[SIZE="5"]The Competition[/SIZE]
Following the grand tradition of spoiler threads that have come before, let's size up our opponents. Here's what we're up against:
Yell0w: Cardith Lorda of the Kuriotates.
The Kuriotates have "sprawling" as a civ trait. Which means they can have a very limited number of cities (2-5, depending on map size: not sure what that will work out to be in this game), but their cities can work an extra ring of tiles. They also get bonus sources of happiness, to help them build huge mega-cities. Altogether, it's a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage in one package. Whether it's more of an advantage or a disadvantage depends a lot on the map (and probably also on the player).
Cardith's traits are expansive and adaptive. His adaptive trait starts as philosophical, which is an especially good trait to have in the early game
(quick elder councils, and they can get a great sage up twice as fast as everyone else. Moreover, academies are particularly useful to them, since all of their commerce is concentrated in a small number of cities). Later on, Yell0w can switch that to something even better, like financial.
Expansive is rather lackluster for the Kuriotates. They only really need to build a small number of settlers, to found their mega-cities. After that, they can crank out lots of settlements, but in my experience those offer pretty marginal benefits, unless you need one to claim bronze or iron or something like that.
Succeeding with the Kuriotates definitely requires a different mindset than most civs. Though they can have giant cities with tons of production, they are limited in the number of things that they can build at a time. This can make it very difficult to compete militarily against larger empires. It also means that the Kuriotates don't get too much benefit from conquering the cities of their opponents (other than setting those opponents back). They're pretty much optimized to pursue cultural victories (unless you're playing on a tiny map, in which case they can't build a third city). On the other hand, they've got a lot of synergy with the mounted line, making them quite dangerous if they decide to go that route.
I have no idea how Yell0w will decide to go with the Kuriotates. It looks like he's fairly new to RB, having joined at roughly the same time that I did. Having looked at his spoiler thread in FFH XIX, I'll say he's made some decisions that aren't the ones I would have made :neenernee.
Color-coded threat level assessment:
Mottled Cucumber
Weezel: Varn Gosam of the Malakim.
Looking at leader traits alone, Varn is definitely the best leader in the game. He starts with the same traits as Arendel: spiritual and creative. However, like Cardith, he's adaptive: later in the game, he can swap that creative trait for anything he likes. Creative is a nice trait to have early on, but drops off substantially in usefulness once you have another way to generate culture (like a state religion). At that point, Varn can choose to be financial instead.
Of course, there's more to a civ than just the leader's traits. In an unrestricted leaders game, Varn would be my first pick every time. But he leads the Malakim, who are pretty mediocre apart from their leader.
They get bonus commerce for working desert tiles, which is pretty much useless unless those desert tiles are also floodplains. (They can really thrive if they start with a lot of floodplains, though.) They also get some bonuses for pursuing the divine path, including a worldspell which can produce a bunch of free priests of their state religion. Combine that with Varn's spiritual trait, and the Malakim are easily the best civ in the game if you want to go the divine route.
As for Weezel as a player, I don't have much to go on. Like me, he's played as lot of FFH in SP, but not in MP. With the adaptive and spiritual traits, playing as Varn gives you a lot of flexibility, and I have no idea what route he'll decide to go. Based on the title of his spoiler thread, I'd guess that he's thinking about going with the "canonical" approach to the Malakim: going for the Empyrean and Chalid. We'll have to see.
Color-coded Threat Level Assessment:
Atomic Tangerine
Tholal: Arturus Thorne of the Khazad.
I actually typed Kandros Fir there at first, and corrected it when looking back at the main thread. Then I rubbed my eyes and checked again, but it looks like he means it. Arturus is a strange choice: a mediocre leader of a civ that also has one of the top tier leaders. His traits are organized, industrious, and ingenious. Organized is a pretty good trait: it cuts down on expenses,
gives courthouses and lighthouses at half price, and lets you build command posts (which are very nice buildings). Ingenious is a nice perk, giving you cheap upgrades on your troops. But industrious is sort of weak: maybe he plans on chasing wonders with it? We'll have to see. Anyways, I'm certainly glad he chose Arturus over Kandros; one fewer financial leader that I'll need to keep up with.
The Khazad are fairly strong civ overall. Their special mechanic is their dwarven vaults. These give bonuses and penalties depending on how much gold you have on hand (which is divided by the number of cities you control).
Early on, when your vaults are empty or near empty, they cause unhappiness. But once you fill them up, you get some hefty bonuses to happiness and production. All in all, this slows down their early game a bit (both due to the unhappiness and giving them a disincentive to pursue rapid expansion), but makes them a real powerhouse later on.
Because of their vault mechanic, the Khazad are strongly inclined to pursue bonuses to gold production. I'd be surprised if they don't beeline the Runes of Kilmorph. But then again, Tholal has already surprised me with his choice, so who knows?
As for the player: it looks like Tholal has been around for a while, and this is not his first PBEM. He's also designed a FFH mod which substantially improves the AI (which is what I usually play against in the SP game). So it's safe to say that he knows the ins-and-outs of the game pretty well.
Color-coded threat level assessment:
Light Salmon
Ellimist: Jonas Endain of the Clan of Embers.
Jonas's traits are spiritual, expansive, and barbarian. The barbarian
trait really changes the way he plays the game. He's at peace with the barbarians (at least initially), and so doesn't have to worry about them in the early game.
The Clan gets a huge advantage in the form of warrens: a Clan-only building available fairly early (at Masonry) which lets him build two units at once. If I recall correctly, this works with settlers and workers. That means that with the expansive trait, he's four times faster at building settlers than everyone else. This allows the orcs to expand like cockroaches over the land. And thanks to their barbarian trait, they don't have to worry too much about defending the cities they build (at least from barbarians).
But it's not all bad. The barbarian trait also comes with a science penalty. In addition, it means they can't ever build libraries to boost the science production in their key cities. This means they are generally slow to tech. But the sheer numbers they can put out makes them dangerous even at low levels of technology. If they get to iron working, they can be near unstoppable: with iron weapons, their champion replacement clocks in at a base strength of ten.
As for the player: it looks like Ellimist is fairly experienced at MP FFH. I see that he managed to win FFH PBEM IX playing as Charadon (who is surely the weakest leader in the game by far). So he clearly knows what he's doing.
Color-coded threat level assessment:
Mustard Brown
Kyan: Rhoanna of the Hippus.
I'd say this is the strongest leader/civ combination on the board for this game. First off, she's the only financial leader in the game (at least at the start; I'm sure it will be an adaptive pick), which gives her a solid economic advantage. But she's also one of the best rushers in the game. The Hippus worldspell, Warcry, is fantastic. It gives each of their units a bonus point to strength and movement (which slowly wears off randomly over time). This is huge in the early game. It makes them even better at rushing than the Doviello: crank out a few warriors, locate opponent, then pop the worldspell to send a couple of Lucian-equivalents in their direction. Of course, that's probably not the optimal time to use the worldspell. But they have a strong incentive to use it early: an extra point of strength is huge in the early game, and slowly fades to irrelevance as the game goes on.
The other thing that the Hippus have going for them is their horselord trait: it gives all of their mounted units an extra point of movement, and a bonus to withdrawal rate. This means that horsemen constructed by the Hippus start with four points of movement (which can be further boosted by warcry, haste, or choosing the appropriate promotions). This makes them great at raiding and pillaging. They can also get their horsemen up to 95% withdrawal by taking all of the flanking promotions. This lets them fight lots of risky battles, which leads to lots of experience and lots more promotions. So they tend to have a solid military. Which they can support with their solid economy. Did I mention that this is the strongest leader/civ combination on the board?
As for Kyan, I gather from Commodore's warnings in the main thread that he's a pretty experienced civ player. He claims not to be very knowledgable about FFH, but I didn't get that sense by reading his FFH PBEM VII thread. In any case, it looks like he'll have no shortage of good advice: so far, his spoiler thread has more posts than all of the others combined.
I'd say it's very likely that someone will be on the receiving end of a warcry-rush in this game. Let's just hope it isn't us.
Color-coded threat level assessment:
Deadly nightshade.
. You're right, Gilden is a Dovello-equse gameplan, and who wants to play the Dovello? (Exception: Tight rush map...in which case, yeah, archery ho!)
![[Image: PBEMXX%20HidingKneel%20T0.JPG]](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16549110/PBEMXX%20HidingKneel%20T0.JPG)
) start striking. Engineer is a big yeah, as this land calls for lots of early workers and settlers to maximize things. Nice to be an elf in all this woodland. Is this a mirrored map?