Enlightened Sidar

[Ichabod]

Regarding Agrarianism, it's just my opinion (and one that I haven't even thought much about), not really a change I'd like to propose to EitB or argue that should be implemented. I'd test it, if I was designing the mod and could go through a beta team, because I think it can work, but I see where you are coming from. Personally, I dislike Agrarianism + Aristocracy economy. I think it disregards Civ's basic mechanic of tradeoffs - you basically get everything in it, food, commerce and even maintenance reduction (why is that? Like the civic wasn't good enough already).

That being said, the production malus from Agrarianism is totally unjustified, in my opinion. A 4/0 tile is better than a 3/1 tile, so why do you have to make the 3/1 tile a 3/0? Is the mechanic supposed to be thematic?

[Aurorarcher]

I agree mostly with you, Ichabod. I dislike the fact that Agrarianism + Aristocracy is so powerful over other choices you have relatively early in the game. And yeah, even the maintenance reduction is given. I'd personally at least remove it. Oh, yea, a point worth mentioning is that Aristofarms is so powerful over cottages also because there's not so big risk of them getting pillaged. Imagine your towns being pillaged! It takes forever to develop them back - not the same issue with farms.

[Ichabod]

Definetely agree regarding pillaging. And a pillaged town/village can give huge gold too, while pillaged farms are pretty meh.

And yet another point is that you can gear a aristograrian Civ to military production by just swapping out of Aristocracy and into Conquest.

Well, this discussion can certainly go on for quite some time.

Just throwing some ideas out there: perhaps a good boost to cottages would be to give them +1 commerce to the base improvement, straight from the beggining. You finish a cottage, it gives +2 commerce, not +1. Considering the FIN nerf, I don't think that would result in a blatant imbalance (elves?). Perhaps some nerfs to the cottage civis would then be needed, though.

Just as a thing to note, I like playing FFH/EitB as it is. I just like to give these ideas to perhaps give some initial inspiration to the mod developers regarding possible changes, it's not like I actually think my ideas are all that great.

[Qgqqqqq]

No no no, don't say that. I really appreciate hearing feedback and opinions on the mod as it stands or proposed changes, no matter how great you think they are. I often don't put massive thought into the changes I propose, which is why around a third of them are shot down automatically.

Don't really have the time to consider that idea, either, but it doesn't strike me as wildly overpowered.

[GermanJoey]

I once posted at length here on why I thought farms were ridiculously too good in FFH2/EITB, due to civics, traits, tech pace, and other considerations, but I ended up getting shouted down pretty hard. =/ Its good to see at that least someone else agrees! Even if it's only you...

In addition to what you and Aurorarcher said, there's also the fact that cottages/hamlets/villages/towns require time to get good while Agristofarms are as strong or stronger immediately, depending on how you compare them. Like, maybe a town is better compared to an Agristofarm, but the town is a result of 74 turns of investment while the Agristofarm is the result of 5.

I think the production malus is supposed to be a nerf to Agrarianism, in that you'll only get half as many 4-yield tiles (or 5-yield, with floodplains!) out of it, assuming half of your land is green and half brown or something. But, from what I've noticed, FFH maps tend to have much more wildly varying terrain compared to BTS/RtR/ToW maps, so you'll get one guy with 18 floodplains and desert tiles in his start, one guy with 20 forests his, and another with mostly just bare and empty sludge, etc. So, the nerf just ends up hurting the guy with bad land rather than actually making the peak strength of the civic any weaker.

Also playing into Agrarianism's hands is that other worker techs come much later, and thus the civic enhances the one tile improvement you can actually build for the first 50 turns or so tends to create a self-feeding machine later-on: "well, I already have all these farms since they were the only thing I can build, so I want to stay in the farm civic, so I might as well build more farms since they're the best thing I can build, right?"

[Ichabod]

Thoughts about Strategy

First question I want to discuss concerning strategies for this game is about economy: how are we going to manage our economy, considering the bonuses the Sidar receive to specialists and the ability to Wane (i.e. the Sidar trademarks)?

The general principle I’ll adopt in this game when planning my moves is pretty simple: for the most part, we play as if we were playing any other Civ, without these bonuses.

Why is that? Well, I think the Sidar bonuses aren’t good enough to justify any sort of gimmicky play that differs too much from the basic economic strategies we have available in EitB. To put it bluntly, in all but the most fringe cases, Aristocracy is still better than a specialist economy, even if sages give +4 beakers and merchants +4 gold. In my previous posts, I purposely highlighted The Great Library when talking about the IND trait just to showcase what I think is a losing strategy with the Sidar: the gimmicky pitfalls (where I think we can include a TGL beeline). Yes, 5 beakers sages sound nice and all, but the beaker and hammer investment to get to it vastly overcome the benefits, when compared to other paths. With approximate the same hammers and beakers, we could have Aristocracy and 2 more cities, which is way better than +1 beaker per sage specialist.




Actually, after reading about the civics in EitB a bit more, I see we can actually have a very nice specialist economy in the end game, with 2/3 free specialists per city + bonus yield for specialists. But that’s not what we should be gunning/planning around for early in the game: we need a strong mid-game economy way before that, and that usually means cottages or aristocracy.

The important thing is to now our options and not let ourselves be tied to a specific strategy (i.e. the famous play the map). For instance, after seeing our map and the land we revealed so far, my initial thoughts is that our situation isn’t very suited for aristofarms or cottages (not a lot of irrigation, mostly plains). So, if we are going with a hammer heavy, settler spamming strategy, the fast Elder Councils (40h building, gives +2 beakers per turn, enables one sage specialist, doubled by PHI trait) enabled by PHI + the ability to run a boosted sage specialists from them actually starts to seem viable. But we are using this strategy because it’s the most viable for our situation (not saying it is for sure, just pointing out it could be), not because we wanted to do it from the start, like a gimmicky strategy would be.




Regarding Waning, I think the best way to go about it is the strategy Iskender used in PBEM V: settled Great Merchants in a single Mega City. The reasons for this are:

*It’s pretty easy to get high gold multipliers in FFH very early in the game, without much investment, but much of these bonuses are tied to a single city. With GK + The Bazaar of Mammon (a National Wonder, boosted by IND), we have 150% gold multiplier already and that can be achieved comfortably in mid game (there’s also two +25% gold buildings, which are enabled in meaningful economic techs, that we probably want). To achieve the same % with science, for example, it’d require more tech, a Great Sage and a more costly World Wonder, that we can very well lose.







*Gold can be converted to hammers and science easier and faster (through deficit research, cash rush, mercenaries and upgrades) than science and hammers into other resources.

*GMs also give +1 food, which is a significant boost and better than a GS +1 hammer.

But will we focus our whole Civilization in a mission to produce units that can Wane? No! There’s no problem in building a couple more warriors early and risking them in low odds battles that I’d normally not take to perhaps get a highly promoted unit early. On the other hand, there’s a significant problem in gearing our Civ to a strategy whose benefit would only be felt late game: we’ll get behind early and won’t reach that end game or we’ll be in a much worse position than you could have been by investing in strategies that’d pay off earlier (and snowball).

An illustrative example is comparing using our first GP to bulb Sanitation to using it for a part of the Altar of Luonnatar (so that, in the future, we can get 1-Shade-per-turn): the first starts giving benefits immediately and improves our position in the next 100 turns; the later will only start giving benefits a 100 turns from now. That’s obviously an extreme case, but I think it passes the point across.

A more likely scenario, one that can happen easily in this game, is if we get a Waneable unit in the first 50 turns of the game. As I said in previous posts, I want to settled shades as GMs in a single Mega City that will likely not be our starting Capital. So, will I save the shade for when I settle my chosen Mega City? Probably not, because the GP yield right now is better than a boosted yield later. So that means I’d settle it as a GM in Celo? Not guaranteed; earlier in the game, a GEng could be better, perhaps a GS. Point being, there’s no reason to blindly follow the Mega City strategy, if we have a better one available.

So, just as the specialist bonuses the Sidar get, the Waning is an ability we should use when it’s the best strategy compared to the others in a given situation, it’s not something we have to waste our game on to “make it work”. Sometimes, keeping the highly promoted unit can perhaps be the best strategy too. It depends.

In the end, I think we can lay some baselines for our economic strategy:

*No gimmicks.

*Don’t use the Sidar bonuses just “to make them work”.

*Take decisions in a case-by-case basis.

This is all pretty obvious stuff, I guess. But I just wanted to give an overall look on what I think is the best way to play with the Sidar, considering I was using an overly enthusiastic and naïve tone in some of the posts about the Civ. I’m always game to play the Sidar using the craziest most optimistic strategies in SP, but in a MP environment, it just wouldn’t hold together.

Later, I’ll make a more in-depth post about how I plan to use the IND trait, the PHI trait and, most important of all, how I plan to survive the early-mid game against a field full of very threatening “rushy” Civs.

[Qgqqqqq]

Jojo, you weren't shouted down at the time. And this is by no means an isolated opinion - it's one of the major intended changes of the mod, and the community is divided on whether it has gone far enough or not. (That is, Aristograrianism in general.)

There's even a proposal against it atm.


Personally, I hate agrarianism as a mapmaker and a player...but at the same time, it's integral to the mod as it stands and undoing it would change it drastically, and I've yet to see a workable alternative.


Still, I don't think aristograrianism is overpowered compared to cottages anymore. Consider the alternatives - CS practically removes maintenance, FT gives double speed cottages and +1-2TR per city. Add to that that cottages start giving commerce earlier, that food is of less value in FFH with the lack of slavery and lower happy caps, more techs necessary (trade has a lot of things going from it, CoL/Construction don't give much besides, to say nothing of sanitation) and I think, at least theoretically, that the two economies are close to equal.

Empirically this is also my observation from the past few games.

[Qgqqqqq]

Good post. Does well to remember that the Bazaar, whilst available quite early and not competed for, is quite expensive at 500 normal hammers.

[Ichabod]

Industrious Thoughts

How to utilize the IND trait effectively?

Well, I guess the short answer is “building the right wonders, at the appropriate times” (both national and World). However, what exactly does that mean?

First of all, a little considerations about IND other bonuses, besides the boost to Wonder production:

*The worker bonus is a pretty “passive” bonus; what I mean by that is that we’ll get its benefits even without actively planning around it. We’ll be building workers, that’s for sure, and they’ll get discounts from the trait. What we can do to use this effectively is build workers in high hammer cities, since only hammers get the boost, not “food-hammers”. This suits a settler/worker-pump dedicated cities strategy, instead of building them all around our cities. Overall, this is a minor point.

*The problem with building forges, even with double-speed, is the tech that enables them: Smelting. Smelting is one of the techs in the melee/metal line, which, aside from forges, we don’t need (it also reveals, but doesn’t connect, Iron – which is a minor thing -, and enables workshops - which suck until late game and we are very unlikely to build any). I think Smelting cost was reduced in EitB, so that is definitely a plus (I seem to remember it being very expensive). However, it’s still a tech out of our preferred tech path and we can’t really afford too much of those.

One possible option that FFH gives us for replacing forges is building the Guild of Hammers. The Guild of Hammers is a wonder that gives a free forge in every city and boosts engineers and GEng specialists (+1 hammer).




It seems a great deal, right? I’m not entirely sure. The tech that enables the Wonder, Engineering, is also very expensive (more than Smelting) and outside the techs we’d normally want. Engineering is a bit more useful than Smelting, because it gives more road movement and enables another potentially useful WW (The City of a Thousand Slums, which allows a city to use its third ring as useable tiles). But, in a sense, the GoH suffers from the same problems that getting forges naturally, it’s tied to a tech out of our desired tech path. I need to think a bit more in-depth about this, to try to figure out what option is best; just some double-speed forges here and there, gunning for the GoH or just forgoing forges altogether. We will see.

And now, back into Wonders. What Wonders should we gun for, to make good use of our IND trait?




If there’s a single wonder I really, really want is the Form of the Titan, which gives newly created units +2 XP. Not because I want it for a Waning strategy, but because experience is very important in FFH and a very welcome boost to our sub-par early/mid military. The denial value is also key; we can’t allow someone like the Hippus to get it, for example. Fortunately, the FotT comes in a technology we would want anyway, since it also enables the National Epic and the useful Military State civic.

The big hurdle we need to overcome to get FotT is the level 6 unit it requires to be built. Due to that, we have to wait before Waning our first level 5 unit, so we can reach level 6 with it and enable this powerful Wonder. Again, I’ll think case-by-case, but it’s one thing to keep in mind.




Frankly speaking, I don’t see a lot of World Wonders beside the FotT that I desperately need. I think IND will be more useful when getting the National Wonders, which actually have better cost/bonuses and are more readily available in the tech path than WWs. We have the NE and HE, just like in BTS, and some new ones, like the already mentioned Bazaar and the Brewing House above. The Brewing House gives 2 copies of a happy resource, which isn’t really worth 160 hammers, IND boosted or not, but it also gives up to 30% commerce bonus in the city it’s built, if the three grain resources are available (so far, we only have corn). It’s a nice addition to a city geared towards commerce (in a river, with cottages/commerce resources).




Another nice Wonder, if we go for the needed tech (the second tech in the Ashen Veil religion -> bulbing it might be an interesting option, more about this later), is the Infernal Grimoire. One free technology is a very nice boost and, considering the branched tree from FFH, we can actually get a very expensive free tech early in the game. I don’t have the pictures with me, so I’ll talk about possible technology targets for this strategy later. By the way, since this wonder isn’t boosted by any resources, IND actually is a significant advantage against our opponents when building it.

Overall, I think there are not that much Wonders that we really, really want. I think PHI will be the better trait in our pair and the one we should focus our strategies on, while just enjoying the IND bonus when appropriate (perhaps with a little more focus on NWs than otherwise). Most of the wonders we’ll go for we’d want without IND too, so it’s not like we are strategizing around it. It’s an auxiliary trait, for the most part.

[Qgqqqqq]

The big hurdle we need to overcome to get FotT is the level 6 unit it requires to be built. Due to that, we have to wait before Waning our first level 5 unit, so we can reach level 6 with it and enable this powerful Wonder. Again, I’ll think case-by-case, but it’s one thing to keep in mind.

This is not the case. Just like with the Heroic Epic in both BTS and FFH, you only need to posses a level 6 unit at some point in the fame to unlock it, it doesn't need to still be alive/around at the time you're building.

(As with all major corrections received from lurkers, I recommend you test this briefly. 100% sure, though.)

The Brewing House gives 2 copies of a happy resource...

Exact number is dependant on mapsize. Pretty sure it's more like 3-4 on standard.

Did you take the chance to read my write-up about Dereptus strategy? Long and unnecessary, but the only unir/building to be properly explained in the pedia thus far.