A tale of self improvement and spiritual development.
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Enlightened Sidar
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I love the roster of players we ended up in this game. My intention is to make this game like the FFH games from yore, when a bunch of brave and talented players explored that different and crazy mod for the reading pleasure of the community. In that regard, I'll try to keep this thread well updated and keep it newbie friendly, so players without that much FFH/EitB knowledge can enjoy the ride too.
Tomorrow, I'll talk a bit about my pick, the Sidar. Also, about my leader, Sandalphon. And, perhaps, a bit about other players choices.
Yeah, it's a great crowd. Setup is quite similar to them too - I was surprised how many "random" options were enabled (lairs, huts) that people have been leaving off lately.
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
What is Fall from Heaven/Erebus in the Balance? (or rather, what I think it is)
Well, FFH is a dark fantasy mod for civilization 4, as a quick google search will tell you. As a mod, it uses most of the empire building mechanics of Civ 4, but it really changes the empire you can build with these mechanics. If you are here, you probably know all this or at least know the base game, so I'll take that from granted from now on. What are the biggest changes in the mod compared to Civ 4? Let's see: *Civilizations are really different from one another. It's not only the fact that they can have more than one or two UUs and UBs, or that each civ has a unique World Spell and Hero. No. The core mechanics for each civilization can change, the whole way in which they work and play. For instance, there's a civ that doesn't use the food yield at all (Infernals, they gain population when units are killed/cities are razed); there's a civ that can build improvements on forests (elves); there's a civ whose most powerful units are spawned, not built (Sheaim); there's a civ that is friendly with the barbarians (Clan of Embers); there's a Civ that can transform they highly promoted units into Great Specialists (the Sidar, our Civ!). You see my point, right? For this reason, FFH games can differ a lot from each, based only on the Civs that were chosen. *The technology tree in FFH is not "continuous", it's "branched". There's the arcane/magic part of the tree, the melee/production part of the tree, the recon part of the tree, the different religions - and, in most cases, you don't need to research the other branches to keep on going through one of them. This further differentiates one civilization from the other and each player's choice from the other, because a lot of times players can end the game with completely different technologies researched and, therefore, with different units, civics and abilities at their disposal to use. These two things are, in my eyes, the biggest differences between BTS and FFH. There's a lot more, which include: *Harsher barb/animal activity, which can lead to severe lack of exploration, constant pillaging/harassment and a very high risk of loss of badly guarded settlers. *Combat relies more on promotions. Combat promotions are 20% bonus, not 10%; anti-something promotions are 40% bonus, not 25%. Units gain more experience from battle (some units gain XP passively, even), so they promote faster. There's also a lot of magical/resource promotions that further improve units, even their base strength. So, highly promoted units can cause significant problems and make a difference in a war, especially in the early game (which makes the aggressive trait - that still only gives combat 1 - better in FFH than in BTS). *Collateral units, like catapults, are rarely used. Collateral comes more from spells, that damage all the units in a stack for a percentage (different spells have different maximum and average damage dealt), or summons, units summoned from magic that can be summoned again every turn. *More mobility on combat: base horse units have 3 moves; mobility promotion is way easier to achieve and most units can get it (some traits give it for free to a class of units), even siege; there's a very easy to get spell that gives +1 movement; commando promotion is easier to get (there's a trait that gives it for free, also). *Food management is pretty different from base BTS: granaries are nerfed and are not the single most important thing to build anymore; slavery comes later and it isn't as powerful as in BTS, due to the change of granary and the high cost of most units (settlers are very expensive) and buildings; there's way more food available faster (a very early civic gives +1 food to farms; there's a "classical era" tech that gives +1 food to farms). *A lot more randomness, especially with our settings. Events, huts, lairs/dungeons/graveyards/shipwrecks (these are all map features that can be explored for a random result) - these can give you free GPs on turn 5 or can spawn a powerful barb that will beeline and destroy your Capital, again, at turn 5. The reason I think those two differences above are the most important ones is because they change the game fundamentally from BTS. Why? Well, let me put it this way: BTS has Byzantium, a civ that gives the option of forgetting everything else while beelining to Cataphracts, a unit so powerful that can win you the game single-handedly, if no one calls you on it. There's hardly another case of such a civ in BTS, though - usually, you win by outexpanding and, later, outproducing your opponents, which is a gradual/snowbally process. FFH, on the other hand, is full of Byzantiums. While it's truth that most games of FFH are won by the players that outexpand and outproduce the others, just like in Civ 4, there's quite a lot of strategies that players can try that work like Cataphracts: "you let me reach that, now I'll go and I'll take your more improved land and cities and there's nothing you can do about it". The very different Civs and Tech options are what make a lot of combinations and different strategies possible and you always need to have your eyes open to catch opponents going for an unusual strategy/gambit. That's also why, when ranking my opponent, I'll give them two different grades: first, basic Civ skill; second, capacity to surprise.
That is a beautiful, beautiful introduction to FFH. Can I copy-paste it into the Strategy Articles thread (if not now, then after the game)?
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
(April 21st, 2015, 19:15)Qgqqqqq Wrote: That is a beautiful, beautiful introduction to FFH. Can I copy-paste it into the Strategy Articles thread (if not now, then after the game)? Of course, feel free (don't need to wait until the game is over). It'd make me very happy. I bet there's a lot of people who could add their thoughts and make it way better.
Posted. Edited out some (very) minor spoilers.
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
April 21st, 2015, 20:55
(This post was last modified: April 21st, 2015, 20:55 by GermanJoey.)
Great post Ichabod... if you'll keep making more like it, I'd be interested in dedlurking your game.
What about the Sidar?
I just rambled about how Civs in FFH tend to be unique and to have different strategies available to them. So, what about the Civ I chose for this game, the Sidar? What makes them unique? The core theme of the Sidar, as far as game mechanics go, is about specialists. To kick things off, the Sidar Palace (each Civ in FFH gets a unique palace, usually just with different types of mana, but, in some cases, like the Sidar, there’s some additional gimmicks involved) grants a bonus to all specialists (besides priests). Sages (scientists) get +1 beaker; merchants, +1 gold; engineers, +1 hammer; and bards (artists), +1 culture. The Great versions of these specialists also get the same bonus.  As a minor bonus, we get a type of mana that gives +1 happy, the enchantment mana. Pretty nice boost, starting with a free happiness resource! But their Palace is just the start of it. The big thing about the Sidar, what makes them remembered amongst the other Civs of FFH, is their ability to Wane their units. Wane is an ability that every Sidar unit (I think permanent summons don’t get it, as an exception) gets when they are sufficiently promoted, which, in EitB, means when they are level 5 (it is level 6 in vanilla FFH) Edit: This is wrong, Sidar units still Wane at level 6 as of EitB 1.11. See posts 52 onwards in this thread for clarification. Wane allows the unit to transform into a Shade and a Shade is able to do the following:  Shades can join a city as one of four types of settled Great Person (which then get boosted from the Sidar Palace!), further developing the theme of a specialist-centric Civ. Simply speaking, you can trade your highly promoted units - your military, basically - for an economy boost in the form of Great People. This can lead to all sorts of strategies, with varying degrees of likeliness-to-succeed and greatness-if-successful (usually, in an inversely proportional scale). I’ll cover some of these strategies in another post, though. By the way, yes, after reading that, any hardcore Civ fan that never played FFH is dying to start a new SP game with the Sidar, just to see how many specialists he can stuff in a single city through waning. Go ahead, try it. Before you do it, though, read the Civilopedia entry about the Altar of Luonnatar and its various parts: it’ll probably make the game even more fun if you are able to churn out units from a city straight out with enough XP for promoting to level 5. One Great Person per turn FTW! This theme is one of the reasons why I chose the Sidar. I really like stories about self-improvement and search for enlightenment and the Sidar lore in FFH, at least what I make of it, can relate to such stories. I like to think of the Sidar shades as enlightened beings, which reached that state through practicing an art or craft. In a personal note, I like to think, in what a friend told me is the Japanese way of thinking (I just started to study Japanese and, as my friend told me, they have a single word that means both art, craft and technique = gijutsu, which I find really nice), that any craft can be an art form, as long as you dedicate yourself to it, and that you can improve yourself through practice of any craft. In that sense, the Sidar seem to live by this way of thinking. Of course, that’s not the only reason behind my choice of Civ. There’re quite a bit in-game reasons for it too, which we’ll cover in the next posts (you can’t reach the Nirvana if your opponents are ways ahead of you in power and score!  ). The next one will be about the Sidar unique units, which are awesome.
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