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Quote: Wait, would Spring and Sanctify work to clear a path? Perhaps… If that’s the case, it would be trivial to open a path through it. Anyway, not a big advantage, but an advantage nonetheless.
Yes, it would clear a path. Tbh, I think spring (or maybe either) would individually, it just wouldn't mantain it.
But tying up one mana (if not at palace) is non-trivial, really, especially considering expense if they're not heading fro Arcane anyway.
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
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(May 11th, 2015, 23:19)Qgqqqqq Wrote: Quote: Wait, would Spring and Sanctify work to clear a path? Perhaps… If that’s the case, it would be trivial to open a path through it. Anyway, not a big advantage, but an advantage nonetheless.
Yes, it would clear a path. Tbh, I think spring (or maybe either) would individually, it just wouldn't mantain it.
But tying up one mana (if not at palace) is non-trivial, really, especially considering expense if they're not heading fro Arcane anyway.
You are right, it can be a big deal. The map appears not to have that many mana nodes scattered around, and having to waste one of those to get the pretty meh water/life mana is very nice (for me, not for them). Another question: are metamagic nodes buildable?
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Turn 15
Here we can see why the previous mistaken move with the scout ended up costing me a bit. I could have moved to the desert hill this turn without my mistake, revealing everything I can see here and a lot more. Besides, I could two-move with the scout next turn by going through the grassland terrain 1SE of the desert hill. I’m actually going to move to the desert hill next turn, it’s the only one that makes sense. So, we lost one turn!
I never realized before that the “A forest has grown near X” message disappears from the turn log. Apparently, it does!
Sidarland, in all its glory.
Sorry for the short report. Not much to say + I’m feeling unusually sleepy today. If you guys have any questions, ask away. I’ll start doing some opponent analysis to spice things up a bit, since our following turns won’t be that exciting. And I still owe you a general overview of our plan post. I’ll try to fix one up tomorrow.
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Yes, meta nodes are build able, at sorcery. More generally, all of the 18 mana types present in the game save Ice mana are buildable.
To be perfectly honest, Ice manas weird setup is not how I'd design a game, although the alternate ways I'd design it (buildable nodes, buildable nodes at a certain tech/religion/unit), are beyond the scope of this mod.
The mana nodes spread around, btw, represent a normal mapscripts result (in general - I'll not state here what I did in map-making this). Which makes for an interesting observation of the game-setup Kael and the original developers were working off, rather than the mana setup RB tends towards.
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
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(May 12th, 2015, 22:47)Qgqqqqq Wrote: The mana nodes spread around, btw, represent a normal mapscripts result (in general - I'll not state here what I did in map-making this). Which makes for an interesting observation of the game-setup Kael and the original developers were working off, rather than the mana setup RB tends towards.
Yeah, my personal experience in SP games, with the regular map scripts, also tended to this few mana nodes maps. Actually, I very rarely played arcane heavy SP games, if I stop to think about it. I always preferred to use religious units and heroes.
Speaking of SP, here's one thing I'd like to fix in FFH: make the high to low challenge mode compatible with the mode where the last place civ gets kicked from the game on turns 50/100/whatever. I really liked to play high to low with a lot of civs, but sometimes you ended up with the Khazad on an all-hill starting city and it was impossible to overcome that. So, I tried these options together, to kick the impossibly weak civs after sometime, while keeping the challenge. But what ended up happening, as far as I can recall, is that you'd take control of a "ghost civ", the one that was kicked out, instead of the one that was currently on the bottom of the score.
Man, high to low was very, very nice. I had a lot of fun playing that. 
May 13th, 2015, 19:48
(This post was last modified: May 13th, 2015, 19:57 by Ichabod.)
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Why rush to Hyborem?
If we were to win a game with the Sidar, we would need a good mid game economy. As my posts about the Sidar showed, our civ goodies require quite a bit of tech. We'd also require the investment in the religion and arcane line for support units + investment in the economy line, for the gold boosts and transition into a late game economy. Later in the game, we could be carried by waned units settled in mega-cities, but to get a decent amount of those, we’d need quite a bit of tech earlier.
There are two main ways to build an economy in FFH, cottages and aristocracy. If we had a good amount of rivers, but mostly plains tiles, we could go with a cottage strategy: 2/3 grass farms per city to grow into plains cottages is doable. On the other hand, a river-less land but with mostly grassland tiles, and a good amount of happy resources, could give us a decent aristocracy setup: grow big cities with tiles that give food and commerce at the same time.
Our land has neither of these setups. We have almost no irrigation available; we have lots of plains but almost no rivers; we have few happy resources. Even a city spam strategy wouldn’t work: almost no food resources, bad inner ring cities, few hills for production...
We could manage to get an economy under these conditions. The drama/sanitation through construction play is an option. Lumbermills + Fellowship of Leaves could work too. In SP, that would be pretty nice. But in MP, someone is bound to have better terrain than I and they’ll get the same effect of my finished economy setup way earlier: grass + river land can get with calendar + code of laws techs what I’d need calendar, CoL, masonry, construction, sanitation (through drama) techs to get, and they’d have the extra commerce from rivers. Going that way is a losing proposition, as far as I can see it.
The Hyborem Plan!
Here’s the techs we’ll be getting in this run, you can see the tech costs and what they enable. The order will be:
*Mysticism
-> Build Pagan Temple, run one priest specialist forever.
*Philosophy
-> Build Prophecy of Ragnarok, run another priest specialist.
*Knowledge of the Ether
-> Just because it’s a pre-req for CoS
*Corruption of Spirit
-> Use two GPro to bulb it; each one gives 679 beakers with a size 7 city.
-> Revolt to Ashen Veil, because it’s needed to tech Infernal Pact.
-> Build Temple of the Veil, run the third priest specialist.
*Infernal Pact
-> Use two GPro to bulb it.
-> Change to Hyborem, burn the whole world!
That’s the basic guidelines, at least. I’ll cover the fine tuning in another post.
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With such limited setup, a very accurate sim should be easy to make.
[beat]
So what turn do you go Hyborem?
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
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(May 13th, 2015, 20:24)Qgqqqqq Wrote: With such limited setup, a very accurate sim should be easy to make.
[beat]
So what turn do you go Hyborem?
100% prophet pool, my current best is turn 88. With mixed pools, of max 15% scientist, I managed turn 85 with little to no optimization. I'm currently working on the fastest way to get the PoR. After I manage that, I'll work on when and where to run scientist specialist along with the priests. I'll explain this is more detail going forward.
May 13th, 2015, 20:43
(This post was last modified: May 14th, 2015, 17:28 by Ichabod.)
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Turn 16
My eyeball C&D analysis says to me: Bob has Yggdrasil, Ellimist popped Myst from a hut and built a WB at size 2; someone has Remnants of Patria on their Capital (HK?). These are just guesses; no meaningful time was spent on it. Ah, and I wanted to show my top food demos with the picture too! Yeah, that doesn’t mean anything, but I’ll likely never retain this position again…
Perhaps another chance to get a 50/50 battle against a bear? Probably not worth it, though. The time I need to get a Wanable unit back to Celo + the last XP needed + the risk of the travel back… I think the value of more explored land + chance of a hut or lair exploration in better than all these “ifs”. On an interesting note, if I get a GP from a lair, I’d use it for a Golden Age instead of trying my luck getting him back to Celo. That’d be terrible play if I intended to keep with the Sidar… But, you know… 
Celo! Working one extra food from what I’d get by improving the floodplain first.
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Assuming you get to Hyborem what happens then? Is it a win button or a fun button? 
Completed: RB Demogame - Gillette, PBEM46, Pitboss 13, Pitboss 18, Pitboss 30, Pitboss 31, Pitboss 38, Pitboss 42, Pitboss 46, Pitboss 52 (Pindicator's game), Pitboss 57
In progress: Rimworld
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