My laptop is broken hopefully fixed soon but need a temporary turn player in the mean time. Would need to discuss turns over gchat or discord.

Looking for a permanent sub for PB43.  The wetbandits are relocating 500+ miles and my time in dealing with the move and everything ancillary to it is not conducive for Civ.  See my spoiler thread for a semi-recent position.

Game: 1oom dev build
uiextra enabled
Mods: fixbugs.pbx
AI: Classic+

Race: Mrrshans
Difficulty: Impossible
Map size: Medium
Opponents: 5

With the Mrrshan thread going on, I wanted to see if I can win with them on impossible. Since I tend to play better when I have to tell someone what the hell I'm doing (like in succession games), I figured I'll do a written Let's Play. I'm not great at this game, so don't expect to see any wizardry, but hopefully there will be some amount of suspense for whether I win or lose. I'll also show off some of the UI improvements in 1oom ... and ask some questions about whether some of the stranger things I see are bugs in 1oom or exist in the original game too. (Last time, the first two races I encountered were Erratic Industrialist Sakkras and Meklars. I thought for sure this had to be a bug, but actually, Sakkras can have that personality.)

Everybody reading this probably knows this, but the Mrrshans are one of the weakest races in MOO because they lack any economic bonuses and instead get a +4 on their to-hit rolls. In a sense, that can be seen as a bonus to ship production: You save space and money by leaving out the battle computer! I'll let the Mass Effect humans explain how we're not going to do things:

(this is not a variant though; I may allow my pilots some heavily miniaturized battle computers at some point)

Let's get started with a view of the map:



Fast-teching Psilons, Fast-breeding Sakkras, and the Mrrshan's arch enemies, the birds. What could possibly go wrong? All yellow stars are far enough away to be possible starting locations, so I have some elbow room for a time. Some AIs will start on top of one another. That can be good or bad depending on whether they wear each other down or whether one just eats the other. Lots of red stars with (likely) habitable but poor planets and a few blue stars which are the other way around.

There are only two stars in colony range, one red and one blue. The colony ship goes to the red one because it is the one most likely to have a habitable planet, and I'm sending a scout as cannon fodder in case they meet the Guardian of Orion there. (If that had happened, I'd probably have given up on this game though - I'm not going to play the Meklon gambit with the Mrrshans!)



The other scout goes scouting the blue star, just in case it goes against type. I also open up Planetology research with precisely one point on my first turn and get Terraforming +10 as my only choice. Damn it, Improved Eco Restoration is so great to have in the early game, so research is cancelled again in favor of more factories on the homeworld. Three turns later, I find that I was lucky for a change: In orbit around Obaca is a jungle world with room for 90 pop and it's not mineral poor. The blue star, Selia, has a toxic, mineral-rich planet with room for 15 pop once I have the colonization tech for this planet type. Unfortunately, settling Obaca did not bring any more stars into colony range. Propulsion research is going to be a high priority soon!



I next send out a wave of scout ships. There's a time and place for being stingy with scout ships, but this is not one of them. I find Orion just 4 parsecs from Fierias, among other things.

Actually, that's bit of a lie. Tha plan is not to use PZs much of at all.

Other players, you don't belong here!

This will be agreat game.Lets hope bob gave us a prety bad map so the specialist to be important.I meant bad for all not just for me.

I was going to name this "Generic Lurker Thread", but apparently I used that one back in 2015


Anyway, players, begone!

I've decided, in honour of my new elven brethren, to return to my first ever game here at RB for my naming scheme: Enya

So, on to the game. I am Arendel Phaedra of the Ljosalfar.

Arendel is SPI/CRE. The only real difference in FFH2 to vanilla (other than different building bonuses) is that SPI gives me bonuses for Disciple units. So I will definitely be going after a religion (more on that below). Other than that, Spiritual and Creative is still just as nice and EitB has even more civics to swap in and out of and more difficult to get early culture, so I think they are better traits here than in BTS/RBMod.

The other Ljosalfar leaders available were Amelanchier, who has a terrible combo of Raiders/Philosophical (raiders can be very good, but not paired with PHI imo) and Thessa, who's Expansive/Arcane. Actually quite a nice combo, I don't remember why I picked Arendel over her. Oh well.

Ljosalfar
The good elves of Erebus. They start with Exploration, and their palace has Nature, Air, and Life mana. Their civ trait gives an attack bonus to Archery units, which isn't nearly as good as the bonus to Recon units the bad elves get, but still might come in handy if the game lasts long enough and I can actually get somewhere in the tech tree this time.

Their World Spell is March of the Trees and requires Way of the Forests, which means FoL is a requirement for these guys. The spell spawns a Treant, a Strength 10 Woodsman 2 Elemental unit, in every forest and ancient forest within your borders. Those forests then turn into new forests and require time to grow back to usefulness. These Treants last 5 turns (less on quick? I'll have to test it). So useful for a desperate defense or a well timed first strike.

Finally, as Elves, the Ljosalfar get the same elven effects their evil cousins get. That means units with the Elven race-trait get double movement on forests, extra attack in forests, and reduced worker speed. They can also build improvements on forests without removing them.

That last bit basically means, as I said earlier, the FoL religion is mandatory. Since there'll be forests everywhere (and it's best to not improve non-forested tiles to let forests grow on them) it's fantastic for them to turn into ancient forests. It also means that Aristo/Agrarian farms are a no-go (unless you avoid farming any forests), which means you can avoid teching Calender for a while.

In fact, my plan for this game is to start with Agriculture as normal, but then beeline Education for Cottages, then go for FoL, before Calender, before Animal Husbandry, before Crafting, before anything else. I'll get hammers from forests and commerce from cottages, plus an early God-King for my cap. I'll also need to build many more workers than normal, since they're naturally slow, and building stuff on forests takes longer than on clear land.

I picked them because they're different, and require a different playstyle than my previous civs. My second choice was the Grigori, and after than I can't remember.

Oh right, UUs. They have a unique Xbow and HA, so I'll discuss them if I ever build any. They can't build Siege Workshops or any of the units that require one.

Who decided to let the Erebus equivalent of an edgy Reddit atheist lead a magical army anyway?  

Whatever, never mind that, wandering eyes begone.

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers!

We finally have a different lineup for one of my games, as scooter is swapped out for Old Harry. Let's see who everyone is playing:

superdeath: Sigrid is a fine generic choice, and this game feels like it'll have bigger units than average since there are relatively few bases.

Old Harry: Ragna is interesting--I'd say it might be worth it to jump over the wall to access the properties without breaking down the gate, but Ragna charges so slow...

CH: Valder is an obvious choice, as hinted at in the title--lots of properties means you need lots of foot soldiers to capture them.

Bob: Tenri is one I'm still not sure how strong she is--can she also move a unit past the wall?

Next post we'll get into what's actually happening.