Future Further FFH Adventures

[Bobchillingworth]

Hear ye, hear ye...!


There will be a second FFH Adventure sponsored by Yours Truly opening up (hopefully) Monday! It will be inclined more toward the "extreme" end of the difficulty scale, but is intended to be more "challenging and fun" than "impossible mortal peril".


There will be continued FFH Adventures as long as there remains community interest, and Square Leg has very generously offered to help organize a rotation scheme come 2011. If you have any ideas for an Adventure of your own, please PM him with the details, so that he may add it to the list. Depending on how many submissions there are, it may make sense to run parallel extreme & gentle games, so please be sure to specify what level of challenge your idea is intended to represent.

[Ilios]

Coolness, thanks for setting this up Bob!

[Bobchillingworth]

Thanks!



Question: Is there anyone from the FFH PBEM 2 game who wouldn't mind converting the starting turn to patch O? I think Square Leg said that all you have to do is open the worldbuilder file using "custom scenario" from the SP main menu after I send it to you, and then save the first turn with a name the makes it clear it's the patch O save. Then send the first turn patch O save back to me. Square leg was going to do it, but I think he's preoccupied at the moment with RL.

[Ilios]

Sure, I'll do it tonight. Send it to ilios dot civ at googlemail dot com.

[Bobchillingworth]

Just a note that I have the scenario, scenario description, and both patch 'N' and 'O' saves finished & ready, but I have not heard back from Gris yet about getting it posted to the main RB Civ page. As I would prefer to get this running the "official" way (as opposed to just posting the save files in this thread), I'll keep waiting and hope that the game can start the Monday after tomorrow. I think that a lot of people are busy with family / vacation / whatever right now anyway, so hopefully a delay will not matter much.

[Toshi]

Count me in. I'm new to this kind of thing but ive played civ 4 for a while and am at playing monarchy level FFH games. This and the play by email interest me quite a bit.

[chaunceymo]

Sweet, looking forward to it!

Question for the FFH2 vets: does the AI ever get "smarter" about using things like heroes, magic, assassins, summons, etc? I'm not getting any challenge out of monarch and so far emperor doesn't seem much tougher, simply because no matter how great their economic/tech advantage the AI always resorts to a poorly constructed SoD that is easily countered with reasonably smart casting and a good variety of units.

[Bobchillingworth]

The AI will always largely rely on ill-conceived and easily countered SoD. The economic edge that the AI gets on higher difficulties from the free workers and other goodies does mean that they generally will build their heroes and advanced units more quickly, but their tactics or strategy won't get any better.


Some of the AI seem better than others regardless of difficulty. The Dovello and Luchirp are often weak, while the Sheaim and Infernals tend to put up more of a fight. The AI is also better at understanding certain spells over others- it often uses the summon tiger, specter, and pit beat spells well, but I've almost never seen it make sensible use of fireballs, maelstrom, or almost any of the third tier abilities. The AI loves assassins and will often build disturbing amounts of them, but it seems to be reluctant to research the necessary Poisons tech.


I typically play on Immortal difficulty, with the "increasing difficulty" option enabled, and with the starting era set to the first step above ancient. That way the computer starts with lots of warriors to deal with barbs and prevent getting rushed, some extra workers, and all of the worker techs (so it can't get screwed over by too many forests and cripple itself by researching things other than worker techs at the start). Increasing difficulty helps out by giving the AI a boost to Deity about 50 turns in, right when they should (ideally) be hitting their stride for development. There is also the "No minimum unit level requirement" challenge, which helps the AI field larger numbers of mages. I always set that one as well.


There is another challenge option that lets the AI build units without the requisite building (so for instance hunters without hunting lodges), but I usually don't set that one for fear that it will encourage the AI to spam units while ignoring potentially useful buildings. The AI seems to manage without it being set, anyway.



In the end, intelligent human use of game mechanics will always trump the AI. The real fun comes in surviving the patently unfair early game, and then figuring out how to deal with incoming stacks of 400+ units