So I tried a couple new games in 1.51 on Hard and usually within 5-10 turns I get defeated, or trapped into sharing space with enemy wizards that send immense amount of settlers and troops/summons. 

If I try to stop them expanding, it results in war and within a couple turns stacks of mid tier units/summons destroy me. 

How does one even get started? Say for example with Life High Elves. Or Life Warlord Barbarians. 

I'm clearly not an experienced player but this seems rather hopeless to me when I just have swords/spearmen and Sharee(?) throws gorgons at me. 

Sure I have Heroism but I can't afford the maintenance to cast it as a buff and casting it one by one in combat is either too slow or my units get black sleep repeatedly and I get swarmed by stacks either way.

I can win on Normal but it seems a bit too easy, Hard seems like too huge a jump imo

Believe it or not, this isn't because of Haphazard's thread.  I was planning this since last year's Alpha Centauri thread, to do sometime after I finished with Civ 5.  Just a coincidence that Haphazard brought up the same game at the same time.

As the title says, I'll play Alpha Centauri.  This isn't going to be break-the-game shenanigans, but a normal (if highly skilled) tour to work through and show the mechanics in detail.  Relevant settings: Pod scattering off, directed research, Transcend (highest) difficulty, all win conditions enabled though I'll target winning by transcendence.  I'll go a few turns at a time, reporting along the way, starting tonight.  I did a couple 50-turn practice starts this week to refresh myself.  I intend to include all mechanics as fair game, although I'll leave out of bounds a few outright bugs like setting patrol points to make a unit elite.

First I'll offer a question as to which of two factions to play.  Eliminating the rest: the University is overpowered and boring, Morgan requires an extreme ICS style, Believers suck, Sparta sucks less but still doesn't do anything besides conquer with impact rovers.  The Peacekeepers could be in play, but Haphazard is doing them; and on the highest difficulty the extra talent does skew significantly for how you manage happiness.

That leaves Gaia's Stepdaughters or the Human Hive.  I think these are also the two most interesting factions to show as builders.  Lacking Free Market is the big swing.  Pretty much every faction that can usefully run FM is best off doing so, but because FM can't police drones, you expand out into endless bases all at size 1.  Gaia and Hive are the two that most lean away from ICS towards more interesting base development.

And I really can't pick between the two.  Gaia is more versatile across different SE choices (the +Efficiency matters a lot more than the +Planet.)  Hive is locked in to Police/Planned, but may have more interesting challenges in the lack of energy and pop-booming.  So what does my audience think?

For reference, as I play along, I'm keeping a save every turn and uploading them here. http://dos486.com/alpha/hive/saves/  Just this request: don't play ahead of me, both for leaking spoilers and for overshadowing my timeline with any other.

Inspired by haphazard's Alpha Centauri thread, I recently decided to reinstall the Planetfall mod.  


For those who are unfamiliar, Planetfall attempts to roughly recreate SMAC using the Civ IV engine. I'm not certain how authentic the experience is, having never actually played the original, but it's an enjoyable enough game on its own.


RB briefly flirted with Planetfall back in 2012, running an SG and a couple PBEMs (one of which was played to completion). Eventually interest waned, likely due to the SG turning into a slog and the mod's well-meaning but neurotic developer obsessively arguing with players and adjusting the game based on whatever seemed to be most effective at any given moment in one of the PBEMs. I figure more than enough time has passed for Planetfall to be a fresh experience.


Looking for 4-5 players. Be forewarned that the mod falls somewhere between vanilla FFH and base BTS in terms of balance, which is to say that you can expect a reasonably competitive game, but one where luck will be a significant factor.


Open to a variety of settings; the only ones I'll insist on are banning Yang, who gets insane bonuses to unit production, and disallowing players from using pods (goody huts) to rush wonder completion (if not disabling pods altogether).

What realms d you win the fastest with, not counting 11 book strategies?

So who is up for another CIV VI PBEM?

I would like to do another no civ bans game with the new expansion and the DLCs.

Basically unbalance madness, but if everyone is unbalanced, things balance out.

Anything else that should be banned?

Civ bans: Scythia, Sumeria, Mongolia

Wonder bans: VA

Map Settings:

Island plates
No huts, barbarians on

Roster:

Chevalier Mal Fet
Rowain
Emperor K
TheArchduke

There was discussion in the postgame threads of Civ 6 PBEM 7 on possible inclusions for a Civ 6 MP balance mod. So I tinkered around in SQL Lite for a few hours and now give you:

The Really Balanced Mod Of Destiny

See attached for the Mod file. Unzip the folder, and move that folder to your Mods location on your computer. Mine is: C:\Users\[WindowsUserNameHere]\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization VI\Mods

Changelog:

The Obvious: Venetian Arsenal only produces double units in the city where the wonder is built.

• This seemed the no brainer that was also my test of "Can I do something moderately complex?". And it works!
  

• Yeah your flatlands aren't so worthless now are they? Gonna think twice before playing on New World Age again?
  

• Obviously something needs to be done about production scaling, chopping/harvesting one of the things to be addressed. What do you think?
  

Attached Files

  ReallyBalancedModOfDestiny.zip (Size: 1.44 KB / Downloads: 3)

New Game First turn and I have already the feeling I should resign

For The King (FTK) is a roguelike adventure game created by developer Iron Oak Games and released in April 2018 after a long period in early access. This was another Kickstarter game in the mold of FTL: Faster Than Light, and it shares a number of features in common with its sci-fi themed predecessor. As in other roguelike games, each playthrough is a one-time adventure done with only a single savegame file. If your party is defeated, that's it, game over. Start over from the beginning once again and try to do better the next time. For The King retains the common roguelike trait of possessing a punishing difficulty level, and due to the different starting party combinations and randomly-generated maps, the game has a high amount of replayability. I've also found myself loving the polygon art style used in this game, reminiscent of the early 3D games of the 1990s. I've been playing the game on Livestream for the last two weeks and wanted to put something together for me website to share with the forums here.



One of the biggest faults of FTK is a lack of good documentation online. There's an official Wiki page that's somewhat helpful, but I couldn't find anything that went into much depth about serious strategy for this brutally difficult game. The forums for the game were mostly people complaining about how hard it was to play and the fact that there's level-based scaling involved, while the Livestreams that I watched were invariably other newcomers who had no idea what they were doing. It became clear that if I wanted to have a real strategy resource for FTK, I was going to have to create it myself, and that's exactly what I did at this website page. I walk through a full Tutorial game on the medium difficulty level, which will hopefully serve as a searchable resource for anyone else who might be interested in getting into this game. I think the Realms Beyond crew will like this game a lot, and since it's a coop game, maybe I'll even get some playing partners for myself down the road out of this.



This seemed like a game that the RB crowd might enjoy. If you haven't heard about it before, it might be worth a look.

For a long time I never understood why Life got superior melding spirits in MoM, but now I think it actually makes a lot of sense and leaves something to be desired in CoM.

All of the realms beside Life have relatively capable Common strategic summons. But they wanted Life to be different and be more dependent on Normal Units. So they didn't want to give life a Common strategic summon at all, but that would have been unfair because Common strategic summons are the best way to guard nodes. So what they did was give Life a Common summon that could meld and guard a node all by itself because forcing a Life player to put Spearmen on every node would have been prohibitive, plus a Spearman on a node wouldn't have been very helpful since Life doesn't have many effective combat spells that could be used to help defend a node.

I guess you could put a Guardian Spirit on a node to defend a node, but doesn't seem as effective as doing that with other realms and also kinda undermines what was unique about Life in MoM.