f13.net

Massive changes - evidently they cleared the python issue that was causing lag when HOLYFUCKINGSHITWTF was going on.  Extremely big improvement considering the epic scale of the game.  This is THE update I have been waiting for since they switched to the latest expansion.

A few facts about FFH:

-Individual units can be built up to extreme capability; you will learn to love that swordsman who is level 6!
-You will not be able to play normal Civ after a few rounds on FFH.  It is impossible.
-Every civilization has a unique feel; religion completely alters the feel as well
-The tech tree is completely revamped and how you choose a path determines the feel of your civ as a whole.
-Following up on the previous point: You will not excel at every tech path.  Commerce, mercenary, religious, wizardy, and wildlife taming have various rewards and cross paths in an ingenius manner.

Caveat Emptor (even though its free): Wait until patch "C" or "D" to play - there are always game stopping bugs at the beginning that need ironing out.

God I love FFH. I always die about 10 turns into it, but I love it. Do people just not jump into the quest, and play empire-building? I could never figure it out.

Quest?  I'm not sure what you mean.  The way I play is a tech race to something that will allow you to crush your enemies (i.e. a special military unit), upon acheiving that, crush your nearby enemies, then concentrate on growing your empire.

What I almost never do is chase the sea-game (i.e. create many naval units), as I could never figure out how to win the game going that route.

Yeah, what the hell is the quest?  This might actually improve the game for me were I aware of it.  As it is, I usually just ignore the game and play vanilla Civ because I have no idea what the units/tech tree actually means.

Are you serious?  The tech tree is genius.  You can work through the top and go with a military based society.  Middle is more economic, bottom is mystical with the very bottom working towards religion and the middle bottom being arcane.

My point is that I know what, say, "pikemen" means.  "The Eye of Agamatto" I have no fucking idea about.

I could delve into the stats and figure it out, but I'd much rather just know right off the bat that destroyer>ironclad.

OK, I think you guys talking about "the quest" are talking about the Age of Ice scenario that was packed with the latest expansion. It was based on a full conversion mod which you should run (not walk run) and install right now. The scenario is about 10% of the full mod.

This is what you are not grasping.  There is no true A > B > C equation.  Its all in how you USE your troops, and what type of civ you want in the endgame.

You could focus on a core team of Arch Mages who rain BURNING death on the enemy.  You could build a massive army centered around a few heros to over run the enemy.  You could focus on creating a religious atmosphere by which you bring the wrath of your God down upon the enemy.

Holy crap, I thought the Age of Ice thing was it.

What he said. That's why I bought Beyond the Sword.

How does civ 4 compare the Civ Revolution on the ps3/360?  We picked it a few weeks ago and have been playing the shit out of, what can I expect different on the PC?

More.  Seriously, while Revolutions is good for a console translation it's still really just Civilization: Training Wheels Edition.

There are only ever three levels of anything.  Warrior < Swordsman < Crusader.  Nation, Religion and other things can let you create special units.  Often these special units replace the normal unit.  Firebow replaces long bow, for instance.  But I wouldn't say it's a straight Firebow > Longbow, because the Firebow can launch a fireball, which can be used for seige.  It's the little details like that, that make playing the game proficiently something of a dedicated effort.  Maybe I'm on the short strategy buss, but I needed to play many times before I fully understood even a few of the strategies involved.  THAT is the attraction of the game, imo.

If you're on the short bus, I'm the family freak kept in the basement to avoid embarassment.  Yeah, I had no idea about any of this stuff you guys have been talking about.  I played it once, maybe twice and tried to play it like I would normal Civ; turtle until you've got a ginormous tech advantage and then conquer the world.  Sounds like this mod is meant to be approached differently.

Yes, very much so.  It's important to not ignore your military might at all.  In fact, the earlier you can build "mage" and "priest" units the better, because they gain XPs at random.  Once you have an archmage in the game, you see why having them is so important.   Really, the best way to learn FFH is to dick around with the world builder and give yourself a few of each unit type (and pump their XP) so you can see what's going on with them.

Vanilla Civ with the Beyond the Sword x-pack plays similarly. I just got into playing it again a few days ago and the old 'turtling' strategy just doesn't work anymore.  Here I am, happily working my little empire, when 1/2 the world decides "time to die."  Evidently being so culturally and economically superior increases the hate of other cultures against you.  Sure, I've got the tech advantage, but motherfuckers can send squads of 30 swordsmen with trebuchets against my walled-in riflemen.  It's a war of attrition and I'm going to lose every time due to his overwhelming numbers.

I tend to clobber the first civ I encounter, then reign in relative peace thereafter. It's worked pretty good so far, and by "so far" I mean I just wiped out one civ and quit out for a break.

Very cool mod, very well done, feels like a different game.

This is a great tactic.  Another good one is to rush the World Wonder that gives you 3 Hill Giants with hidden nationality- run them to your nearest neighbor and you can WTF level them with ease along with crippling their civ completely.  After they get uber experience split them up and you can keep your neighbors nice and weak while you expand.

Curly, Larry and Moe are very cheaty (those are their real names).  It does seem like they are the only decent chance for some civ's to survive the early game (the arcane civ's have a hard time if they are near some aggressive military civ's).

This thread made me play 12 hours of Civ4 yesterday.

Damn you all to hell!

I've been convincing myself to hold off on buying BtS for the last couple weeks. Finally failed yesterday, no place in town has it. I called the gamestop guys a bunch of consolewhoring pigfuckers who wouldn't know a quality platform if it fellated them. Hey, the guy asked me if I found everything I was looking for as I was walking out the door empty-handed. That calls for a bit of vitriol imo. And they were fellating the dreamcast as I was futiley searching the minute pc gaming corner or hopelessness.

At least he didn't try to sell me that console civ.

Online ordering ftw, as always.

I've been noticing this too.  I'm confused, though.  I thought the whole point of culture was that it was intended as another way of defending your empire, where other nations were more inclined to leave you alone because they respected/were in awe of your culture.

Steam has Civ4 and all the expansions available right now.

Culture is offensive, not defensive. It is a non-military way of spreading your borders, and if you bump up against other countries they will not take kindly to your subverting their cities.

There's a reason why Great Bards are called "culture bombs"....

I haven't tried this yet. I wanted to get bored of the base game, first.

I'm willing to give it a go now.

Should I wait until the 15th when this is released, or should I play whichever the latest is, uh, "Fall from Heaven II 0.30"?

Maybe I'm still thinking of culture the way it was promoted in Civ 3.  I distinctly recall the devs explaining its intended purpose as an alternative to military might as a way of cowing rival empires.

Start now.  ALWAYS wait until patch "C" to load the latest mod.  Current mod is pretty slick.

[urlhttp://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=276032]Current mod:  .32l[/url]

For information I have a thread or two already going.  I have been playing FFH since it was first conceptualized and pretty much know everything about it.

Anyone put the FFHII mod onto a Steam install of CivIV+BtS?

Yeah, I think this is my problem, too.  I haven't looked in-detail at Civ4 but it seems like you get all of the disadvantages of culture from Civ3 (extra hate from being 'too big', pushing boundaries, annoying the neighbors..) but none of the "Oh hell they're too big to fuck with" advantages.  It seems that the threat other nations see you as is tied purely to your military, while they hate you for military, science AND culture.

Civ4 forces a a LOT more millitary down your throat than the previous incarnations did.  You can't afford to ignore having a standing army or keep it at just 2-3 "Defensive" troops in a city.  You'll get rolled too damn fast.    Then tack-on that every Defender has a counter, and now you're holding 3-4 different TYPES of defensive units, and you need at least 3-4 of each of them.  I find I can't do the old "build every building in every city" bit anymore because of the focus on keeping my army strong, and it's a little annoying.

I blame it on catering the game to the CivFanatics.com people.

I had a civ4 box but i got bts through steam, ffh works fine.

Sweet.  I need another game in the rotation for when I get tired of Dawn of War.  Might as well skip vanilla Civ IV and get right to the nougaty center.

The other thing you get from Culture in Civ4 is actual, enforced borders. Other nations' units will not cross into your territory unless they're either at war with you, or you've agreed to an Open Borders pact. (And vice versa).

This, no doubt in conjunction with updated AI programming, has cured one of my personal pet peeves from Civ2, in which the computer nations would send settlers zig zagging around your units, usually with the help of their navy, into some godforsaken useless space in the middle of your empire, and set up a city. And you'd have no recourse except to declare war or else set up watchers around the city to intercept the AI's spy units.

In Civ3, same thing, except that the offending Settlers would cross your "culture borders" to get to the empty space.

They'll still crowd you in Civ4, but they can really only pull it off in areas where your cities haven't grown to border size 2+.

Ok im having a problem.  I played this a few months ago with no problems, now when i try to launch a game it crashes.  There was an update to beyond the sword when i launched, im guessing that caused it.  Any ideas what the problem is or how to fix it?

If BtS updated, you'll have to update FFH to the latest (stable) version as well, I'd imagine.  If you already have and are still having crashes.. um I'd ask over at their forums.

You MUST have the latest BTS patch.  Otherwise it will close if you try and open it.

Man, if I had more spare time I would LOVE to get some multiplayer going with this. 

Hey, I don't have much spare time. I've never tried Civ multiplayer, and I'm not too good at FFH.

Anyone else want to start a slow turn-around PBEM game. Dibs on Amurites.

I'm game.

Is that the kind where it goes by email or whatever?  Could take us through 2012.

I am down with giving it a whirl.  Heck, I will even let the OTHER players pick my civ.  Someone want to set this up? 

I recommend at least a 6-7 player game; more if we get more live people playing.

Civ PBEM games are really, really slow to take off. I MOVE MY SCOUT done, wait 24 hours.

Can you hand the PBEM games down to future generations to finish, or do they get whacked by the estate tax?

We could do an advance start along with bumping tech levels up.  Advance starts take a slightly different strategy, though, and tend to get bloody very quickly.  Personally I prefer them - helps make things more fair vs. the AI (FFH is a lot more dependent on where your first city is located).

Hawt diggity, count me in. Whatever rules people come up with (quick start, etc) is cool with me.

I can get the game going, but someone else will have to track manage it; I am too busy lately to monitor things.  MP thread to be created shortly.

Keeps crashing on me (Steamy version), and since there's going to be an update tomorrow, screw it for now and I'll redownload later.

We are sticking with patch .32 for now - getting the new patch on the day it comes out will bring you to tears.

Was fine for me on steam.

PS. I inadvertendly played this for like 7 hours last night.  God damn.

Since the 0.32 version isn't working for me at all, I can't see the new release making me cry into my keyboard.

MrHat, did you do anything other than dl Civ4 and BtS from Steam, install FfH, then patch FfH?

If you're using the steam version of BTS, you need to change the install path of the FFH mod, as well as any patches for the mod.  Don't recall where to off the top of my head

Hmm, OK, it seemed like a regular old zip to me but I'll try a direct-to-the-mod-dir install.  I had unpacked it elsewhere then copied it into the mod dir.

FFH has its own executable that it uses to run, you don't run it through the Civ IV mod screen.  If that's what you were doing, that's why it kept crashing.    Happened to me the first time I tried to play with it, too, until Cheddar straightened me out. (Woah, Ched was useful?)

Ya yegs, just run the exe for FFH 2.32 or whatever, then run the patch for L, if you do a quick google search re: "install ffh civ4 steam" should pull up the right thread showing the correct directory.

off the top of my head its' something like: "C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\sid meier's civilization iv beyond the sword\Beyond the Sword\Mods"  lol.  You install both exe's to the mod folder of bts.

Then make a direct shortcut to the FFH play executable.

I did the default install, then had to move everything to my 2KGames folder. Worked fine after that.

Very cool stuff. The initial game was amazing as I explored all the new cultures, then I settled into my usual Civ play patterns, until OMG DRAGON!!! and I assembled a party of Argonauts to sail the seas to find the dragon. I played it on the easiest difficulty, so it got boring after a while. I didn't even scratch the surface of the mod, so I look forward to more challenging games.

I got cock slapped by some fucking barbarian lizard dude for like 40 rounds.

Start up BTS then go to options (under advanced) and change your starup screen to Civilizations IV. Now exit the game and start up FFH.

 :drill:

Making a shortcut to start FFH directly is easy. Use the link to start BTS as a base and add mod=\Fall from Heaven 2 032 at the end.

Here's mine, as an example. The placement of quotation marks is important.

"C:\Games\Civilization IV\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword.exe" mod=\Fall from Heaven 2 032

Crap.. I forgot to mention that what I posted above is an easter egg.

For Steam:

"C:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\sid meier's civilization iv beyond the sword\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword.exe" mod="\Fall from Heaven 2 033"

(Remove the (x86) if you aren't running a 64-bit OS)

Oh, and 033 included a CARD GAME. In CIV 4. I'm awestruck. (It's actually a kind of nifty little card game, too.)

Alright. I'm actually going to try and get this installed. Again. I fucked up last time. But new OS< new chance. Let's see if I can do this.

That install just got stopped dead in it's tracks, lost the first disc of BtS.

Disc?

You're doing it wrong.

Not sure if this was mentioned elsewhere - With the 2.33 patch, I was crashing to desktop when starting a scenario until I got the BtS 3.17 patch (Firaxis only mentions the 3.13 patch on their website, you need to hunt for the 3.17).

No need to hunt for patches if you bought it from Steam. :oh_i_see:

My problem was where I unpacked it to some other dir and copied it.  It worked perfectly after I deleted the mod dir and reinstalled.

I'm still trying to figure this game out, meaning how to do things mechanically as well as gameplay things.  I had to go read the Civ IV manual, which was mildly helpful since it's been YEARS since I have played Civ II.  Once I win or lose this game, I'll read up on the FFH instructions, assuming they exist.

There used to be a wiki for FFH, I don't know if there still is.  The in-game help files have been modded, but it breaks things down in such unintuitive ways it's hard to find information sometimes.

But, wow, from Civs2 to jump into IV would be killer.  The combat system changes alone are huge, and then you have the Culture and Corps and Religions to tangle with.  Good luck, sir!

Yes, I seem to be taking in the ass from my neighbor's religion.  Well, only a little, but it's bugging me that two of my three cities have a predominant religion that isn't my state religion.  Ungrateful bastards.  I'm considering switching but I'm afeared of the ramifications, and it bothers me a great deal that I can't just force my religion on my populace.  I should have went military on my first game.

The original at civ4wiki.com crashed or was hacked last year (I forget). IIRC, the amount of work to restore it was such that the admins threw up their hands and abandoned the project.

There's another up now at wikia. (http://fallfromheaven.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page)

If you want to keep your current state religion, promote a priest to be capable of using the Inquisition ability (there will be a brief period of increased unhappiness, you intolerant bastard), or switch to Theocracy civic (no non-state religions allowed or spread in your territory), or build the Purge the Unfaithful ritual (possible revolts in cities where multiple religions are removed).

Thanks to this thread I just dropped 20 bucks on BtS off of steam.  Played the crap out of it this weekend, didn't quite get my ass kicked but it's not looking like I have enough time left to win by doing anything other than bribing everyone to vote for me in the UN election.

I'll kick up FfH once patch 33 is a little more stable.

Keeping all your cities your home religion only matters a lot in the early game for organized religion with its sweet, sweet +25% to building construction bonus.  If you plan on Keeping Theocracy or Pacifism as your primary civic rather than Free Religion for the mid to late game, I'd go with Stormwaltz's purge suggestions.  Otherwise, just build a temple and train some priests to spread your state religion around (There's an auto-spread toggle "R" so you don't have to micromanage them once they're built.)  My fav is to spread everything for those awesome happiness bonuses on the extra large cities.

Read up on corporations a lot using the civilopedia once you get to a point they show up.  They matter a lot for strategic resource micromanagement, but they can wind-up costing you a lot of money if you build the wrong ones in your own cities.  Yeah, having the corporate HQ as your world wonder gives you money, but not enough to make up for it in some cases, IMO.  My grief strat is to found General Cereal Co or Sid's Sushi (since their bonuses are only food or culture in the city) and spread them to all the foreign civs so I get the gold bonus and they get something of less benefit than oil or aluminum access or production and gold bonuses. (More food = larger cities = more discontent.. buahahha.)

Corporations? Wtf.?

This is about FFH.  Completely different beast - start your own thread if you wanna discuss BtS.

It can also be quite useful to have multiple religions in a city. It means more temples which means more happy faces (with incense/gold depending on religion), more culture and each religion's temple also has some sort of bonus like more culture from OO, gold from RoK, military production from Order (iirc)

This depends on your civics.  With the proper civic you can get bonuses from all the different temples, with the wrong civic you will get hammered for not enforcing the one true faith.

Edit: I have Civ IV off discs and BtS off Steam and I dl'ed the 0.33 and patch 'b' for FfH last night and installed it.  I needed to do nothing to the install the make it work, all the paths were set correctly (I'm using Vista YMMV) and the only change I needed to make was to the short cut because the part after mod= needs to be in quotes ie mod="\...".

Thanks for the info, Murgos. I'm going to be in the same situation as well soon.

Anyone have any tips on how to easily do troop group movements? Also, do people have 'auto promote' option on for military units? I do, and it doesn't seem to work, at least in vanilla Civ IV

Autopromote is a bad idea IMO.  The bonuses can add up very quickly if you are paying attention but you have to be aware of what role you are intending the unit for and use it appropriately.

A scout unit with bonuses to movement.  A defense vs artillery unit.  Etc...

One well prepped unit in the right situation can be extremely powerful.

Fair enough. Yeg was asking about some vanilla stuff and I got carried away.  :why_so_serious:


You mean other than the "Move all units in this stack" and "Move all units of the same type in this stack" buttons?  Nope, but I'm not entirely sure what you're after here, either.

Eh, wasn't being a dick.  FFH and vanilla Civ are 2 completely different games. 

I would get wtfpwned in normal BtS these days!

I didn't mean to give that impression, since I have not played Civ4 without the FfH2 mod.  At this point, playing a non-modded game would just confuse me.

My state religion is Council of Esus but it's only present in my capitol.  My two other (standing!) cities are Ashen Veil, which I'm not getting any music notes from.  I'll be happy enough to allow religious freedom if I can make it benefit me.  Wow, I sound like a world leader already.

I am not a big fan of the new council religions; I think the original 5 were more then plenty for a flavorful game.  You get various bonuses from the different types of temples along with other perks per religion.

Ashen Veil:  Science/Evil oriented; summon demons for fun and profit!

Order:  Military/Good oriented; angels + lots of combat/units!

RoK:  Money money money money, moooooooneeeey (1 of my personal favorites)

FoL:  Defensive/Nuetral/Healthy.  Trees are good, mmmkay.  FYI, they will come alive and eat you if you cross my border!

??? (psuedo kthulu one):  Demon/Nuetral/holyshitCULTURE; mind staple the peasants so they do not revolt!  This one is brutal if you go the religious route (able to make super melee warriors with magic powers).  This is another favorite of mine.

Wow, I have no idea how to do any of that.  I'll have to check it out... one of the others, that is.  I don't know how to milk the Council of Esus for anything.

Octopus Overlords

Council of Esus allows special units and heroes - not sure of the exact bonuses beyond that.  You can also pass amendments that the other members have to abide (world vote type tool).

An example of using a religion to your advantage:  Ashen Veil allows some powerful demonic units along with the ability to sacrifice live ones for Science gain.  A side benefits of spreading the religion is that its temples produce science as well.  Be warned - spreading evil raises the Armageddon counter; this can be good or bad (extremely WTF awesome if you are at peace with Barbarians!).  In addition you can summon the Demon race leader and get a civic that halves the bread cost of population.  

Unfortunately halved bread cost is of little use to Hyborem, as he also comes with the trait "Fallow" - meaning that city population neither rises nor falls because of food. It IS useful for Hyborem if you adopt the Conquest civic, as that much more food is going towards building your army units.

But anyway, only way for Hyborem's cities to gain population is through the death of units with the Ashen Veil religion or by razing cities.

Also Hyborem's Whisper is just pwn.

Kuriotates + Ashen Veil = UBER cities.  Just sayin'.

Council of Esus is pretty weak overall... it doesn't spread naturally (you have to move a unit with the CoE promotion to a city and spend money to spread it) and its only hero is a one trick pony - Gibbon Goetia is weak in combat but can infiltrate and run an opposing civ for a few turns... then he dies.

Empyrean on the other hand is a powerhouse - with the new patch its temples have the same research bonus as Ashen Veil, and its hero Chalid Astrakein is one of the most powerful heroes in the game... a +2 Sun Mana affinity means he gains +2 strength for every Sun Mana you have. And if you founded Empyrean and have the shrine, you probably have at least 2 sun mana before you've built a single mana mine...

Still, the easiest by far method of winning Fall from Heaven 2:

1) Select Calabim
2) Select Order for your religion
3) Play nice with others until you research Divine Essence and have teeming metropolises
4) Create 4 Vampires
5) Feed on your huge teeming metropolises
6) Promote 4 Vampires to Vampire Lords. Vampire Lords are level 12+ units that CANNOT DIE.
7) Eat the world.

There are faster, easier ways.  For example - start as Tebryn.  Shoot straight towards the Pyre zombies (aka, rolling DEATH).  Turn into a military economy; proceed to steam roll your neighbor or two.  Now, after you have doubled (or tripled) your landmass play the economy game; make sure you pop at least 8 adepts. 

Shoot for Archmage tech, take over world (4 Eater of Souls, 4 Liches = Rolling death).  Remember - Eater of Souls can eat 1 population point then recast.  It is not unusual for me to have 30 str. 11 Wraiths with double strength + 4 move.  Oh, as a bonus, they have fear and grant wither on death.

Another sick/broken combination is promoting the Octopus Overlords mage to lvl 4 combat, lvl 3 fire magic, and twincast.

2 fire elementals a turn will kill anything (str 14 I think, plus collateral damage), especially considering how early you can pull this stunt. Except, you know, Vampire Lords. Because THEY CAN'T DIE.

What was REALLY sick was when Vampire Lords didn't have to wait a turn per eaten pop point, but could just eat an entire city in one turn. It made conquering other nations sick endless loops. NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM +300 XP NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM

So, uh... does the AI do this?  You know: NOM NOM NOM CAN'T DIE?

I don't know if anyone else came across these two incredibly broken bits, but I thought I'd share.   If you ever get the PBEM game going, or a hotseat you'll need to be aware.

I've got patch "B" of this version, and the Phoenix wonder is so fucking broken it's not even funny.   Any time you upgrade a unit that has the immortal promotion, you get not only the upgraded unit but the original.   I was trying to figure out why I had so many warriors showing up in my capitol.  "I didn't build warriors there.. and why are they at almost 0 health?"  Then it dawned on me.. and I gave it another test with an archer.  Heh.

The vampire lords are equally broken, albeit in a different way.  If you manage to capture some "Black Mirrors" from the dark elf race, you can then use them on your VL.  This lets you cast an illusionary version of the unit that dies after a turn.  Well, VLs can't die and will always respawn back at your capitol and apparently the game does the same thing with the illusionary ones, but they don't respawn with the illusion promotion (which kills them at the end of the turn.)   I now have an army of about 10 Vampire Lords who are fucking everything up.  Combined with the Portal wonder all I need is one city on a continent and it's mine.  I stopped playing this game through because it's just a ROFLSTOMP with only 4 VLs.  10 of them at level 20+ (I love Feast) is just fucking sick.

I may be naive, but I'd hope in a gentleman's game among friends, things like that would be noted, lolled at, and units deleted by the owner.

Fall from Heaven .34 is out. Illians are playable now, they have their own storyline involving summoning OMGHUGEAURIC and stomping everyone else into snow. Also lots of other changes (including moving a lot of features from the Fall Further modmod, such as lootable dungeons).

We wait for second patch, same as with your games.  Asshole.

Couldn't wait because I wanted to try the Illians and the RPGish dungeon exploration feel. But after two crashes I will give it one or two patches as well. But what I saw I really really liked (yet again).

Good that Hinterland had a free content patch this weekend as well so that I have something to do while I wait. :)

I have to fight the temptation.  But I refuse to have my heart broken again!

Patch G is out for .34, so it's fairly solid at this point. 

I haven't played since .32 - I like the UI changes.  Explorable lairs look fuuun but they all get popped so quickly... maybe I'll kick up the difficult a notch and quit playing Pangea maps. 

Haven't tried the Illians yet, not sure if they're my style as I tend to cycle through the forest elves, Luchurip, Calabim and Amurites.  Damned if they didn't get some nice toys, though.