described in one word: terrifying. Pyre Zombies are some of the most grossly overpowered units in the game, while Sheaim Death mana users are unmatched by any other civilization, thanks to their free palace Death mana and Summoner trait. Typical Sheaim strategy involve spamming PZ early on (and keeping a steady stream going for the entire game), and then building lots of adepts while raising the AC. There is one bright spot out of this mess, however- Os-Gabella is a much weaker leader than Tebryn. Summoner is deadly with the Sheaim, but Industrious has very little benefit outside of getting the Catacomb Libralus a little earlier, and speeding up the various Towers. Oh yeah, and both Sheaim leaders get Sundered on their arcane units as a free minor trait. It boosts the strength of their summons by a percentage equivalent to half of the AC.


The Sheaim have a couple Unique Units. Pyre Zombies are of course the most infamous. Undead units with the same strength as axemen who explode when killed, dealing heavy fire damage to all units within 1 tile of the PZ with no limit to total damage . This means that enough PZ will kill anything that can’t perform a hit & run attack against them (or resist fire damage). Excellent rushers and city defenders, but thankfully very weak to Life II (Destroy Undead). Eater of Dreams are regular archmages who can eat one population point in cities (much like vampires feasting), not for exp for rather to cast again. This makes them nasty city defenders, and very dangerous if they can get into a captured city with a large population, thanks to Summoner. The Sheaim have several other random units which can pop up through their Planar Gates, but since a lot of them are pretty rare I won’t discuss them until they actually appear in-game.

Speaking of which, the single Unique Building for the Sheaim is the Planar Gate . It releases special units, many of which are quite powerful, based on the AC. If the AC is high, you’ll receive units more frequently and in large numbers at a time. Different buildings in a Gates city will lead to different results in units summoned.


The Sheaim hero is Abashi the Black Dragon.




If we see this guy in-game I’ll be utterly astounded. He’s a dragon, so he has 21 strength, 3 moves, the neat Dragon racial spells, and takes approximately forever to build. Not only is the dragon himself an impressive 360 hammers, but he requires the ludicrously expensive Divine Essence tech. Which has several very expensive prerequisites. All for a unit who doesn’t even have the Hero promotion & who dies to a couple beastmasters.


The Sheaim worldspell is “Worldbreak”. It does fire damage to units proportionate to how high the AC is, so deploying it during an AC of 100 or more will outright kill anything that isn’t fire-resistant. Dangerous from AC 20-onwards, where it could give the edge in an attack, although the temptation is to hold on to it for as long as possible while raising the AC, for maximum impact. Has a chance to ignite forests and jungles, which I don’t really care at all about, and to start fires in cities which can burn down buildings and some wonders, which I do. The Sheaim also get a special ritual, “The Elegy of the Sheaim”, which raises the AC by 5. Nice if they want to buff their gates and worldspell, but it’s expensive. It makes more sense for them to spam units from a city with the Prophecy of Ragnarock.



Strengths

* Pyre Zombies can lead a very difficult to counter early rush, and are superb city defenders.

* Summons are the most deadly around.

* Gets bonuses from raising the AC.

* Has a very clear strategy and focused tech paths.


Weaknesses

* Vulnerable to assassins.

* “Destroy Undead” will eliminate a PZ stack of any size with only four castings, and can clear away stacks of Specter summons with ease.

* Hell terrain and lack of economic traits can hamper economy.

* While they aren’t necessarily forced to follow an exact religious and tech plan, adopting anything other than the Veil makes raising the AC significantly more difficult for the Sheaim, which adversely impacts their UB, summons, and worldspell.



The Player (Serdoa)


I’ve followed Serdoa’s threads for a few of the Bts PBEM games, but haven’t been able to observe his play in FFH PBEM 2 since I’m dedilurking (and at the moment playing for) Amelia. He seems to be a skilled general and player who has a bad habit of gaining a lead and then squandering it through inattentive play. I think he’s new to FFH, but it doesn’t take that long for anyone to pick up on the basic concepts, especially when a valid strategy for your civ is “build nothing but PZ, and then throw them at the other players”. He has gotten some flack for his diplo being too blunt, which seems to have to do more with English not being his first language rather than him being rude. Likely to be one of the more aggressive players in this game, although he seems to enjoy diplomacy as well. His posts in the tech thread and his thread title indicate that he’s going to pursue the standard Sheaim stratagem of “burn it all”. Will be interesting to see if this holds true.



Overall Threat Rating


** to start, ***** once PZ are out and before I have a counter, **** after I get Life II on some mages.


Essentially the Sheaim are yet another civ who has some severe advantages over me at some crucial junctures in the game. I’m very worried about PZ, and would appreciate any suggestions Dave / Hes have regarding how to deal with them before I can get Destroy Undead. If Serdoa is near me, I may have to divert tech to HBR & Saddles, and/or get construction earlier than I’d like. To use Starcraft by way of categorizing the arcane specialists in this game, he’s the Protoss to Sareln’s Zerg and my Terrans. Or for a Super Smash Bros analogy, he’s powerful Solid Snake, Sareln is spammy Metaknight, and I’m frigging jack-of-some-traits master-of-none Mario. I’m hoping that he doesn’t start anywhere near me. Oh and his civ is a natural partner for the Orcs with their warrens and potential for raising the AC really quickly through the Prophecy of Ragnarock. Hopefully this doesn’t occur to either of them. Ugh.

[uberfish]

[DaveV]

A tough puzzle at the start. My analysis:

Settle in place? No way - even though you pick up all the specials, this converts one of the best tiles in the game (floodplains) to one of the worst (desert), which will give you -25% defense in your capital until you have adepts and water mana. Cotton is not a great commerce tile, and you can eventually build a junk city that claims the fish and the cotton.

1W - very good food, good hammers, +2 freshwater health bonus, river defense bonus from 5/8 possible attacking tiles . No hill defense bonus, three worthless coast tiles and a peak. River defense bonus can work against you if you're trying to kill barbs.

78 (NNW, forested plains hill) - plains hill production bonus (huge in early game), defense bonus, good food, picks up wines. Wastes riverside hills unless you cram in a really tight city, five unknown tiles.

My vote: send the guy (I can't tell scouts from warriors) north onto the forested plains hill: if there's something spectacular in the fog, build there; otherwise build 1W. Pick up the hut and identify the unique feature to the west.

Note: Pool of tears is really, really good for you, since it cures Withered and Diseased. Mutation looks more attractive than ever.

[Bobchillingworth]

Thanks, uberfish!



Wow, this is a pretty sweet looking start, especially since I start with agriculture. I'm going to move the move the northern warrior as you suggest, Dave- if he sees some commerce resources, I'll probably sent my settler to the plains forest hill tile. Otherwise, I'm thinking of settling 1S. Hill for defense, river placement leaves only three non-water tiles open for attack without penalty, and most importantly I'll have two cottons to start working after I research Calendar as my first tech (and then the wines with Crafting as my second). Overlords hopefully won't be too big of an issue, as I intend to get the religion myself and so can station priests along the coast- actually this could make the capital easier to defend. Fish is wasted unless I want to cram in a junk city really close to the capital, but who cares. Heron Throne can be built if I ever have way too many free hammers to toss about & decide that I want to get serious about a culture win.


If I settle 1S I'm thinking warrior first while I grow to size 2 working the FP, then worker as soon as the warrior completes. Two defending warriors should be sufficient to beat lizardmen and a couple poison goblins.


Pool of Tears is great- +1 happy (probably for my second city) and as you point out it means I can cure freaks and mutated units much more easily, which is great if I delay priests by going for my proposed Esus beeline. And good catch with that western unique feature- I might be able to figure out what it is on turn 0 by zooming out all the way on the map.


Both units appear to be warriors, btw.


I wonder if anyone else got two starting unique features...

[darrelljs]

Does your Settler have teh starting settler promotion?

Darrell

[Hesmyrr]

You lose like, three minable hills though. Never played high difficulties so don't know how soon the happiness problems kick in but I suppose it is more about +2 commercial bonus? The thing is 1W would be good way to incorporate three more grassland tiles on the west; I see bunch of deserts in that direction so it would be hard to effectively place a city there. Contrarily if I build 1W I can just plan to grab the cotton tiles later on with 4E or 3E1S (from the settler's current location).

[Bobchillingworth]

Okay, played turn 0.



At the start of the turn I moved my northern warrior to the forest plains hill, as planned. This is what he uncovered:




Very nice production land. I debated long & hard about whether I should settle the coastal spot for the extra commerce or on the hill, and eventually decided on the hill. While I'm very concerned about getting enough early commerce, I can't resist having a capital with such high production, and I can use the extra hammers to get out a quick second settler to found a second city 2N of the fish, which will get me the commerce back. Also the free +1 happy in the capital from the Pool of Tears is a welcome benefit.


Moving to the forest hill took up all of the settler's movement points, so I'll found at the start of the next turn. It wasn't really a wasted turn since I took the opportunity to revolt out of Religion and into Nationhood. I also got an incredible amount of vision over the surrounding environs thanks to the starting settler bonus. Here's what I found:






Lots of features to note. There are two huts and a grave, so I'll want to get to all of those quickly. I'm thinking of sending the warrior occupying the same tile as my settler to the eastern hut, and then moving him to pop the grave. The southern warrior will reach the western hut in 6 turns. This leaves the capital undefended, but there are no barbarian lairs nearby and I'll start a warrior as first build. Speaking of lairs, the only standard one I can see is a ruins 1E of the mana node. I look forward to a game where I'm not getting attacked by four lizardmen a turn in the early game.


Two new unique features were revealed. In the north we have the Standing Stones, which was one of the best possibilities. Gibbon could go Earth III and summon two Earth Elementals a turn via puppetry- great for a rush or defense. I'll certainly want to hook it up soon, maybe fourth city. A short distance to the west is Bradeline's Well. This is a less welcome feature. I'm honestly not sure what to do about it... I could pop it early, before anyone else can reach it, but then I'm utterly doomed if it spawns a mistform or ogre or more than one azer. Or I could leave it there and risk someone spawning nasty crap right next to my capital and/or stealing a nice benefit. I'm open for suggestions as to how to handle it.


Overall the land seems production-high and commerce low, except for a couple patches of FP. Decent amount of irrigable land for aristofarms without needing construction, although food output will be low until sanitation. Cottages will be utter rubbish, so at least that econ decision has been made for me. River + desert near the Well likely means more FP in that direction. And there's Reagents, should I manage to survive long enough to build archmages. My initial impression is slightly cautious optimism- I don't have any complaints, at least not on turn 0



-------------------


With a fair amount of the land known, I can also start to plan my tech and build queues. I'm tentatively thinking warrior (working FP, growing to size 2) -> worker -> warrior -> warrior -> settler (starting at size 4 or 5). Tiles to work are the rice, 2X FP, plain wines, and cow, with the plains hills for emergency production. Tech path could go Crafting -> Animal Husbandry -> Mining -> Calender. Maybe Calendar before mining, I guess it depends on if I really need a lot of hammers and how long my first settler takes to produce.



That's all my thoughts for now, hopefully I'll get another turn in tonight.

[Hesmyrr]

Oh man, that is really unfortunate. My impression from reading FFH PBEM is that players are very happy to pop dangerous dungeons as long as it isn't near them- I've read it happen repeated times, so you probably need to come to decision about that.

The super-aggressive method is to just cross your fingers and pop the damn thing. Of course it may result in your demise, but would you rather have someone pull the trigger for you or do it yourself in inevitable Russian roulette? Don't know the result probabilities, but it produce either very good-very bad which mean you don't want anyone exploring it in any case.

The super-defensive method is to have one of your units park over the wall, do nothing and warn away any players that dare to approach. This is super safe approach and your chance of dying due to bad barbarian spawn would decrease dramatically, but it has disadvantages of diminishing your scouting capabilities for a long time.

Cannot think of any other way to handle the wall at the moment, perhaps you can come up with the less extreme solution.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, parking on it is one option, but the big issue there is that I'm liable to just lose the warrior to an animal or barb, plus I'd have to declare on someone as soon as I saw a scout, otherwise they could just run under my warrior and open the well from beneath his feet. I could also try to rush my second city that way so that it falls within my culture, although that still wouldn't prevent someone from simply declaring on me and opening it anyway. Plus it's going to take at least 35-45 turns to get my second settler out, and I don't even know if I want to settle in that direction yet.


Opening it probably makes the most sense... Dave, do you know if the units get any worse depending on your level of tech / development / turns into the game? I've rarely ever gotten ogres or multiple azers early in the game, results mostly seem to be hill giants, animals, and mistforms in the opening turns. The later is deadly, but I can live with some extra scorpions or whatever crawling around.