[SPOILERS] superjm, My Little Amurite: Conquest is Magic

[superjm]

HERE BE SPOILERS





















THERE STILL BE SPOILERS

[superjm]

Thread will probably be slow as I prepare for my move near the end of the month. I'll still play my turns as quickly as I can while available. Given that this is my second FFH game I'm still more or less just winging it and seeing what works best. Don't have any specific knowledge of my opponents that I can use. Two barbarian civs is a bit scary, as that just means potentially more barb activity towards me.

I picked Dain of the Amurites because I felt like playing a Magic-focused game, even though I never really grasped what the best magical options were in this particular mod. Oh well, if I don't find out, I won't last long in this game

As for the start and "gimmick", uh, I'll let these two screenshots tell the tale.






Is there any practical difference in yields/improvements of hell terrain as opposed to its normal counterpart outside of the obvious inability to grow forests? At least nobody picked an Elven civ, that would have sucked

Only me, Tholal, and Black Sword settled in place.

EDIT - And apparently I need to remind my stupid brain that Rivanna is in fact a Svartalfar, not a Sidar.

[Mardoc]

Is there any practical difference in yields/improvements of hell terrain as opposed to its normal counterpart outside of the obvious inability to grow forests?

It also destroys floodplains, which can be very sad. And the resources are changed. But I'm pretty sure both of those only apply to hell terrain that's made during game, not to mapmaker-hell.

[Qgqqqqq]

Mardoc is correct, hell terrain placed in worldbuilder behaves differently from that occurring naturally. It is largely a change of aesthetics.

[superjm]

Oh geez I completely forgot about this thread.

It's not like a whole lot has happened in the first 50 turns but I guess I should give some sort of report as to what's happening on my end.

First off, I made a mistake in my last post, everyone seemed to settle in place, I was just confused about the turn order.




Barbarian angels (!) running around at the start. Fortunately they have all the debuff promotions giving them -100% strength, allowing my scout to win the battle on the defense. On the other hand, one of those debuffs was Diseased, which means my scout would definitely not be winning another battle.




There really isn't much to say about the first 24 turns. I went worker first, researched Agriculture->Calender, built some warriors while growing to happy cap, improved those rice ASAP, and went to a settler. This screenshot does show what I think was my first few mistakes of this game. I went Exploration immediately after Calender so I could road the path to my second city. However, since I'm PHI and clearly going towards a magical strategy, I wanted Mysticism as soon as possible. Additionally, as you can see, I hadn't switched to Agrarianism at this point. The plan was to wait until the settler finished and then switch before founding the second city, but I also wanted to switch to God King as a stop gap towards eventual aristofarms and didn't want two anarchy turns, so I had to wait until I finished Mysticism to revolt to pull that off.

In retrospect I should have either A) switched to Agrarianism immediately and then switched to God King later if it was worth the second anarchy turn or B) Researched Mysticism before Exploration so I could double (well it ended up being a Triple cause I switched to Religion...) revolt as soon as the settler finished. Really I'm leaning towards the former because working two farms would have sped up the settler by a turn anyway, turning the lost anarchy turn into a wash.






Explored to my west and eventually reached Sheaim lands. The map reveals that he is uncomfortably close to my eastern flank, which I haven't explored yet. My exploration has been woeful, and I'm really considering investing hammers in more scouts to check things out, if possible. Scouting in FFH in general is a perilous task in general so I'm not particularly surprised.




Second city location. Seemed like an obvious choice having plenty of riverside aristofarm tiles, plenty of hills for production, and a wet corn and eventually sheep and fish. Gotta get a monument there first though since religion won't be on the menu for a while yet. Also some barb activity prevented me from improving the corn for a few turns, but no real harm. Also note the tech path. I was really tempted to go straight for Education->Code of Laws but I feel like I really have to step back and take care of the basic worker techs before anything else, and getting to mining gives me another happiness from wines via crafting, potentially gives me copper, and most of all will give my workers more stuff to do and provide more usable tiles for my cities.




That's a dead scout. Also note Lucian, who is fortunately nowhere near my borders. He is heavily promoted though.




Empire as of the current turn (note the extra food in the northern rice, that was via event). Not shown is Elder Councils done in both cities which will provide a significant research boost and allow me to get KotE via scientist as I work through my core techs. Gonna try and expand as well as I can, taking advantage of some good spots to the north/northwest while exploring my southern borders. The north grassland hill pictured here seems pretty good, I can work the wine tile and corn tile immediately and share the northernmost rice farm if I need to!




Oh right. This thing. Well it can't hurt me cause it's held, but I really don't know what the heck to eventually do with this...

[superjm]

Oh. Okay.




So it's going to be one of those scenarios. I'd probably be more confident of rebuffing this thing quickly with just warriors if it weren't for all those drill promotions. As it is, I can one-turn warriors from the capital indefinitely as long as I stay in God-King so I'm hoping things don't get too bad. I was also hoping on keeping a minimal military so I wouldn't have to worry about the extra maintenance from the Shade but oh well, that doesn't seem like it's happening either. May end up having to delete it after all...

Anywho as you can see, this will delay Aristocracy a bit, which is a bummer. Current plan is to beeline Sorcery with some sages (already got one for KotE as planned) and get mages out ASAP. Most everyone else has got their fourth city, so I'm behind on expansion, but I'm hoping I can eventually use the magic line to conquer someone. Barbs hadn't been much of a problem at all until well... just now I guess. If there's another positive, it's that Heralds are recon units so pillaging isn't a concern at all. Keeping Elegy, on the other hand, is a dicey proposition if he decides to attack that instead of the capital.

[Qgqqqqq]

I apologise for that guy, it wasn't intended to occur. While I'm sure caution is necessary, based off what has occurred elsewhere I wouldn't expect him to be attacking you.

[superjm]

Is he set to animal AI or something?

[Qgqqqqq]

I believe he is set to MAGE AI - he was supposed to be held, but I had that as a backup for earlier. So he will enter your borders, but I don't think he will do anything about that.

[superjm]

It's still going to be a problem if he ends up blocking my good tiles but eh, if he doesn't actually attack I should be able to get him out of my hair eventually. If it weren't for those drill promotions...