Gotta Catch 'Em All! Hiding Kneel plays the Svartalfar

[Qgqqqqq]

Also as a spectator, illusionary kithra has easily been the most entertaining unit this game.

Its been awesome the cool tricks you've performed with him.

[Merovech]

Wow...

[HidingKneel]

Turn 128. My plan to finally confront GreyWolf was foiled. First of all, he's moved his forces here:



Second, I didn't have as much mobility as I thought I would. (Didn't realize workers could not be hasted.)
Oh well; Evermore lives another turn.

Also as a spectator, illusionary kithra has easily been the most entertaining unit this game.

Yes, he's definitely being nominated for MVP. It was very tempting to switch to Esus a few turns ago:
I've got a great merchant to build the Nox Noctis, sorcery for Gibbon, and I can quickly tech Guilds to upgrade some of my awesome assassins to Shadows. But Kithra + mirror is just too awesome, especially with engineering (potential range of 30 tiles).
For example, this turn, Illusionary Kithra redlined GreyWolf's best Fyrdwell (allowing a griffon to kill another Fyrdwell at 88% odds), pillaged a hamlet, and ended turn in a position which will again prevent GreyWolf from being able to counterattack:



The upside of GreyWolf pulling his forces out of Evermore is that it let me build my new city in peace:



At this point, trade route income is so good that a new size 1 city actually pays for itself immediately (total income went up 5gpt).

Piled most of my forces into the new city:



Next turn I'll raze Evermore one way or another. Either GreyWolf moves his Fyrdwell back to defend and I commit a lot of troops, or he leaves a skeletal garrison and I do it with a handful of fawns. Either way, those forces are in a position to move quickly on Mardoc: our NAP will only last another two turns.

Got my floating eyes this turn, and did flyovers of GreyWolf and Mardoc. Didn't see their whole territory, but it gave me a pretty good idea of what they've got. GreyWolf has his Fyrdwell stack, and a handful of other units in White Horse (including Gilden). Mardoc's got basically nothing, or at least nothing visible:





For comparison:



Of course, those demos I showed you last turn were "cooked": I was in a golden age, running 100% science researching a tech for which I had four prereqs. Here's a more honest depiction of the situation:



As for graphs... which ones do you want to see? Here's power:

[HidingKneel]

Two more turns played. On turn 129, I razed Evermore using three fawns (it was guarded by two warriors).
I interposed Illusionary Kithra to keep him from taking revenge against the surviving fawns.
But between turns, GreyWolf managed to kill the illusion with Gilden Silveric. (Surprised me.. he must have had terrible odds, given the bonus that mounted units get over archers.) It looks like he's decided attrition isn't working for him, so he moved his main stack here:



I'm guessing he plans to threaten Nameless Tower, which is currently guarded by a single warrior. Unfortunately, I think he underestimated my mobility. I had a haste adept and a lot of fresh fawns in Malor. Promote them to Woodsman II and they get 94% odds on his Fyrdwell in jungle. The battle went like this:



Altogether, I lost one fawn, and he lost a stack of 18 Fyrdwell. I used satyrs to kill another the Fyrdwell he used for revenge against my fawns, along with Gilden. I think that's pretty much it: according to my floating eye, Greywolf's got just a unit or two per city now.

Also, this was the last turn of my NAP with Mardoc. He can attack me before my next turn, but doesn't have the forces to do so (also looks like a unit or two per city, at least the cities I can see). I've got the following just out of his reach:



So it looks like the game's pretty much done. I should be able to take one of GreyWolf's production centers and two of Mardoc's frontline cities next turn, and can probably just press on without stopping after that. Unless, of course, the game ends by concession before that.

[Merovech]

Great game, HK!

[HidingKneel]

So, some final thoughts on the game.

Basically, this was a game where everything broke my way. First off was the civ picks: Volanna was by far the strongest of the new leaders (IMO), and probably top-tier among all the EitB leaders. Not clear if she's better than Arendel or not: I think it's map/playstyle dependent. But this was a rather small map, so having strong early military options was awesome.

Originally I imagined that animals were going to play a bigger role than they did. I didn't end up capturing many (though I did some good use out of that 4-move griffon, and almost got a chance to pull a really nice trick with a spider), because I researched animal husbandry rather late and the animals were mostly gone by then (probably due to map size). Still, having wildlands on was a nice advantage for me.

I think the decision to skip calendar entirely and head straight for education was a good one. But it would only be effective under special circumstances: specifically, with the research boost that I got from the great shade we all started with. In a standard FFH game, it would have taken too long to head straight to education without some sort of commerce boost along the way. Anyway, the shade was pretty key to enabling education early, which was key to letting me build scouts that could take shock promotions right out of the box.

Next was the great person from the dungeon, which secured me a nice early economic lead (over everyone except Kyan, who I think also got an extra GP early?)

But really, the most important factor shaping the game was geography, and the fact that I ended up bordering the Doviello. When I first realized this, I thought was doomed. But I didn't appreciate then just how strong Volanna's early game is. Sinister + aggressive is just too much synergy: it's like Volanna gets to build faster Lucians for the price of 16 hammers (quick speed).
Amelia's decision to start with a merchant ended up backfiring in a big way: he never got to expand enough for the merchant to really help his tech rate, so he couldn't defend himself against my hunters.

I was basically forced to expand that way: it was all jungle to the south, and Amelia's land was a more attractive than mine (that's one thing that I think didn't break my way: Amelia had a better capital site, though that was balanced against having three neighbors rather than two). At the end of the day, only four of my cities really belonged to the "Svartalfar" sphere of influence
(and one of those was pretty lousy for most of the game), while six of them were built on "Doviello" land (would have been more, if I hadn't ceded some land to Mardoc for the NAP).

I caught a huge break when Mardoc declared on Kyan. I'm pretty sure Kyan was telling the truth when he said that force he was building was meant for me. After all, wrecking me made the most sense. And he would have done it, if Mardoc hadn't stopped him: I had a few very well promoted recon units that I used to conquer Amelia, while running a skeletal garrison at home.

I think game was decided the turn that GreyWolf took over, and decided to call off his treants. Treants probably could have razed Nameless Tower, and been effective enough at threatening my capital to force me to build warriors instead of the Bone Palace.
When that invasion got called off, I had a long period in which I could do some uninterrupted building. By the time the rest of the world decided to dogpile me, it was mostly too late: I just had too much military capacity in place.

Militarily, my conclusion from this game (and several other EitB games as Volanna vs the AI) is that fawns are amazing for the Svartalfar. The military action that the game ended with (trading a fawn for 18 Fyrdwell) was sort of an extreme example, but I feel like it was a microcosm for the whole game. Aggressive + sinister + 40 hammer investment gives a unit with effective strength of 6 and a lot of mobility, especially in forests (i.e., all my territory) where they also get a hefty terrain bonus.
And fawns that survive combat get to promote to satyrs, which are -very- strong offensive units considering how early you can get them. Also, fawns and satyrs are both unlocked along a tech path that gives economic benefits.

By the time diplomacy was turned on, I think I pretty much had a lock on the game. But the NAP with Mardoc just made it silly.
Mardoc was the most effective in fighting me: the fawn/zombie trade was roughly even, and didn't leave me with many survivors that I could promote (by contrast, my wars with Yell0w and GreyWolf were virtually costless and gave me a lot of satyrs). I was prepared to invade him right before the NAP started. If the game had gone that route, Yell0w would have had no trouble using his big axeman stack to retake the city of Dust, and maybe pressing on and conquering Ahepetr (which was built on desert). That certainly would have made for a more interesting game. As it was, the safe border from Mardoc let me concentrate all my forces on Yell0w and quickly wipe him out. It also meant a safe border with GreyWolf, since GreyWolf wasn't going to put pressure on me until he had Mardoc to back him up.

Of course, the Sheaim NAP looks ridiculous from the point of view of "how to make the Svartalfar lose the game". It looks pretty attractive from the point of view of "how to improve the relative position of the Sheaim". Which is sort of similar to the sense I had of the Clan-Ljosalfar NAP in FFH XX. Maybe an argument for leaving diplo out of the game? This game was certainly more interesting beforehand. (The deal with Mardoc was unexpected for me: my original intention with the diplomacy suggestion was strengthen the anti-Svartalfar coalition.)

All in all, the game was pretty unbalanced but I still had a lot of fun getting to try all the Svartalfar tricks. My favorite moment of the game was the Elohim GM kidnapping. Kithra Kyriel with the Black Mirror was pretty awesome, too (stuff like that almost isn't worth the trouble in the SP game, since the AI has no idea how to deal with even a modest amount of mobility).
My only regret is that I didn't swap to Esus in the endgame. Just for the thematic-ness of it all (not sure if would have made me stronger or weaker: Illusionary Kithra is a lot to give up, but maybe it would be worth it for an archmage and the Nox Noctis? I don't even know what the Nox Noctis does in this version of EitB, other than causing crashes).

tl,dr version: Volanna is overpowered! But if you must play against her, remember that fawns get hefty bonuses when attacking in forests and jungles.

[Mardoc]

Frankly, at the time I signed the NAP, I had pretty much given up. I was just looking for a way to minimize the amount of time I had to spend finishing the game, and actually have a war I could win for a sideshow.

My fundamental problem with contributing to an alliance is that I had thrown away my first 80 turns building and buying two armies that got destroyed, and I was Barbarian with huge army costs. I wasn't coming back from that, with anything but a long stalemate among the rest of you. Take the Svart down, and the Ljo would be in a winning spot. So I gambled it would happen, but instead you won the war while building your econ to frankly ridiculous levels. If I'd contributed, it might perhaps have slowed you, but it certainly would have destroyed my last hope.

You were right, I built exactly 3 units between signing the NAP and its end. There wasn't any other way to have a prayer of catching your economy - but that turned out to be not nearly enough regardless

[Merovech]

Two random thoughts:

I have no idea why you guys let Kyan pick Adrenal. Wasn't this game supposed to be a new leaders showcase (Mahala gets a pass because she hadn't yet been played here and recieved some substantial boots in EitB to bring her to relative parity)? Furia was still available, for example, or you could have at least prevented him from picking a combo as insanely good as EitB Adrenal of the Ljosalfar.

Yeah, GreyWolf inherited a tough situation, in the middle of two wars, but man was that a big time strategic mistake, on par in "c'mon man" level as Yell0w's tactical mistake of placing his entire army in a forest next to you, and much more important. Honestly HK, I never got to see what Kyan was doing because he didn't post, but you definitely outplayed everyone here, and did not just get lucky.

[HidingKneel]

Two random thoughts:

I have no idea why you guys let Kyan pick Adrenal. Wasn't this game supposed to be a new leaders showcase (Mahala gets a pass because she hadn't yet been played here and recieved some substantial boots in EitB to bring her to relative parity)? Furia was still available, for example, or you could have at least prevented him from picking a combo as insanely good as EitB Adrenal of the Ljosalfar.

Seemed fair to me; IIRC he submitted a list of four picks, all of which were new leaders, and didn't get them. Furia was the one new leader he didn't want to play. (I only had Volanna, Averax, and Thessalonica on my list... Furia didn't sound like fun.)
It's true Arendel is a lot stronger than most of the leaders in play. But so is Volanna...

Honestly HK, I never got to see what Kyan was doing because he didn't post, but you definitely outplayed everyone here, and did not just get lucky.

I'd like to think that I didn't *just* get lucky, but I definitely got very lucky this game.

[Merovech]

Two random thoughts:

I have no idea why you guys let Kyan pick Adrenal. Wasn't this game supposed to be a new leaders showcase (Mahala gets a pass because she hadn't yet been played here and recieved some substantial boots in EitB to bring her to relative parity)? Furia was still available, for example, or you could have at least prevented him from picking a combo as insanely good as EitB Adrenal of the Ljosalfar.

Seemed fair to me; IIRC he submitted a list of four picks, all of which were new leaders, and didn't get them. Furia was the one new leader he didn't want to play. (I only had Volanna, Averax, and Thessalonica on my list... Furia didn't sound like fun.)
It's true Arendel is a lot stronger than most of the leaders in play. But so is Volanna...

Ahh, I did not realize this. I somehow missed that in the tech thread when I perused it. That makes a lot more sense.