[Spoilers] Bobchillingworth asks: "Who are the Warriors?"

[Bobchillingworth]

Waaaarriors, come out to plaaaaay...









The One and Only:




Yup, that's the full movie. Enjoy!

[Ichabod]

Ded-lurking!

Have you sent your picks yet?

[Bobchillingworth]

Sweet! I knew posting a feature-length film would pay dividends!


Yeah, I sent in my picks. In order:


1. Auric

2. Falamar

3. Amurite Chick



Auric is first for three reasons- Flexibility (he isn't locked into a tech straightjacket to be viable and can handle any terrain), Dickishness (making my land an icy mess, summoning barbs and turning the world into a tundra wasteland will be hilarious), and Stasis (isn't banned, also gives a Golden Age).


Falamar is second because he can run a couple strategies I'm interested in. On a map with a fair amount of water, he can exploit the mobility of boats to project force over a wide swath of land (which certainly worked well when employed against me in XXXIII). On any script he can employ an incredibly ill-conceived Drafted Longbow scheme I came up with- get the Mines wonder, run engineer specialists to bulb the LB tech, adopt one of the various drafting civics to stuff cities with really difficult to kill LB while employing Charismatic to build up a Mage army. Plus people will probably assume I'm going to do some stupid Hyborem rush, again.


Amurite Chick would basically run the Falamar LB strategy, except she'd be employing Firebows, which have the advantage of actually being decent units, but the not-insignificant downside of being burdened by slow-ass Amurite teching.




I actually considered putting Jonas as my first, again trying to land the Mines wonder, this time with the expectation of bulbing up to Ogres, but I realized after a couple humiliating losses to the AI in test games that I have absolutely no fucking idea how to play as him. Just game after game of crashing my economy. Way too much balancing between expansion, unit costs, early teching and trying to figure out the optimal time to construct Warrens.

[Ichabod]

Stasis gives a GA in EitB? Couldn't find it in the changelog. I guess duration was reduced, then.

The Illians are definetely the coolest civ around. Turning everything into ice, while not a good choice economically most of the time, is also incredibly cool. And I just realized that this paragraph is filled with obvious puns...

I hope you can get the Illians. I'd try to play them myself if I joined a game.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, I'll need to double-test, but I believe Sareln reduced the duration of Stasis by 50%, and then to make up for that also had it give the Illians a free GA.


Temples of the Hand will be built in cities under any of three conditions:

1. It's a border city which I'm worried enough about holding that making it mostly useless to my opponents outweighs the downside of replacing every tile with difficult-to-work grassland equivalents.

2. The land sucks, and ice is a marked improvement.

3. The land is mostly grassland anyway, and the happiness from the Temple justifies the extra worker turns needed for further tile improvements.



I'll have to remind myself to be a lot better about scouting in this game. Even without huts or lairs, I'm going to need to know where my neighbors are by around T60 if I'm going to consider PoW rushing someone.



Extremely preliminary early tech plan would be Agr -> Calendar (or Crafting if I've got wines but no unforested Calendar resources) -> AC -> Myst -> Edu -> Crafting (if not already researched), -> Mining. Obviously the presence of Gems or Gold pushes Mining up earlier. Myst before Edu seems like the right choice in most circumstances, especially since the barbs are going to be pretty ruthless & make placing and protecting cottages a real pain.

[Ichabod]

It's raging barbs, right? The frostling ritual will be very risky. I like it!

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, there's going to be a bushel of barbs one way or another


There are really only three Illian Rituals worth considering:


* The most important is The Hand, or whatever ritual gives the PoW. Completing it is mandatory. The PoW will be our only healers for a long time (until Regeneration Mages), the only units which will be able to Cure Disease from bad mutations, and by far our most potent military force early-into-mid game. The only question is when to complete it- if the barbs are easily enough handled by warriors / axes / jav throwers, and there are no viable rush targets, then I would rather invest the hammers in a settling party.

* Second most important is The Deepening, or whichever one freezes the world over. It hardly benefits us at all, but it has the potential to be absolutely crippling to our opponents. With no diplomacy, we won't have to worry much about alienating allies. The ice & tundra it spews everywhere takes ages to fade away, so the ritual is essentially equivalent to smacking everyone with a permanent (but milder) version of the Blight.

* Third is Samahain, the barb-summoning ritual. Another ritual which really doesn't benefit us much. This one will be pretty tricky to deploy correctly, and I might never get around to building it. Although it's cheap by ritual standards, it's still far too expensive to complete before The Hand. It's a good source of exp for our units, but it has a number of issues. It won't affect barbarian leaders (unless they've broken peace with the barbs), and there are bound to be one or two of them in this game. It might catch an opponent or two off-guard and cause them to lose workers and/or panic-build military, but that's far from guaranteed & we won't even know if it worked. And of course it has a lot of potential to backfire, depending on what kind of frostlings spawn, and where. I can't rule it out, but it's going to be difficult to justify the hammer cost.

[Ichabod]

Wait, you mean we won't try to make Auric ascend in this game?

[Bobchillingworth]

Auric Ascended has many uses. For instance, The Draw is very helpful should our cities be too large. Or if years of peace have made our people soft, and only the challenge of AW can invigorate them. And Auric is fantastic if we want to give our strongest opponent the most powerful weapon in the game.


Yeah, realistically he's never going to happen :P Drifta would be more likely, and Drifta has awful requirements. I do need to put some thought into late-game military, though; I suppose recon + lots of mages is the obvious choice. Of course the main priority is going to be "how to manage Ellimist", because he is by far the most dangerous guy in the room. Dave is a good builder, but very passive. Yell0w is a decent warmonger, but has a tendency to bite off more than he can chew. GreyWolf hasn't had much luck so far. Ellimist is aggressive, clever and has a pile of victories.


I'll post some thoughts on the Illian Economy later. Fun!!!

[Bobchillingworth]

Hrmm, kind of torn about this "Kredom" guy. On one hand, this community certainly could use some fresh blood, and as a mod I should probably be welcoming people into games. At the same time though we've already completed most of the set-up stuff, and having 6 players will very likely slow down the turnpace enough as to make 1-a-day infeasible by the mid-game, if not earlier. Plus I have no idea how good this new person is going to be at keeping the save moving. I've essentially already said as much in the tech thread, but my strong preference is to stick with the 5 players we already have- Mardoc, once you have the picks from Yell0w please proceed with generating the map, unless a majority of players want Kredom joining as a sixth team.



Also, as threatened, here are my thoughts regarding Illian economics / civics:


My first civics change will be into God King and Agrarianism. Unless I have a surprisingly economically fertile start, it doesn't make much sense to me to wait until I have landed Education for Apprenticeship- although that's a good civic to have.

Under the majority of circumstances, the next wave of civic changes should occur once I have expanded enough as to make God King economically burdensome, and have built the PoW (which are the main big-ticket item of the early-to-mid game). Aristocracy is tempting- Temples of the Hand mean that I will be able to spam aristofarms across most of the map (unless Mardoc is using a Highlands script or something). I think that would be a mistake however, for a couple reasons. First, production is likely to be an issue, with Temples of the Hand making mines only 3 hammers, being unable to run Arete, having a fairly low happy cap and no special hammer-producing civ-specific gimmick to make up the shortfall. Running Conquest will make up for a lot of the difference when producing military, which doesn't gel at all with Aristocracy. Second, barring some sort of river-saturated wonderland, an Aristofarms economy places a burden on me to research Sanitation and Construction. I'll want Sanitation eventually, since I'm going to need Public Baths, but Construction does little for me.

So I expect to be using cottages as the backbone of my economy. That means City States for my Government, which has great synergy for a civ which can make excellent use of almost any terrain. In the "Cultural Values" column, I'll very likely stick with Nationhood all game. Labor is more difficult- Apprenticeship means 2 promos on new units when combined with Conquest, but Slavery will help a lot with getting infrastructure in place, plus it means slaves from the raging barbs. I'll have to think more on this later. For Economy, switching to Conquest seems like a given, for reasons mentioned above. Agrarianism alone won't do much for me past the early game, and although Foreign Trade will boost cottage growth, it requires researching Trade- not sure when I'll get around to that. I'm ignoring the Membership column, for obvious reasons.


So, in sum, 2 civics revolts planned- the first into Godking & Agrarianism, the second into City States, Apprenticeship / Slavery and Conquest. Economy will be largely cottage-based.



Man, I'm going to feel foolish if I end up getting Falamar This was all kind of boring, so here are some random comic panels from my dank recesses of my HD: