Green as they come: Hiding Kneel plays the Ljosalfar [SPOILERS]

[HidingKneel]

The new turn is in. Muted optimism.

The second (unpromoted) lizardman attacked last turn. Our defending warrior killed him without a scratch. Unfortunately only worth 1xp, so no promotion for us.

Not much else to report. Workers are farming near Evermore, due to start working the dyes as soon as calendar comes in. Evermore will grow to size four at the end of next turn, which is the "happy cap" considering it has no defenders right now. At that point I'll either crank out a quick warrior or switch to building a third worker, depending on how things look up by Hyll.

Here's the situation after EOT:



Two warriors in the city now. Another one can arrive from the south next turn. We can also complete a fourth in the city, but only if we want to starve back to size 1. Hopefully that won't be necessary, but I wanted to keep our options open.

So, there's three warriors outside our gates, and a wounded lizardman that's promoted to C3. Even when that lizardman heals up, it should have < 50% odds on our top defender. Maybe even less: if it waits a turn and one of those warriors attacks, we should be able to promote to C1. But the real grounds for optimism is this: unless the AI is smarter than I think it is, that lizardman will probably be undefended after it attacks. So even if it manages to take out our defender, we'll have a shot at finishing the job.

All in all, I'm liking our chances of surviving this. Of course, we'll still come out of it in last place. Baby steps.

[Commodore]

Really it depends on how many warriors survive. A power graph that's going upwards? That's a wonderful thing in the Elimist-dominated world. It's not like the warriors won't be seeing action. And hey, you're at least sitting on two cities here.

[HidingKneel]

Turn 17 rolls in, and still not much to report. One of the barbarian warriors attacked Hyll, but didn't scratch our defender. So we've now got a C1 warrior there, with 20% fortification. (Game mechanics question: when does the 20% become 25%? Will it happen before the barbarians move?)

The C3 lizard is still badly injured, and fortified on a forested hill east of Hyll. It's tempting to try to redline it with our unpromoted warrior, then finish it off with our top defender. But that's too chancy. I used up all my luck on turn 0, so I'll have to play it smart from here on . It won't get good odds when it attacks again.

Since we've got 3 warriors in Hyll now, I figured we can wait another turn for the fourth. So Hyll's growing again. Here's a screenshot from EOT:



What else? We finished our third farm near Evermore, which grew to size 4 this turn. Calendar will come in soon. I'm still liking crafting/mining next, then chants/mysticism. By the time mysticism rolls in, we should have mines on both of those forested hills north of Evermore, so we'll really be able to take advantage of the +50% hammers from God King.

[HidingKneel]

Turn 18. More of the same. One of the barbarian warriors suicided itself on Hyll. The C3 lizard is still healing outside our gates. Might be a while before it actually attacks, which is fine by me. Once again I resist the temptation to attack out: we could probably kill it, but it would cost us a warrior or two, and those don't come cheap at this stage of the game.

With just one more barbarian warrior (due to suicide next turn), and a new defender coming at EOT, I decide I feel pretty safe with the garrison currently in Hyll, and send one of the warriors back towards Evermore.

Switched production in Evermore to a worker. Should be able to get it out in 4 turns. We really need to step up on getting our land improved.

Here's a screenshot from EOT:



Calendar came in, so we can revolt to agrarianism (for real this time) next turn. There's still a worker in the build queue in Hyll, which maybe I should also finish (how long before I start losing hammers on it?) Four workers seems like a good number for the time being.

I assume you're still in favor of crafting next, Commodore?

[Commodore]

I assume you're still in favor of crafting next, Commodore?

As long as it's still needed for mining.

[HidingKneel]

Turn 19, and Calendar has arrived with much fanfare:



We're revolted to agrarianism, so starting near all those floodplains can start to pay off.

What about the barbarian situation, you ask? Well, that seemed to have resolved itself. Apparently the C3 lizard got a little bit reckless, and decided to take us on before healing up:



Flawless victory against the lizardman, and barely a scratch when the remaining barb warrior attacked . So our territory is now barbarian-free, at least for the moment. Also, our defending warrior earned another promotion, as well as the enduring gratitude of the Ljosalfar people. Feeling pretty safe for the moment, I decided to send another of our warriors south to Evermore.

Speaking of Evermore, let's have a look down there, shall we?



A moment of inspiration struck as I was playing the turn, and I think I've got an appropriate naming theme for our lazy elven workforce.

So, now that we're out of immediate danger, time to start counting our chickens before they're hatched. Evermore will complete a worker (with copious overflow) at the end of turn 21, at which point we can spend three turns growing to size 6 (and finishing a warrior). At that point, I'm thinking I'll start our first settler, due out at the end of turn 35.

As you may recall, I was thinking about sending that settler here:



And that's still my top contender. But let's have a look at some other potential (and hopefully future) sites. There are several resources I'd like to claim up north of that location:



The desert hill isn't ideal defensive terrain, but it should still give a bonus to a defending archer. Also there's a possibility of springing it with a water adept later (if I can get a water loan from Yell0w, say). This site isn't quite as strong, and is further out from the capital, so it's not going to get settled first.

But I'd like to have a city there eventually. Ellimist's opening message certainly seemed to imply that I'd find orcs a little further north of there. No idea if that's really true (the units his worldspell bought him ought to have been scattered all over the map). But if so, that's a nice bottleneck to try to seal him off at.

Considerably lower in priority is the following site:



(or possibly the plains hill SW of it). The land down there is pretty lousy. But there are some resources worth claiming (furs and mana), and I'd definitely eventually like to have a buffer between Evermore and anyone coming up from the south.

Finally, we didn't get much of a chance to see lands to the east, but what we've seen looks lush. We might consider putting a city on the hill where our scout was lost:



Pros: Plains hill, can work lots of nice tiles, floodplains for early growth.

Cons: Only three tiles from Hyll, which is more overlap than I like.
Especially given all the peaks (and that we're a creative leader who can potentially grow giant cities), I'm thinking we want to space things out a bit more than that. Also, there's a ruin down that way spawning lizardmen, so we can't safely improve tiles around there at the present time.

Also, I think I'd want to have a better picture of the land out east (and maybe north as well) before I think about settling in that direction.

Now that our domestic drama is concluded, maybe it's time to have a look at foreign affairs? Still haven't met anyone but Ellimist. However, something interesting seems to have happened in the power demographic:



So we can breath a little easier: Ellimist is a little less powerful, and that's probably because he's fighting someone other than us.

I've been holding off on demographics for the past few turns, because they were just downright embarrassing. I was hoping they'd look a little better once calendar came in. Anyway, here's my report card:



It doesn't look great. We've got an F in GNP, trailing everyone except Ellimist right now. And I think even that's an inflated figure, since it's counting culture output from our creative trait.

In manufacturing I'm going to give us an "incomplete". That number looks lousy, but it's because we're building two workers with food right now.

Crop yield is a solid A. We're second in "soldiers" but I have no idea what that means; I think those supplies must still be inflating us. We get an easy A in Land Area thanks to our creative trait.

In population I give us a C-. But that should be an easy fix: Evermore will shoot right to the happy cap after finishing its worker, just in time to take advantage of our dye plantations.

In overall score we're still in last place, with Tholal and Weezel a full tech ahead of us. Which makes us the plucky underdog. And everybody loves the plucky underdog, right?

[HidingKneel]

Turn 20 arrived. I pressed enter, and it looked like this:



Actually, I did poke around a little before pressing enter. Ellimist's power went down again, which can only be a good thing.

So, since nothing is happening in the game (that is visible to me), maybe it's time to continue my education about game mechanics. Time to confess that I didn't understand my micromanagement lesson:

That is exactly correct, and in FFH that's the primary way overflow is done. In BtS with much better slaving, it can also be used to whip in wonders without the malus. The thing you have to be careful about, though, is +100% (or +10%) production modifiers. Those overflow hammers are actually divided by the amount you were getting bonuses on (so a temple's overflow for you is halved, etc). One interesting application of this is with Nationalism, if you're not careful to finish military units with exact hammer amounts you'll lose at least one hammer to rounding from the overflow. Worth it, if you're gaining more than that from the bonus, otherwise, it's a bad civic.

If I'm reading you right, you're saying it's the opposite of what I thought: I can't use overflow to benefit from bonuses to the first build that normally wouldn't apply to the second, because the game automatically corrects for these?

So, aside from the fact that I can use overflow hammers from worker/settler builds to build other units with food, is there any other way to take advantage of the mechanic?

[HidingKneel]

Turn 21 came in early today. Not much to report. Workers finished our first dye plantation, and Evermore completes our third worker. Here's a screenshot from EOT:



The commerce must flow...

In other news, the scoreboard just rearranged itself. I assume that's land points for tiles in the first ring of our first city? So it ought to be possible to do some C&D and figure out how many peaks everyone has adjacent to the capital?

[Mardoc]

So, aside from the fact that I can use overflow hammers from worker/settler builds to build other units with food, is there any other way to take advantage of the mechanic?

You can use rush (cash or whip) hammers to build wonders, up to the limit of your overflow, as Commodore mentioned. You can't do as much as you can with BtS, but there's some room to play.

Often, adjusting the order you build things lets you subtract a turn or two from the overall time, at the expense of not having overflow in the end. When these 'things' are military for a war, that can be pretty important.

But overall, it's true, Civ4 did a lot to make it so that micromanagement to that level just doesn't pay. They didn't get their formulae perfect, there's still places you can squeeze a little more out with a lot of work, but most of the time, focus on the big picture and you'll be ok.

[HidingKneel]

Two turns came in today. Huge news in foreign affairs:



And then there were five...

A few thoughts:

1) Sounds like Ellimist has decided to keep his new acquisitions.
2) He hasn't yet lost peace with the barbarians. If/when he does so, he'll be forced to play a little more defense. Though he can probably manage that well enough with warriors...
3) while using his experienced goblin archers to come at the next of us that he finds.
4) I'm guessing that Kyan is target #2.
5) Ellimist has education? I want education!
6) I guess I'm not getting a water loan from Yell0w.

When I saw that we were getting two turns today, I felt a little bad about posting this earlier:

c) Turn pace actually been really good in this game; we've managed a turn a day with only one exception so far. But Yell0w's typically got the save for at least 12 hours a day (once more than 24 hours). It's possible that turn pace might pick up substantially if he's eliminated.

Turn pace has been really good, and I don't think Yell0w's held on to the save for more than a few hours since I posted that. I thought that was worth pointing out. If you're reading this, Yell0w, thanks for playing, and I look forward to playing with you in FFH XXII!

In domestic news, not much to report. Finished our second dye plantation, and our worker team is heading north to start improving the land around Hyll. Here's a screenshot from EOT:



Finally getting some commerce! Before this turn rolled in, I was having second thoughts about the crafting/mining path, since it's sort of a detour from the education/hunting/WotF beeline. But Yell0w's elimination reminds me that we need the capacity to defend ourselves. Still might go archery after mining; at the very least, we'll have some mines around the capital to greatly speed troop production.