Enlightened Sidar

[Ichabod]

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.

I used to play only with Erebus and Erebus Continents map scripts when playing FFH (highly imbalanced, but I liked the feel of the maps they generated), so I didn't test much of the "normal" map scripts, like Pangea and such. While generating maps to test some things with the Sidar, I noticed something similar to what you describe, even in the supposedly more balanced mapscripts; they seem pretty different from the way the BTS map scripts work. There's the argument that that's the reason you start with a boosted settler, to get out of a bad starting spot, but I wouldn't mind seeing some better balanced scripts for FFH.

And I agree on the implications this has on the value of Aristocracy and Agrarianism, like you pointed out.

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.

You may very well be right. I haven't been playing much of EitB lately, nor have I followed the games here with much care. I haven't really seen how the meta game evolved and that's saying a lot when we had guys like TBS (which is a crazy good player) playing during that time.

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

Very true. It seems we'll need to already have quite a bit of gold/commerce production in place before spending all the hammers needed for it. Otherwise, it won't be a good investment.

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.)

That's my understanding of how it works too. What I meant is that I'll have to keep a level 5 unit until it reaches level 6, and only after that I can wane it, if I want the FotT. And it can take quite a bit to go from 17Xp to 26XP.

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.

Didn't know it could go higher than 2. I think it's also 2 on standard, otherwise I think I'd have noticed. I'll read the Civilopedia entry when I fire up the game again.

[Qgqqqqq]

Units can't wane until level 6. That's about to change, but it hasn't yet.

Yeah, you're point is true with regards to FFH mapscripts - but there's a reason we don't play those in MP. They're pretty unrepentantly unbalanced. If that's the case in the edited maps, than it's a failure by the mapmaker - farm viability is probably the main thing to balance around in FFH.

[Ichabod]

Units can't wane until level 6. That's about to change, but it hasn't yet.

Is that so? It says differently in the changelog!

"Sidar get the "Divided Soul" ability on all their Recon Units, can wane units at Lv. 5 instead of at Lv. 6"

Well, what can you do? At least we solved the FotT/Waning decision problem.

Yeah, you're point is true with regards to FFH mapscripts - but there's a reason we don't play those in MP. They're pretty unrepentantly unbalanced. If that's the case in the edited maps, than it's a failure by the mapmaker - farm viability is probably the main thing to balance around in FFH.

I wish I knew that before proposing this game with these settings, by the way. Just kidding, I wanted a random map, as imbalanced as it would end up being.

[Qgqqqqq]

There's two places that your mistake may have occurred. Firstly, that is one of the changes that will be being made in v12, and has thus been discussed in the thread - but v12 isn't out yet. Secondly, this was a change that was implemented several years ago, in v8 or v7, but reverted by the time of v9 (because it was thought to be overpowered), before I started modding. Thus, it's in the history of the cumulative Changelog, but I believe it is stricken out.

Sorry. I was surprised that you (and others) picked a civ just before it got buffed.

[Ichabod]

It's not stricken out, hence my mistake. It's not really a big deal, we'll just have to work a bit more before reaching Enlightenment.

[Ichabod]

From the land I can see so far, I think the best place for a second city is on the sheep. A couple of reasons:

*We likely won’t have AH for quite some time. In this sense, settling on a grassland tile and farming the sheep gives the same tile yield than settling on the sheep + farming a grassland tile. Later in the game, even without agrarianism, a grass farm gives the same food boost as a sheep pasture, +2 food. So, we won’t lose food late and we’ll even get a bit more food early.

*We don’t want to use hammers in monuments, so it’s important to have good first ring tiles. That’s the main reason why I think settling on the sheep is better than on the grasslands to the north. We have access to 3 hills without a monument (the yellow circles, one of them is inside borders due to Capital third ring borders) and that’s pretty good, considering our current plan is to go for mining early.

*Settling on the sheep shares the corn tile with the Capital, which will likely be able to share it at that time (even if that results in a bit worse yield). Settling 1NW doesn’t share the corn.

*It’s close and requires few roads for connection.

*We can improve the city with the same techs we plan to use for the Capital.

This decision is certainly not final, especially considering my first tries at simming showed I’m completely lost about what tech path to take (calendar? Mining? Myst? Exploration?), when to start building a settler and similar choices. This is a pretty hard start, no obvious right plays (at least from the eyes of a player with my skill level), no easy commerce gains, lots of competing needs…

Man, I really, really want the next save!

[Ichabod]

Turn 1

So long was the wait
So brief was the joy
Six tiles





Did you guys liked my turn 1 report in the form of Haikai? It pretty much sums up all there was to it, really, but I guess you guys want me to be pedantic and repetitive about it. Well, after Ellimist “kept the turn hostage” for a while ( ), I finally received the save, eagerly played it and promptly passed it along; since then, I find myself once again remembering the melancholic feeling of missing it…

Oh, you want to know about the game! Well, our scout revealed some new tiles! Six, if my poem is right:





Yes, you get two pictures of a single scout move. Bandwidth be damned, it took me three days to receive this save!!

Cotton is nice for the happiness bonus, not that big of a help for our commerce needs (it’s the worst “commerce” resource in the game, I think it adds a total of 3 commerce when improved), especially when it’s not on a river. Speaking of rivers… Where are them? (Rivers of tears don’t count, before some smartass says anything). Well, we’ll keep venturing forward looking for them. They have to be somewhere... ("In your opponent's land", says the same smartass).




Yes, after almost three days of thinking about the turn, I made that movement above with my warrior… Considering I’ll probably move to the hill 1W next turn, the sum total of gains from this move was a -25% defense bonus (forests are +25% in FFH, right?)! Yes, that's what you call pretty stupid. I actually may end up moving 1SW next turn, just so I can justify the move to myself and not feel that dumb. Is there a period of grace in FFH during which animals don’t spawn? It'd make me feel safer about not getting defensive bonuses.




This one is interesting, I missed it in turn 0. That announcement saying Brigit was created reveals that the Ring of Carcer Unique Feature is present in the map. The Ring of a Carcer is a tile that you can only enter with a very highly promoted unit....… I just went to check, it requires a level 15 (!) unit! That’s more than 100 XP. Good luck getting a unit there, right? Well, if you can manage that and you also move that unit to the Ring of Carcer tile (it's usually somewhere near the North Pole, far, far away from the places where you'd want your highly promoted units to be), you get the very cool angelic hero Brigit for yourself:


She is really invincible or she can only use the immortal thing once? Perhaps you need to kill here two times in the same turn to get rid of her, I seem to recall something like that.

Well, talk about a cool SP goal! It won’t really happen in MP, especially when you can’t use the “it’s unfair to lose a +99,9% battle” reload rationalization. Not that I use it, obviously...




Finally, a random picture of our nice Capital, waiting another turn before border pop! That reminds me, we need a cool naming scheme for this game. Something to do with the life of Buddha, mayhap, to go along with the Enlightenment theme? I’d have to look some info about it, because I’m pretty ignorant in the subject. My brother has a very technical and historical biography of him, perhaps I could borrow that for a while…

What do you guys think/suggest? Perhaps you guys like the default naming scheme of the Sidar?? (Yeah, right! )

[Qgqqqqq]

Brigit is basically just a normal Immortal with the Hero promotion and a cool reskin, so she's truly immortal (have to kill twice in one turn).

There is a very small grace period, same as base. 5t?

[Mardoc]

Enlightenment theme? Like, Candle, LED, Torch, Fluorescent, etc?

[Ichabod]

Enlightenment theme? Like, Candle, LED, Torch, Fluorescent, etc?

I might end up using that, actually.

With a "no shades" variant to boot!