Uncommonly Good: A Story of Elves

[Mardoc]

Nicolae: Tebrim (Arcane Summoner) of Sheaim!
Kyan : Keelyn (Creative Summoner)of the Balseraphs!
Brian : Einion (Philosophical Defender Tolerant) of Elohim!
Gaspar: Arendel (Creative Spiritual) of Ljosfalar!
Acalostas: Cassiel (Industrious(adaptive)Philosophical)of Grigori!
Rawkking: Rhoanna (Financial Expansive) of Hippus!

What stands out? Well, the first thing is, there's only two civs with any real econ focus - us and Rhoanna. Although Grigori could switch to Financial, I suppose. The longer the game goes, the better off we'll be. So, in general, we ought to be looking for a balance of power strategy in the early game.

There's a lot of magic in the game - obviously Nicolae and Kyan will want a magical gameplan, but probably Acalostas and we will want it too, to a more limited degree. Mana will be at a premium, but conversely, mana trades should be easy to come by. I expect our Life mana to be at a premium for anyone facing Sheaim (except maybe Hippus, who can probably handle them just with cavalry).

No one really has a booby prize - can't write anyone off just due to their civ choice. Probably the weakest is Elohim, but Sancturary is powerful enough to make up for a lot.

In terms of religion - well, of course Nicolae will want Ashen Veil, and Acalostas can't have any, but other than that, we're the only obvious ones with needing the Leaves. I doubt anyone will challenge us for Fellowship.

[Gaspar]

Yeah, I suppose that's probably for the best. Ideally we'll find a way to tech fast enough early enough to get a decent chunk of Savants/Ritualists up prior to needing to be in Guardian of Nature full time. Definitely will need to be disciplined with specializing cities and the like for that to happen. Maybe even getting a layer or two of the Altar to get them some XP. That's probably quite unlikely, frankly, but one can hope.

I'm glad we started the conversation early, though. Lots of good feedback helping me hopefully avoid stupid decisions. Thanks, everyone!

[Ravus Sol]

Here is your "I started a thread Early" Reward! Someone must have chased off that Dragon.

Hope you enjoy. I am now going to sleep.

[Mardoc]

Thanks Ravus! I appreciate the settler's name, too

So, thoughts. First, yay for forests! Second, is that gold in jungle? If so, we probably want to move away from it, actually, and get the pigs instead. . Depends on what's in the fog.

[Gaspar]

Thanks Ravus! I appreciate the settler's name, too

And look, another Elvish start where we're 3 tiles from the coast. Eff you, ErebusContinent RNG, Eff you.

Firstly, let me echo Mardoc's appreciation. Secondly, may I ask, was the lack of the starting settler promotion intentional, as I noticed that "Mr. Inland" has only two moves and quite normal line of sight. Fair enough if it was, but I thought I might mention it in case it was just an oversight. Particularly because...

So, thoughts. First, yay for forests! Second, is that gold in jungle? If so, we probably want to move away from it, actually, and get the pigs instead. . Depends on what's in the fog.

Yeah, jungled Gold will help us approximately... never. There's little incentive for the Elves to rush towards BW, and while we'll probably get it some day, it kind of defeats the purpose of Dexterous - to push us towards the Archery line rather than the melee line. While Cotton is the Rice of luxury resources, riverside Grassland cotton can push the tech rate enough to be worth having, and while Elves benefit from Rivers less than most (those forests eat the riverside commerce.)

Upon further reflection, actually, this is a pretty mediocre start. AH food resources won't help us for quite a while, as AH is a pretty expensive tech, so growth will be quite slow. While the forests are great, they slow you down early while our lazy Elven workers wait forever to build farms (have to build farms if we settled in place, with no food resources.) More I look at this, the less I like it. The northern scout can be moved W-SW to get maximum tile views, the eastern scout won't reveal anything worthwhile for us but I suppose SW-SW is the appropriate move for him.

Instinctively, I think the right move is to move the settler if we can find a grain food resource, preferably north away from all that useless jungle that's peering out of the fog to the south. Then we can come back after we have AH and settle a city on the coast. These are the sorts of decisions FFH2 doesn't want you to have to make blind though, which is why you get a 4 move settler with enhanced sight. Regardless, I'll assume we all have the same sorts of dilemmas.

This is actually a classic case of the big differences between FFH and the base civ game. In vanilla Civ, I'd settle SW of the scout on the coast and be just fine with my start - the jungled Gold wouldn't be so far away from being improved, nor would the pigs. The base start would never happen in basic Civ, however, as there's no visible food resource in the BFC. Hopefully the scout will reveal a Wheat or some such 2W of Mr. Inland.

I dunno, Mardoc, lurkers, am I being too pessimistic or does this start suck as much as I think it does?

[Mardoc]

It'll depend almost entirely on what's in the fog. At least we have an accessible Calendar resource, though, not incense or furs or some such. I agree if we only have pigs, we're bound for a slow start, but so far that's still an 'if'.

I am thinking Education needs to be a priority, though. If we're going to be working all these grass forests, we need to put cottages on them ASAP.

With what we know now, I'd be tempted for 1NW, but of course move the scout first (probably 2 SW). Who knows? Maybe there's wheat/rice/corn trifecta just out of sight.

[Gaspar]

It'll depend almost entirely on what's in the fog. At least we have an accessible Calendar resource, though, not incense or furs or some such. I agree if we only have pigs, we're bound for a slow start, but so far that's still an 'if'.

Well, that's pretty key. I'd rather Cotton than something harder to get our hands on, though I'd really much rather have food.

I am thinking Education needs to be a priority, though. If we're going to be working all these grass forests, we need to put cottages on them ASAP.

With what we know now, I'd be tempted for 1NW, but of course move the scout first (probably 2 SW). Who knows? Maybe there's wheat/rice/corn trifecta just out of sight.

Yeah, Education is going to be a priority tech regardless. Grassland Forest Cottages grow into pretty nice tiles, even better when they eventually become the Ancient variety. Still, if there's no food in the fog, this is going to be a REALLY slow start, so I suppose the speculation is mostly unimportant until we can get a scouting unit out there. I'll have to speculate on other stuff in the meantime.

[Mardoc]

I suppose the speculation is mostly unimportant until we can get a scouting unit out there. I'll have to speculate on other stuff in the meantime.

I've got to say, I'm surprised, this is the first game I've seen in a long while where the map was ready to go well ahead of the rest of the organizing! Kudos to Ravus and assorted lurkers for that!

So...Mr. Speculator...when are you going to update your opponent analysis post for me to pick holes in?

[Gaspar]

So...Mr. Speculator...when are you going to update your opponent analysis post for me to pick holes in?

Right then, its time for the first in our new series:



First up, led by PBEM12 Evil Nemesis Kyan and the purveyor of putrid plans himself, Twinkletoes - the Balseraphs!



The Balseraphs have two available leaders, Perpentach and Keelyn, and Kyan chose the less fun but probably more useful of the two, Keelyn. Perpentach is a blast to play, because his Insane trait means you're basically playing the lottery, but Keelyn is easier to plan a long term strategy around, since you know what you're going to get.



Keelyn is Cre/Sum, which means like us, she gets to not have to build the painful FFH2 Monument, as well as half-price Carnivals. The Summoner trait is actually absolutely most useful in the hands of the Balseraphs, which we'll discuss in greater detail in a moment. It means that her summons stay around an extra turn, as opposed to everyone else, where they die at EOT, she gets a 2nd turn to play with them.

The Balseraphs, are a potpourri sort of a Civ. They get lots of little advantages in lots of different places, but no one big obvious game-changer like say the Elves and trees or the Lanun and water. Instead there's a lot of flavor stuff which takes real skill to utilize to your best advantage. For that reason, I find it interesting that Kyan, who's probably played less FFH2 than I have, chose them. More on that in a moment. So what *do* the crazy magical mad clowns get?



Starting tech: Agriculture. Probably the best starting tech in FFH, that or Ancient Chants. It means they can get their food up and running quick if they have grains, making worker first a viable option.

Hero: Loki. Loki's been discussed enough around here that I won't bother you with pictures and long stories. Suffice to say, a human has to be careless to let him bother you, but as we're creative, he won't be able to flip any cities unless we're really stupid. Nonetheless, as long as he's alive I will make a condition of any treaty we sign with the Balseraphs that Loki may never enter my borders. You don't mess around with Loki, you wardec and then ask questions later. Other than scouting, however, he's pretty useless in a SP game. Can really fuck with the AI though.

World Spell: Revelry. One of the best world spells in the game. Free Golden Age. 'Nuff said.

Unique Units: Freaks are an extra Balseraph unit trainable after Festivals. They come out with Mutations, which can result in very strong units. The lousy ones you can settle in your cities via the Freak Show, which provided +1 Happy, +2 Culture and +1 Great Bard GPP. At 60H a pop, they're not a cost effective warrior replacement, but if you have hammers to burn, you can get some killer units via mutations.
Mimics, the Balseraph replacement for Champions, gets 1 less strength that the normal version, but can steal promotions from units they defeat in combat. Nice, but I'd rather have the extra strength, personally.
Harlequins are their Ranger replacement, and gain the taunt ability in exchange for 1 Str. Taunt is nasty, because they can force units within a 1 tile range to attack the Harlequins stack. If you have a few strong defensive units in a stack, it can be a great way to fight a war on your terms, especially paired with something like Treetop Defense. These are worth the -1 STR, in my opinion.
Taskmasters are Assassins that can also create Slaves from combat. Mostly a flavor thing.
Courtesans are Shadow replacements with the same Slave perk.

Unique Building: Arena, which replaces Training Yards, allows you to send units into a 50/50 shot at getting some XP, or dying and providing a happiness buff for a few turns. Its one way to waste freaks with bad mutations, but beyond that, the risk is generally not worth the rewards.

Palace Mana: Mind, Chaos, Air. Mind is very nice to get from the palace, because everyone would like a few Mind adepts for inspiration. It also gives a 3% research bonus Civ wide. Chaos is situationally useful, but Dance of Blades is not an adept spell you're likely to use often. Air's adept spell, Fair Winds, is not likely to play much in this game.

Specials: Spell casters can create puppets. What's a puppet? It basically means that spell casters can create a summon of themselves to do their casting for them. The puppets get all the promotions of the caster. We'll talk about that shortly.

Likely Strategy: Reasonably observant readers can probably already figure out that Keelyn's Balseraphs are likely to want to push Mages out as quickly as possible to take advantage of puppets with Summoner trait to get double the spell-casting. This can mean things like boatloads of fireballs or elementals at your door, or just ridiculous collateral from only a few spellcasters. The downside to this strategy, of course, is that as Keelyn lacks the Arcane trait, it will take her a while to actually get mages. That's where the move of heading for either CoE and Gibbon or OO and Hemah makes a lot of sense. If you can get Twincast on either one, you can have 4 twincasting puppets up, for a total of 8 spells from just one hero. Devastating. Gibbon Goetia is probably the quickest Archmage to get your hands on, and the Balseraphs have easy access to enough happiness bonii that its pretty easy to forsake one of the more versatile religions for the slightly more restrictive CoE, which lacks priests or temples. That's certainly the strategy I'd be employing if I played Keelyn.

Drawbacks: Keelyn's Balseraphs lack a reasonable economic trait, so whatever strategy they employ, they're going to have to work hard to get where they want to go. There are a lot of little temptations along the way that can distract a less focused player, so I would generally say they're not a good choice for the beginner, which can play against the "noobs" in this game. As noted, they're encouraged to go down both the melee and recon lines to support their strong magic users, but their Champions and Rangers each lose a key point of base strength.

The Players: Kyan is a very alpha personality, so I don't expect either TT or his vet dedlurkers to have a big influence on him. Both DaveV and Bob know their FFH very well, however, so he has excellent resources available to him should he draw on them. Kyan is an amazing BTS player, easily the strongest in this game, so I expect his worker/tile micro to be flawless. That, ultimately, is still at the heart of this game. Kyan and I have a bit of history, from both WW2 and PBEM12, and I said many unkind things about him in my lurker thread - there really is no real love lost between us, so I suspect given the opportunity, he'd rather be against us than with us. That said, he's an complete pragmatist, and he'll side with whomever gives him the greatest advantage. He's also hyper-competitive, so while there's a degree of this being a lark to him, he'll be all in to win.

How they'll affect us: They'll probably be one of the earlier civs to research Festivals, which means they're probably also favorites to pick up the Great Bard from Drama. That's unfortunate, as that Great Bard can allow us to found the Song of Autumn without having to focus specialist points on priests, and would in fact probably be my preferred strategy for getting the FoL shrine without the Balseraphs around. Other than that, they're a non-starter on competing for religion, and there's no doubt that down the road we'll have the stronger economy. Ultimately, beyond the Drama bard, I doubt anything they do will interfere with us other than if we end up on opposite sides of a conflict, which remains likely.

This concludes todays episode of Better Know a FFH Opponent. I hope you enjoyed learning about the Magical Mad Clowns from Hell!



P.S. Link to this post edited into the opponent discussion post.

[Gaspar]

The problem with starting with that level of detail, is you feel like you need to meet it in all subsequent posts. Since I need to finish this before I go over a patchwork "This is how it all fits together" post, I'll try and knock the rest out this weekend. I hope you all appreciate the hard work I do for you, lurkers! (And Mardoc, but I suspect you'll pay that back in spades by preventing me from doing stupid stuff down the road.)

Anyway, time for part two of...



In this installment, we take a look at the enigmatic Rawkking Goodguy (henceforth, RG) and his Hippus!



The Hippus also have 2 leaders available to them, Tasunke and Rhoanna. Tasunke is the pure rush leader, Rhoanna gives the balanced economic traits to sustain the inherent rush abilities.



Rhoanna is Exp/Fin, two great traits in BTS, and they're also great in FFH. Expansive trades its cheap workers for cheap settlers. While that's of limited value on its own in BTS, the sub-par Imp trait, in FFH settlers are freaking expensive, so its a noticeable help. The 3 Health is ok, Harbors and Granaries are both much less important here than in base Civ. Fin however, is still king in FFH. You'll see some argue its not as good here as in base civ, but I'd disagree - I actually think its *more* valuable here. First off, unlike BTS, it gets 2 cheap buildings - the Money Changer, which is essentially a Bank, both for its bonus and its place in the tech tree and the Market, which is a building available at Festivals that you will pretty universally build in every single city. Basic rule of thumb - buildings you put in every city for cheap = killer trait. In fact, its often the first thing you build in a city, or 2nd after a culture producer if you need 2nd ring. Oh yeah, and it still gets those piles and piles of free commerce, even more dangerous with Aristofarms. So yeah, Rhoanna's traits are pretty flipping good. I can say that I went back and forth quite frequently between Rhoanna and Arendel in pre-game discussion, and immediately had buyer's remorse when I got the Elves. Suffice to say, I approve of this pick. Rhoanna is right there with Hannah as the best unrestricted non-adaptive leaders in FFH2.

What about the Civ choice, then. Strong leader is supposed to in theory imply limited Civ. Does this hold true?



Starting tech: Agriculture. Probably the best starting tech in FFH, that or Ancient Chants. It means they can get their food up and running quick if they have grains, making worker first a viable option.

Hero:

Magnadine is pretty bad ass, a STR 11 fast moving horsie who can also hire units as he trashes the place, making him some pretty unstoppable cavalry. Unfortunately, as you can see from my mouseover there, he requires the quite expensive Warhorses trait. If the Hippus player has access to Magnadine anytime soon, they've severely ignored another part of the tree or two. So while he can cause pain, he's not by any means the scariest tool in the Hippus-kit.

World Spell: Warcry. The most fearsome rush aider in the game, in my opinion, Warcry gives all your units +1 move, +1 Str and Blitz. Yeah, seriously. It has a 5% chance of wearing off each turn, so there's a bit of a lottery of how long you're going to get out of it, but 3-4 well placed turns with units in the right place can be enough to completely eliminate you if prepared, and there's really nothing you can do about it if you're not prepared to counter it. Its even more fearsome with Tasunke, but its plenty scary with Rhoanna, who can keep the economy moving in the right direction while beating you to death with horsies.

Unique Units: Mounted Mercenary. The Mounted Mercenary is a 3 move merc. While that's a very nice unit to be able to hire, you have to build the Guild of the Nine Kings wonder to take advantage. While any Hippus player would want to do so, that's a 500 hammer build at Currency. The payoff for the wonder is rarely worth the outlay, though you can absolutely generate a huge, effective army quickly with it. Still, nothing I'm going to be losing sleep over.

Blocked Units: Cannon, Arquebus. They can't make use of the Gunpowder units, which isn't a big deal, as they come extremely late and are extremely too slow for their cavalry anyway.

Unique Building: None.

Blocked Buildings: Like us, Hippus cannot build Alchemy Labs.

Palace Mana: Air, Nature, Horses. The Hippus only get two Palace Mana, which overlap with ours, Air and Nature. In place of our Life Mana, they get Horses. Access to Horses from the palace is basically there to accentuate rushes, you don't have to secure and improve a horse tile to build your mounted death squad, you can just build stables and go. Its a double edged sword though, because you waste a useful Palace Mana slot with a relatively easy to get ahold of resource. As noted in our overview, neither Air nor Nature has any passive effects.

Specials: Horselord. All mounted units get +1 movement and increased withdrawl. No big deal.

Likely Strategy: Hmm. Do you think the Hippus are designed with a Cavalry rush in mind? The leaders are a pick your garnish sort of choice - Tasunke for the deadliest rush possible, Rhoanna for economic balance. Clearly, Rhoanna is a smarter choice for an MP environment, Tasunke isn't going to rush 5 humans off the map, and he's screwed once the rush is thwarted. But yeah, you can easily see that they have little atypical strength beyond the bad ass horses. If a Hippus player doesn't swarm you with Horsemen/HA's/etc then why take the Hippus, so I firmly expect RG to rush someone. Certainly, you'd expect them to use Chariot siege rather than mages or priests. Beyond that, settle in and play the Fin game - Aristofarms for sure. They can go any which way religion wise, and I wouldn't expect RG to have a particular flavor in mind. I'd wager they're a decent choice to found RoK, simply as the only Financial starting civ they can get their faster, and RoK helps defer the costs of keeping cities acquired in an inital rush.

Drawbacks: #1 problem is they have to bring swarms if they don't hit you early. They're too fast for any non-Chariot collateral or any reasonable medic. The withdrawal chance increase certainly makes that doable, but there's no question that mages and priests have a hard time keeping up with the horde. They really have nothing else - Fast, strong mounted; Financial. That's the whole toolkit. Its enough, if used correctly, but it doesn't leave room for a lot of variety. Also, even moreso than Sheaim, everyone knows you're going to rush someone, so you have a gigantic target on your back, and the Horsemen/HA's/Knights still don't receive defense bonuses, so they're definitely susceptible to an alpha strike. If you can avoid their fast units in the field to get to a city, that is.

The Players: I know nothing about RG, other than he basically said he's pretty good at FFH2. Still, until he proves it on the battlefield, its hard to say what he's really capable of. He's got SL and Thoth as DLs, both quite capable players in their own right. I fully expect him to be one of the top threats in the end.

How they'll affect us: The biggest conflict they'll have with us is tech rate. They're definitely going to be out-teching us early, so any 1st to bonuses might well fall to Rhoanna. Otherwise, we're sort of after different things, so the only real problem will be if we become his target. Fortunately, we're unappealing as a target for him for two reasons. First, remember all those forests? Well, they're going to slow down his fast movers a ton. Second, our worldspell makes us a much more unappealing target than say, the Balseraphs. Instinctively, this is a civ that would seem like a good choice to ally with, depending on geography of course, but if we could point them towards the Sheaim or the Balseraphs, that'd be ideal.

This concludes this episode of Better Know a FFH Opponent.



Link added to opponent preview section.