I've already been thrown for a bit of a loop, by the choices everyone else made on civs - I thought I'd be the only one who wanted to break the world! I suppose I ought to have known better given the intensity of the debate on Hyborem and Basium's settings
So far, neither of the other games has broken the world; the closest anyone's come has been Selrahc freezing it! And he's only frozen a small piece of his Erebus
But, with opponents choosing Sheaim, Bannor, Malakim, Ljosalfar, and Elohim, I suspect we're in for a very religion heavy game, Armageddon front and center!
I had originally planned to rush for Hyborem, possibly as the Sheaim myself, and depending on the situation either summon him to the game or switch to him myself. Now, though - that might give Irgy's Sheaim too much of a benefit.
A second plan had been to go for the Bannor, summon Basium and feed him with crusading Demogogs. Which...isn't going to work either. Although, I ought to be able to get Basium first, if I go more or less directly for him, which would force Mr. Yellow to decide between using his main benefit and help me, or to stay without it. I might even seriously plan to switch to Basium and let the Lanun unlock all my angels for me - with 3 Good civs and 2 Neutral, there ought to be plenty of future angels in the world, just waiting to be slain and rise again
The Lanun don't have any particularly good units themselves, aside from navy which I expect to be strictly secondary on an easy-contact map. So I do need to pick a religious line, and drive hard for it to make up for that lack. It's just not obvious anymore which way I should go. Fortunately, I don't have to make that decision quite yet, with an ancient-era start and a civ that really ought to be able to get a tech lead.
My next few posts will be info about my enemies, and then resummarizing info about the Lanun. Maybe after I organize my thoughts, it'll be more clear to me which way is best. If you want a good explanation while you're waiting on me, though, Amelia's done an excellent job explaining their power over in PBEM 2.
Amelia, my take on the Lanun is that their bonuses are strategic, not tactical. Which makes them less obvious; everyone can see how nasty a vampire can be, or a Priest of Winter, but when you see the boarding party is less strong and only gains the ability to capture ships, it's kinda underwhelming. You don't see that Lanun boarding parties will be available when everyone else is stuck on axes.
That said, Lanun don't even have the massive weaknesses like Dwarves' no-magic or Grigori Agnostic, so I don't quite get it either
Well, everyone looks at Lanun and say "oh, they're the civ used to rush Basium or Hyborem". I still don't get it lol. Even in my thread there were people saying "Lanun is pretty useless". We'll see i guess.
The Lanun are great, they just don't have the shiny UU that's nearly impossible to counter and such a clear thing to shoot for that going for anything else would seem silly. Fortunately for the Lanun, there are many incredibly strong base tier 4 units in FFH and strong religious units they can turn to. Whether or not you can beat everyone else to them enough that a few tier 4 units will be the edge you need to help you win the game is the challenge. Best o' luck to ye Captain Mardoc! I'll be lurking with interest.
Quote:So far, neither of the other games has broken the world; the closest anyone's come has been Selrahc freezing it! And he's only frozen a small piece of his Erebus
I'm doing my best!
Quote:Spoiler for those playing in PBEM 2 and thus unable to read my thread:
To check.. you don't want us reading what's in the spoiler? Or you're providing it for us to read? I'm assuming the former.
Quote:with 3 Good civs and 2 Neutral, there ought to be plenty of future angels in the world, just waiting to be slain and rise again
Bear in mind that alignment of civs has very little do with getting angels. It gives you a few angels when a city of theirs is razed, and that is the only real effect.
Whether a troops comes back as an angel depends entirely on what religion it has, with an exception for the mortal troops of mercurians who always come back. A trooper with Ashen Veil, Octopus Overlords, Council of Esus or Fellowship of Leaves will not leave an angel, no matter if their leader is an Order state religion Elohim. Similarly a trooper which has Runes, Empyrean or Order will always leave an angel regardless if the leader is an Ashen Veil Calabim. Religion for soldiers is random(Except for priests and similar), and is based on the religions present in a city, although it is slightly biased towards the state religion.
In my SP experience, Lanun have good, perhaps the best, potential to be the runaway AI civilization, technology-wise. I have fond memories of an elvish game, where I finally got out of my tundra, beat back the evil clowns who tried to rush me, and started my Priest of Leaves - powered terraforming, when the Lanun showed up with a dozen Arquebusiers at my doorstep.
However, since the random map generator can land them in the middle of the continent, and since for a long time the AI would not build pirate coves, they were very much a middle-of-the-pack AI civilization, which is why, unless you played them yourself a few times, you could be discounting them heavily.
The Sheaim...their insane lust for power is such that they're willing to destroy the entire world to get it.
The Sheaim have quite a large variety of unique units and abilities in this mod, generally with the theme of power ahead of morality, better to rule in Hell then serve in Heaven, demonic pacts, and so on and so forth. As you might have guessed, they're Evil.
The Sheaim palace provides its inhabitants with Chaos, Death, and Fire mana, to continue the theme, and their world spell is called 'Worldbreak'. As a recurring theme for the Sheaim, this spell is directly tied to the Armageddon counter. For everyone outside Sheaim lands, things catch fire - Forests and Jungles have a AC/4 chance of starting to burn, as does every city. A city fire, if started, has a 10% chance per building to destroy that building; all units in cities also take AC% damage. This is obviously quite powerful during a war; people dependent on forests (like the elves) also need to worry.
The Sheaim's second Armageddon-related bonus is their Planar Gates. These nasty buildings (which are fortunately 300 hammers) start spawning a wide variety of nasty creatures for free for the Sheaim. As long as the AC is below 50, each gate has only a 6% chance per turn of spawning a unit, and can only support one of each type at a time (the total number of Revelers, say, can be no higher than the number of cities with both a Gate and a Gambling House). As the AC increases, so do their free units, up to 4/gate and 15% odds of spawning/turn at AC 100.
Each spawn requires a specific building to also be present in the city:
Gambling House: Revelers
Mage Guild: Mobius Witch
Carnival: Chaos Marauder
Grove: Manticore
Public Baths: Succubus
Obsidian Gate: Minotaur
Temple of the Veil: Tar Demon
These mostly each replace a unit on the tech tree that the rest of us have to train, and vary from Chaos Marauders, who are simply Str 4, can use weapons, like an Axeman, to the Manticore 12/8 +1 Poison, move 3, flying.
Since the Sheaim want an high AC, it'd be a shame not to give them the ability to get there! They have a civ-specific ritual, Elegy of the Sheaim, that increases the AC by 5 and is repeatable.
The Sheaim also have power early, in the form of the Pyre Zombie (yep, not only is it dead, but it's also on fire!) - Str 3, +1 Fire, can use weapons, and crucially - when they die, every adjacent unit takes 10% damage. No stacks of doom against the Sheaim! And a sufficiently large stack of these can wipe out whatever it hits.
Tebryn, the leader Irgy chose to go with, goes well with the Evil Demonic-Pact-Making Wizards, as an Arcane Summoner - all Sheaim mages start with more experience, gain experience much quicker than normal, and their summons stick around for three turns instead of the normal one. Finally, all Sheaim mages get the Sundered promotion, which gives their summons the Stigmata promotion - an extra +AC/2 to their strength.
There are two periods in which I need to fear the Sheaim. First, the Pyre Zombie period, where the only defense is a good offense, and the best units for killing Zombies are those that don't stick around afterwards. Second, late game, when their summons (both from the mages and the Planar Gates) can, heedless of casualties, sustain an awesome war of attrition. Their main handicap here is that they can't control their production rate - a fixed percentage chance of a random unit from the Gates, no more than one summon per mage per turn; if you can kill the mages and kill their summons faster than they naturally spawn, there's little the Sheaim can do about it. If/when I fight the Sheaim in this period, assassins are the order of the day.
Finally, given their heavy dependence on raising the Armageddon Counter, if you can keep Armageddon at bay, you limit them severely. Which brings us, of course, to the Elohim.
Late check-in as your dedicated lurker. I have very little playing experience with the Lanun, so my advice may not be worth much.
A few corrections to your excellent Sheaim writeup: summons only last two turns for Summoners. This was an application of the nerf hammer when people were complaining that three turns was just too good. Both Sheaim leaders are trying to end the world, not hoping to wrest rule of it away from the demons.
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