Fall From Heaven IV planning thread

[Ichabod]

I prefer an ancient age start too. FfH early game, albeit slow, is very fun and challenging, IMO, so I don't see a point in skipping it.

[Amelia]

About your settings... i was thinking about it, and well

Don't read this unless you want yourself spoiled about this tactic

Rantine, with the ability to purchase Barb Cities, is going to break the game.

Honestly, if you can only get cities by capturing them, that is by far the easiest way.

[Selrahc]

I'm happy going ancient age if people are very concerned about classical. I have a slight preference for skipping over the early game, but I'll bow to the people who want it included.

Rantine, with the ability to purchase Barb Cities, is going to break the game.

Doesn't seem overpowered. Barb cities aren't exactly hard to take down normally. And without settlers to act as a production sink people will have slightly larger early game militaries anyway.

What would seem possibly overpowered are the various nations that get slow expansion/powerful cities. Kuriotates, Sidar, Khazad, Ljosalfar are all going to be far better off with just two or three cities than another nation would be, at least economically. The Kuriotates in particular would be incredibly well off in this set up. Fast expand nations on the other hand are a little screwed over.


I'll admit, no settlers is going to be weird as hell. There will be all sorts of issues for everyone. Resources. Territory. Technology. All these things will be in an incredibly odd situation. The basic game will be completely thrown out of whack. And that's kind of what I like about it.

[Sciz]

Something that's come up in the PBEM 3 thread is the question of what to do about Basium/Hyborem if we allow them; especially what's acceptable in terms of AI vs human control, and spoiler knowledge on the part of the human.

Do any of you have an interest in possibly being summoned to our game to play one of these two or the summoning civ? Upsides would be playing a powerful civ with unique mechanics without having to summon them first. And getting to skip the slow 'moved a scout and hit enter' portion of the game. Downsides - hard to predict when you'd start, and we might want to impose spoiler restrictions which would prevent you from watching our game.

We haven't come to consensus that this is the option we want, but I figure I should first check if it's even workable; if no one's interested, then we'll have to go with AI control or compact enforced.

I'd be willing to do that for your game, if you want a human, and to abide by whatever spoiler restrictions you want to place on Hyborem and Basium. Or even be one of a few candidates, who could negotiate with the summoning civ for terms (more relevant with Hyborem). Of course, that willingness is entirely dependent on you guys, if you allow the angels and demons, and if you choose to summon them once allowed.

I'd definitely enjoy playing as either Hyborem or Basium if it is indeed possible, and i'm okay with avoiding everything in your PBEM up to that point, even if Hyb/Basium don't ever get summoned. In that case I can just read through the whole game after it's finished, so no harm done

[Irgy]

Rantine, with the ability to purchase Barb Cities, is going to break the game.

For what it's worth, this is what I was referring to as well. That and

the clan worldspell.

I honestly think you're nuts if you don't simply disallow the choice that activates both of those. It's probably not an "unstoppable" winning strategy, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't at least dominate things to the point of distracting from the rest of the interesting things that you're doing here.

[Selrahc]

What does it take to conquer a Barb city? 5 axemen would do the job every time, to a point ridiculously late in the game. Because the barb city strategy is to have 2 weak archers on defence, and then build raiding parties

My common strategy for Rantine is to take him out with a two axeman bodyguard so you don't get unlucky and lose him to animals. In a multiplayer game you can add opportunistic players to that so you'll definitely want a bodyguard.

Coincidentally the cost to build Rantine + 2 axemen is 300 hammers. The cost to build 5 axemen is 300 hammers. Rantine has the advantage of not taking casualties in the attack, and probably being a little quicker. But the disadvantage that if you lose him you also lose your one and only method of acquiring new cities from the barbs.

If you guys really think that Rantine=Irrevocably broken.. I think I'd have to heavily disagree. Honestly.. I think he only barely edges ahead of capturing cities in the normal manner.

"For the horde" is pretty good though. It will crash your economy, and a lot of the troops it gives you will be spread out and weak, but it stands a good chance of giving you a force capable of taking out an opponent.

The thing is.. you can contrast it with things like Pyre Zombie rush, or Priest rush, or Hippus Horsemen rush, or Adventurer Rush and you wouldn't necessarily pick it. I think that means it isn't brokenly overpowered either. Although it is a lot stronger than normal.

Really though.. Barbarian world does make Barbarian civs(Or.. the clan at least. Any other barbarian led civ can't conquer cities) more powerful. I would argue that No Settlers makes them considerably less powerful though, as Clan is ordinarily one of the most expansive civs in the game.

[Bobchillingworth]

Why is everyone suddenly using spoiler tags? Knowing what the Clan hero and worldspell do is hardly Forbidden Knowledge or a secret technique For what it's worth, I think Selrahc is entirely spot-on with his analysis of why Ratine isn't overpowered. Also, no Clan player who wants to have any sort of economy or defensible empire would or should ever go any try to flip every barb city on the map... it would be utterly impossible to hold or pay for them, plus the score increases would make the barbs declare on you. So really Ratine just gives you a different method of capturing cities, and not a game-breaking edge.


I wouldn't worry about No Settlers leaving everyone with only a couple cities, btw. A lot of the FFH Scenarios use the no settlers option, and it's common for the barbarians to settle about a half-dozen cities per player (assuming you don't purposely fogbust everywhere). The second Illians scenario is a great example. If you go for Barb World and have a mapmaker presumably you could just have them make sure that everyone has a certain number of cities reasonably close by, anyway.


Also, just a heads up that you guys might want to avoid Last Days. The game is known to frequently bug if the AC gets high enough for the Avatar of Wrath to spawn. It has nothing to do with the Avatar himself, but rather so many units getting raged / turning barb- the game apparently cannot handle the way that certain random units are affected, and so will never finish doing its end-of-turn calculations. The only solution is to go into worldbuilder and manually delete the offending units, which probably is not practical nor advisable for a competitive mp game. There's a thread about the problem on Civfanatics I can try to dig up if you want more info.



(I'll be dedicated lurking Selrahc along with the Rev, btw)

[Ichabod]

Well, Selrahc makes a good point. Rantine wouldn't be imbalanced comparing to other imbalances in FfH. So I wouldn't mind in having the Clan in the game.

No settlers would certainly add a lot of flavour to the game, but it could make the situation very hard for some players, depending on random factors. Well, the game is supposed to be fun, above all, so it's not that big of a problem.

[Sciz]

If anyone wants to dedicatedly lurk me that would be cool also

[Selrahc]

So have we reached a broad consensus here? I'd say its time to move on to getting together some instructions for Square Leg/working out the nitty details, and picking leaders.

This is what I understand as the situation

1. Ancient start
2. Barb world
3. No settlers (But starting with two settlers)
4. Raging barbs
5. Wildlands
6. Unrestricted leaders snakepick

Here are a couple of things we want to sort...
A. Living world
B. Acheron
C. "Big 3" natural wonders, and unique features in general
D. Compact settings
E. Difficulty settings

I would say:
A: Yes
B: Either preplaced or fully on. This is going to be the game least affected by Acheron.
C: Got a weird little idea for this. See below.
D: Same settings as PBEM III? I'd even be fine with two humans on a Basium team.
E: Emperor

My idea for the "Big Three" is as follows. Anyone can request that they get a specific Unique Feature within immediate range. It can be any of them, but obviously the big three are the most likely. The rest of the natural features are at the discretion of the mapmaker.