f13.net

>>Download here. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1)<<



Developers announcement of a new FFH, non CIV engine (waiting on details). (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=361727)

Lums recommend mod to FFH. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=315887)  <-- Awesome mob, called Orbis

I've been waiting for this. I admire the amount of thought and effort they've put into this mod. It's on the scale of DC for BF42.

Patch C is up now; they are extremely quick to fix bugs!  I love this mod and hope to eventually find some people to multiplay with.

Must read for fire. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=202889)

Wiki, slightly outdated. (http://civ4wiki.com/wiki/index.php/Fall_from_Heaven_II)

What coincidence.  I hopped on the civ board Friday to see if they'd updated anything, and was surprised to find the Fire update.  I got my tail whipped on the first go round (lost three warriors and a settler right off - set me back about 50y), doing better the second.  Really fun surprise; don't research Ashen Veil unless you want things to go nuts. 

There's also a slight bug, where the game will CTD on startup.  Go into options on the main menu, and turn off "Show Health Bars". 

Thanks for this thread.  I had not played Civ4 in forever, but after reading up on this and DL'ing the mod, im back in turn based heaven.

To date, I honestly think this is the closest thing to a remade Master of Magic that i've seen (and i keep an old laptop around just to play MoM when the mood strikes).  The early game can be a little rough with wandering monsters and barbarians.  Game 1, I had the misfortune of having a big ass red dragon land in the middle of my empire of 3 cities.  Couldn't kill that bastard.  Game 2, legendary Barbarian chieftan spawns near my 2 cities and promptly takes over my capital, then razes my second city in less than 10 turns.

Game 3 is going much better.  As a neutral civ i've already wiped out 2 evil civ's who had the nerve to be on my continent.  Still trying to  get a good feel for the mages spell abilities they can get when leveling up.

I'd highly recommend this to anyone who hadn't tried it.

Xilren

Just wondering, but will this mod work with the Direct2Drive version of Civ4? I just felt like re-downloading the game for whatever reason, and I remembered someone frothing about this mod.

YES.YES YESY YES YES YESSSS.

For serious, this is the greatest mod.  EVER.  Get it.  NOW.

Damn you for necroing this and getting me all excited for the next installment.

Quite seriously though, the best mod i've ever seen. For extra fun, try playing it on the "Earth 16 Civs" map. I managed to get the Calabim starting in Egypt and the Lanun in Great Britain - how sweet is that?

Unlike the normal civ game the FFH mod has tons of strategies; no one is better then the other.  And the magic addition really is rad.

Religion makes a difference.  What magic you take makes a difference.  Every style can excel in this mod.  It is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I rave.

Hmm, everytime I try to load the mod, it restarts the game and crashes on me. So, I'm kinda stumped here.

It was already off, this does nothing.

I'm in the same state as Paelos.  Health bars off, game just quits on the loading screen with no errors.  Is it really like MoM?  Enough for me to struggle with it to get it running?

Edit:  I figured out what my problem was - I wasn't running the lastest version of the Civ 4.  I used the internal game update utility, it worked well, mod now loads fine.

Yes, same here. I went back and actually reinstalled Civ4 completely and then updated it to the 1.61 patch. That seemed to help with the mod situation. Now, I'm playing it and enjoying it.

Rawk on. Cool mod, I'm impressed with the amount of changes they've made...though they need a musical advisor. Enya? Ecchya.

Played a game with the same settings I had been playing my vanilla Civ4 over hte weekend. Huge archipelago, few civs. Lots of naval fun and expansion. Took a random civ, got what appear to be neutral elves? Forget the name.

As before, I tried to rp it some. Picked my advancements as a leader logically would, given the landscape and challenges facing an isolated island nation that didn't know there were others out there.

Focused on magery and naval, being elves and island-bound. Quickly got the Octopus Overlords thing going, and decided to embrace that, not even forming other religions. Sacrificed all my warriors to be The Drown (should be Drowned?). Shuffled them underwater and beat some barbarian tail. Had the ghost ship show up and dump undead on the northern end of my island and had a nice battle taking and retaking a couple cities before getting that under control. Built up a bunch of mage characters so they can level up while I work on improving the navy.

Got totally sucked in and went to bed late. Good deal. Maybe not quite as MoM as Age of Wonders:Shadow Magic, but definitely a GREAT improvement to Civ4. I mean...c'mon, in my first game I'm an elvish Cthulhu cult! Woohoo!

Oh goddamn you all.  I just failed trying to get MoM running on my new machine and now I see this mod. Yarrr, where's my Civ4 disks.

Oops, apparently I'm a human! Couldn't really tell from the 3d units. Playing as the Amurites with Dain the Casswallawn as leader. Still...the cthlu...errr Octopus Overlords stuff is a really cool vibe compared to the vanilla game I was playing beforehand. And as an island naval nation, the (at least early game) naval options are much cooler.

These guys are really spanking Firaxis and need to be hired STAT. Instead of a chintzy galley, I get the galley and a couple types of similar ships...all of which I can then slightly modify for speed/attack/cargo? Oh hell yes.

I can't wait to dig in some more, and it's still at .22! The release shall pwneth, verily.

Octopus Overlords are great for their upgraded religion tech - mind stapling or some such. Allows you to enable the slavery civic, which gives a significant chance of creating an orc/elf/human/whatever worker whenever you beat a rival unit.

Playing as the Calabim on the 16 civ world map, I started in Egypt and made a big early push into the Levant. Adopted the Octopus Overlords, maximized economy and battoned down the hatches. All was going pretty well until the Centaur Folk and Mercenary People (forget their names) staged a big attack from Iran and Asia minor. Solution? Hold on in Gaza until I can found the Ashen Vale in the dark heart of Africa, then switch to the Hyborem faction, permanently ally with the beleagured Calabim, and restart my dark conquest of the planet.

My one complaint about the mod is the AI's inability to handle magic well. They use it occasionally, but with nowhere near the possible effectiveness a human player would.

That was always a huge stumbling block for the AI in MoM, too.  The computer could be counted on to cast a heal once (if available) it's highest damage spell, and the same series of enchants (depending on color).  Don't know why that was, but there was more than enough times that if it'd cast Flame Strike instead of a maximized firebolt or doombolt it could have wiped my army out.  Silly machine.

I'm also finding it very cool.  It's not MoM, but it's definitely not Civ 4.  Not that Civ 4 doesn't have a much improved interface (from Civ 3), but somewhere along the way Civ 4 seems to have lost it's heart.  This mod has heart.

Well, Civ 4 just made too many decisions about their features which have zero consequences on the actual game. Religion? Meaningless. Civics? Basically meaningless at the top. Units? All homogonized with no attack v. defensive tradeoffs. It just became extremely beige even with "upgraded" items like flashier graphics and better AI.

This mod actually makes things matter. Your civics have tradeoffs and balance, and they really piss off the AI. Religion actually affects units, civics, and technology. It's a much better use of the system.

So what difficulty does everyone play on?

I've already restarted like 8 times.  Each civ plays very unique.  Currently enjoying my role as a barbarian.

Religion - I've always suspected this was a victim of politically correct tooth-pulling. There's a mod somewhere that makes religions more like their RL counterparts (Jewish cities don't gain health from pork, Christians get awesome missionaries, etc.).

Units - I think promotions were supposed to take the place of unit variety. I'm still missing the Firepower stat from Civ2.

Civics - Better than the handful of basic governments in previous games, but not enough variety in effects. Fun to mod, though.

Strategic Resources - I like the concept of this. Scarcity can really enrich the game, but it doesn't happen all the time. I enjoy "New World" style maps, where some of the most valuable resources aren't available on the starting civ continent. I've also run across the odd super-site on random maps. One city in my last game of FFH managed to hit four wine regions. (It also ended up being the birthplace of Octopus Overlords, which made it my biggest source of both money and culture.)

Drunk Octolords? How could you ever go wrong!

Cursed mod keeps crashing on me as one particular city completes production.  I may have to abandon my summoning octolords for a new game.  :x

Oh.. and "Desert Rose" for the OO music.  NOoooooooooooooooooo.

Ashen Veil is looking attractive.. wonder what their music is.

The Order's music is well-picked. I'm using that one at the moment as I pump out legions of Crusaders to smite my heathen enemies.

Interesting--I'm getting a crash as well with the exact same setup--locks me up completely, have to restart :(

Any idea on what it is you are building? For me, it seems to be when a certain city absorbs Octolords religion...

EDIT: "patch d" fixed my crash problem, but omfg do they have a breeding wolves problem. Looks like they didn't bother to check the total number when breeding--about 100 years in or so and I have literally 300+ wolf pack units all across any of the north/south tundra.

I never ever thought I would see "the grind" in Civilization, but I spent 20+ turns with 3 summoners chain summoning to try to thin them out, and finally opened the world builder in frustration to find the den--only to see the horde in all it's glory.

Looks like Arcana (http://www.erebusodora.net/arcana/) for the most part, with at least one song taken from Ben Houge's soundtrack to Arcanum.

Ashen Veil is niiice.  NIfty feature, too.  Once you research "infernal pact" (AV only) you get a popup that says, "You have brought demons into this world. Do you want to abandon your civ and begin as Hyboreim?" (Infernals) (http://civ4wiki.com/wiki/index.php/FfH_Infernal_%28Civilization%29)

The infernals start out with a powerful hero 2 settlers and some nice units.  As a nice touch, any place your borders are turns to ash/ lava rather than natural pastoral settings.   Opposing civ units that die can produce Manes (http://civ4wiki.com/wiki/index.php/FfH_Manes_%28Unit%29) which are able to hurry production or promote into minor melee units. 

Buahah.

Don't worry about abandoning to try them out, either.  It changes the savegame name since your leader's name changes, so you can return to your previous civ if you find Demons aren't for you.

It seems FFH will be included in the next Civ4 expansion pack, "Beyond the Sword." News found on civfanatics.com.

EDIT: The mod finally has a homepage (http://kael.civfanatics.net/).


A lot of SF scenarios, but I bet not a one of them will have a galactic-scale map. Long ago (Civ2) I had made a stylized spiral galaxy map for a personal Star Wars mod. "cities" were "Sectors," and each square of terrain encompassed thousands of stars. It boggles me that modders - including Firaxis' own - are still obsessed with having maps on the scale of individual planets or solar systems.

So weird that you should mention that (galactic-scale map) as I was recently thinking about Outreach - a board game created in the late 70s by a company called SPI.  They had a galactic scale map similar to what you are talking about (game was one of three, Star Force, Outreach and Star Soldier).

I absolutely love this mod, problems and all (minor ones in the big scheme of things).

The one thing that bothers me is that they flat out ripped a lot of commercial games' graphics--specifically, a lot of the promotion icons are straight out of Guild Wars.

I hope that Firaxis is giving them some support art wise to get this fixed up for that CD--hate to see a law suit happen and taint this incredible mod.

<3 Planar Gates.

Edit: Well, I built the Mercucial Gate and unlocked some new race that took over the city.  It was all very confusing, maybe if I get a few mins at work this week, I'll read the wiki.  Or print it and read it on the train.

The froth for this mod has officially reached me. The moment I can play this, it shall be done. I've wanted a reason to get back into Civ 4, this looks like a good damn reason.

Nod. I'll be installing this as soon as my PC arrives. Mioght even check out the expack as well....

While I was downloading this I noticed the following:


The mod is more popular than the official patch...

I was thinking the same thing and came here to post it after thinking about Stormwaltz's post a bit.  There's just tons of ripped-off sounds, artwork and -not to mention - Guybrush Threepwood as a Hero unit.  They've got to be doing something about that.

For those thinking about trying it--go back to the very basics. The only thing this really has in common strategy wise (how you build, what you need, how to tech, what buildings to blow off, etc) is that it uses the Civ 4 engine.

I got endlessly frustrated trying to keep up with my old-school civ strat "it's ok, I'm on top of it, build everything", and figured out that it's really designed to have you specialize. In just about every way possible.

Once I took the time to read the wiki, get a feel for an empire or two and how to play it, I was having a --lot-- more fun.

I cannot believe you fuckers are finally getting into this.  For serious; this mod had me quit MMO's for months.  and months.  I cannot imagine actually getting a multi player game going with this thing.

I will say this; it is not for the faint of heart.  As mentioned earlier; you WILL not be able to build everything.  You need to focus on strategy a lot with this mod.  Also, knowing your civ and playing up his strengths is extremely vital.  Example: the crazy Civ who switches traits randomly is awesome for cultural takeovers.  The barbarian civ needs to pop their unique civ hero ASAP and take over villages (he has the ability to automagically take over barbarian villages just by entering them). 

I love this mod and can play it for hours upon hours; no 2 games are truly alike.

3D Pong (curveball) made me quit MMOGs. It doesn't really take much.

For those of you wondering how to start FFH straight off (i.e. without having to launch Civ IV > Advanced > Load a Mod), go to My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CivilizationIV.ini and change the Mod=0 line to read Mod = Mod\Fall from Heaven 2 022

note that "Fall from Heaven 2 022" is what I have for the FFH mod directory name, your mileage may vary.

Awesome, I'll set that up later.

There is also a shortcut in one of the sub directories that will launch FFH- it looks gnarly.

Ok, so any hints on how to level up disciple units (healers/priests)?

Unlike the arcane units, they don't gain exp over time, and with a strength 2, by the time you can produce them, the barbarians (and other civs) have units that obliterate them.

I used the subdirectory shortcut.

I think my Zealots are autolevelling? My newest army has one in the stack to speed healing, it's pretty slow without one, wizard regeneration just wasn't cutting it. I also decided that I'm only going to use wizards and healers in stacks with hero units. Losing a level 8 or 9 wizard last night hurt.

Thanks, Ched. Took a while to get into, but this mod is teh pwnz. My last two weeks of EQ2 subscription are almost untouched, and  :nda: is lonely. And I'm still playing my first kludged-together game where I didn't really have any plan, I'm just fumbling around researching and building stuff. I did finally specialize a naval yard and military production city. My navy was pretty woeful for a while there and I almost got swamped by someone's pirate ships before I recovered. Luckily, I had a couple early heroes who were max level and a few mages that were decent level.

There's so much crap you can build, it's great. You can really customize things. I'd find in Civ4 that for 75% of my cities, it was the same build order every time. In FfH2, I have to be a lot more specific about building queues and unit selection. Although I do have to say I bought a lot of time to mess around by specializing my Amurites in magic and pumping out a small horde of mages early on. I only wish fireballs gave the casting wizard experience, they don't seem to unless I'm missing something. But my early game was the fireballs of doom (especially after getting an arcane barge to ship them around in).

How long do games last for?

As long as regular Civ games - ie long.

BTW the newest version of FFH has a nifty intro video. Unfortunately it still uses some of the heisted artwork (most of the really nice looking leader pics come from Icewind Dale II). It'll be interesting to see if Firaxis redoes the artwork or if they just package it as a "user made mod included as a convienence". I'm sure the lawyers will sanitize it either way.

I usually play as the Calabim, because hey, having 3 roaming immortal vampire lords lay waste to your enemies backed by Brujah artillery is just pure sex. (And yes, I rename my immortal vampire lords, because 'Steve, Slayer of Nations' sounds better than "Vampire Lord" in combat recaps.)

Firaxis is also packaging Rhye's Civ4 mod, which is worth a look. It's insanely historically accurate, and HARD. Each faction has a historical benchmark to reach that meshes how it plays; India has to found 5 religions, while Arabia has to convert 40% of the world to Islam by 1400 AD, whereas Rome has to take and hold Europe by 450 AD.

Cool feature - if you create a city, it will not only take the correct name, but be named correctly for your faction. Greece: Byzantium  Rome: Constantinopolis  Arabia: Bizantia  Turks: Istanbul

http://wikirhye.wikidot.com/

Dunno, I've been playing this one since May 29th. I play the biggest maps from the earliest time period on normal speed, but I play sporadically. A half-hour here and there with a couple multi-hour sessions on the weekends.

I lolled the first time the barbarians got the three hill giants. "Your fireball has been defeated by a Moe!"

And seriously...ditch the goddamned Enya.

Yes, mages and clerics (zealots, etc) both gain XP per turn like heroes, but at a slower rate.

I looked for one, but didn't find it (cause I'm blind).  So I ended up going out to a Civ 4 site and finding that method.  Thanks!

Edit: causing looking for "on" is much different then looking for "one"

Like Lum said, they do auto-level, at something like 2% chance of gaining 1 XP each turn.

Goddamn it, you guys are gonna make me fire up Civ 4 again. FFH sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.

I've had the install exe sitting around for at least a week now, but I know damn well I have no time.

My favorite map to play is continent- I do custom game and add 3-4 extra civs; creates lots of turmoil.  Early game is about expanding and survival; after awhile people get established and the game always has character.  Later in the game, assuming things are relatively stable, there is an entirely new continent to exploit (the timing seems perfect for my level of play!) chock full of established barbarians.  My games tend to be about early expansion, some wars, build up, then wars and/or attempting to get the resources from the newfound continent.

Disciple units do gain xp over time; key is to pop 10-20 as early as possible and upgrade when needed.  I generally do not level them until I find a need (such as getting a healer up and running for my attacking horde).  Ring of fire is a great strategy for seiges; take 4 disciple units with ring of fire spell and heal + a bunch of melee unit, park near a city, spend a few turns popping the spell off, and viola.  Careful of fires, may need to put them out if they occur!

Another great tactic is to switch to the demonic civ.  Everytime an evil unit dies you get a low level demon who can be sacrificed in your city for population points.  If you have an arch mage with law magic 3 you can pacify a city so there is no turmoil; one game I had a city with 120 population!

Thats a lot of specialists!  Plus a great person every turn   :heart:

Funny I have been playing FFH for about 3 weeks now just about every night.  I cancelled my WoW sub because...well I'm sick of it, so Civ4 has gone back to the top of the rotation (with DoW: Dark Crusade a distant second.

I myself haven't had any tech problems running or playing the mod aside from the very infrequent CTD. 

I usually go Fractal > Large > High Water level.  (I like coastal cities and battles and schtuff)  I play mainly as neutral civs (Hippus) but for a fun easy and overall IMBA run playing the Wood Elves is great.  I enjoy how the different religions affect your civs strategy.  IE - Wood Elves with Fellowship of Leaves = easymode stay the fuck outta my territory pewpewpew. 

Dunno, Civ4 was a damn great game anyway, but FFH really has me hooked.  Other than the fact that Orthus seems to spawn in my front yard EVERY SINGLE GAME, and the odd Acheron camping of my fog of war early game border that is.  :roll:

Elves are easy to deal with.  FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!

(http://smartlabs.lewiston.k12.id.us/Jenifer/MrazJacob/images/beavis6.jpg)

I keep restarting after 250-300 years and try something new.  I'm missing out on the rest of the game me thinks.

Orthus was holding down the evil civ but they finally killed him last night. Going to have to do something about them, luckily I am in the final stages of my expansionist push to grab the two huge island chains just south of them before they recovered from constant barbarian ravages. I took your mithril, bwahaha.

I keep it to 4 or 5 civs on a huge archipelago. I like to really develop the civs out and when you finally engage in combat it's massive. Lots of diplomacy. Playing this round as the only neutral civ, have the wood elves as good and two evil civs. The one evil civ was being held down by barbarians until last night, the other I stopped trading with two nights ago because my good buddies the elves asked me to, and we're super friendly and trading tons of stuff.

I think my next phase is to share some of my mithril with the elves and have her attack the evil civ that has been flourishing so they're out of the way now that the stunted evil civ (which is the Ashen Veil civ) is finally jamming. Let her have that island and then sandwich the Ashen Veil guys before the demons show up.

Armageddon clock at 12.

I'm still learning the tech and the units and what does what.  I'm playing as the Demons right now, and while I'm not doing horrible, the Law God/ Elf combo is right on my border causing me grief.  There wasn't enough land for me to get a whole lot of expansion room, as I picked 10 or 12 Civs to start with.

  That little land and my little starting city means I've got a whole lot of catch-up to do... if only these mortals would die faster so I could take over their cities.

Counter's at 35, and just not ticking fast enough for me.

So now that everyone's playing, who wants to do a multiplayer game?

Reserve your civ now!

No.

I really really want to, but how would you do it?

Either play by email or someone runs a Pitboss server. Pbem would take forever, while Pitboss requires some sort of technical wizardry, i'm sure.

Oh, I thought there was a hosting option.  Was wondering more about how to get a few us of to sit still for like 30 hours.

Multiplayer 4x always end in tears of abandoned games.

The last time this was tried was with SMAC.. I think they got 15 turns in before it was abandoned. Those 15 turns took ~4 weeks from the thread I remember.

Pitboss would be better, but, requires so much more coordination it's also a loss.

Some games just weren't meant for multiplayer.  :|

Q: What difficulty does everyone play on? I pussy out at Warlord so I can win games.

I just updated my game to 2022 version f and checked Gamespy, and two FfH games were visible. Apparently it would be possible to play it via the regular methods, if anyone was interested. On blazing quick small maps the games can actually go by quite quickly.

I play it on Prince. Formerly I would play it on higher difficulties, but since they nerfed the "plague" spell in the last build I can no longer kill stacks of 20 units with two vampires.

Yeah. You're really selling me on wanting to multiplayer with you.

Don't hate the player, baby. Hate the build.

Hah, I have a feeling I'd get owned in multiplayer. I'm very big on the whole culture war thing.

No, I'll just hate the player. Just because you can exploit game holes doesn't mean you should.

But then, that's why I don't play multiplayer any more. You'll always get some bunny-hopping, dolphin-diving douche that says "Hey man...the game allows it!".

(http://www.rps.org/images/portfolios/420/CAR_FIRE.jpg)

I'm up for multiplayer. I can probably get a pitboss set up. Think the only way we'd ever get anything done is to just set some time aside to play live though. PBEM would be WAY too slow.

Nor would I play a game that relies upon an "honor system' to prevent cheese tactics from being exploited. Battlefield Vietnam being the first example to spring to mind.

One of the beautiful things about playing a work in progress is to explore the different gaming holes and go bitch about them on the forums. I did just such a thing in regards to the tier 2 entropy spell, and within a month they fixed it. Huzzah for their responsiveness.

Anywho, there are a number of holes still left in the game - notably the upgrade system. Experienced multiplayer folk apparently have a complex map for building new units with max promotions - starting with a dwarven warrior, then immediately uprading him  up through the tiers to shield wall to produce a unit with guerilla II, sentry, commando, etc, for example. Personally I dislike essential build orders in games, no matter what their form, and this seems to be just another abstract realization of that.

Anywho, i'm free for a game Thursday or Friday before 2. Or on the weekend. And I'll try my hand at the dwarves - I call Kandros Fir.

Edit: What the hell is dolphin diving?

I'll give a medium world quick pace game a try w/ the computer today and tomorrow and see how I like it.

I fully expect to have run my attentionspan course by this weekend.

Is 2.022 the latest version? I was poking around teh webz last night and couldn't conclusively answer that.

Dolphin diving = exploit in BF2. Jumping and proning in rapid succession while still being able to shoot.

2.022f I believe (Don't forget to DL and apply the patch).

I'd possibly be interested in an MP session, but given that my games are taking 10+ hours for 250 turns single player before the first war by anyone is even started, I just don't see that happening :(

Maybe we could try a scenario, or play a second era game--although that could really break some of the civs that have specific starting strats--for example with my Calabim builds, I can't automate workers since they seem to not understand that all I want is farms and mines and pastures--cottages are for the weak.

It's very dependent upon the civs, the size of the map, and the playstyles being employed. On Quick/Standard/Pangea i've seen fighting break out as early as turn 35-50 (much to my detriment, as scouting wargs capture my second city). It's also important to note that the computer's willingness to go to war is greatly influenced by the Armageddon counter, which invariably favors clashing mid to late game empires rather than quick and dirty skirmishes in the wilderness. While some civs in multiplayer games - Calabim included - will still hold off in favor of rushing aristocracy and their other "essential" techs, early game parties such as the Doviello and Clan of Embers will try to mount up their goblins on Wargs and go on an early game rampage in hopes of buying them enough time to get a sizable advantage.

From what I read on the forums, 2-3 hours would be a reasonable amount of time to play. While I doubt anyone will secure total victory, it would still see some good fighting, and a couple civs wiped out.

And if we still feel we have unfinished business, we could save it and reload next time we play.

I'd be interested in the MP game.  Let's see how it pans out. 

Don't worry Hat, I'm the same way, I love me some culture and religious city turning.

Clan of Embers needs to be at war.  Always.  If you do not war then you are losing- you cannot produce shit fast enough during peace time to keep up with others.  Meta tip:  pop a shitload of goblins and go get wolves; BAM free Warg Riders!

To clarify a bit on this question, the first tier (strength 2) disciple units don't get XP over time. The unit needs a channelling promotion in order to get XP/time, ie. you need priests, high priests or inquisitors.

For example, with the Order as your religion the acolyte is the basic disciple unit and it doesn't get XP over time, although it can upgrade into a confessor which does. The confessor can also be built in a city. The confessor can then be upgraded to a high priest of the order or an inquisitor once it reaches level 6, which is the only way to get those units (they can't be built). You also need the appropriate tech/resources/buildings to do this.

Leaders with the "Arcane" trait are awesome.   Elves, however, ARE fucking E-Z mode.  Holy crap. I started a 'quick' game last night and I'm about 1k points ahead of everyone else on the scoreboard after only 200 turns.

Think I'll try some dwarves or vampires later today.

Vampires are teh awesome.  Midgame, setup a few cities as pure growth, and have your vampires (or lords if you have them) suck the population.  They get xp based on city size, so a city of 20 gives more xp than one of 5, even if they down a point either way, so you'll want to find the sweet spot where you get the most xp, but also high growth.  Or my personal favorite, conquer an opponent's high pop cities and suck them dry.  Each city turns another vamp into a war god.  Or for more fun, vamp a high level mage, and have your mage suck a city.  Easy way to advance 200xp archmages (plus, it lets you rapidly advance 3 of them into liches).

Starting area and neighbors > Race.

Or maybe I'm just telling myself that because elves are the only race that I haven't gotten my butt kicked with so far  :-)

I started a game last night with the elves and got stomped a couple times by barbarians before I finally got things going. Those first two starting islands sucked anyway.

Then I started thinking I want to play the pirate guy because I love archipelagos....Love this mod.

I got Civ4 on direct d/l, installed the mod and...

remembered its been fucking forever since I played whatever civ was ported to the SNES way back in the bygone era.  I dont remember how to manage city growth for shit.  Also I keep building workers only to realize that they can't actually improve anything because the needed tech research hasn't been done for them to be anything beyond road builders.

I think I'm going to need to actually participate in a tutorial...   *sigh*

Heh..the biggest problem is that city/empire infrastructure is fundamentally different for each of the civilizations. You can't re-learn a single infrastructure strat and expect it to apply to the next civ you use.

Personally, after playing evil races hard (vampires, sheim mostly), I've realized that I really like the simplicity (3-4 cities tops, but super sprawl) of the Kuriotites. Of course--I make them evil by going Veil, but hey, I start off good!

I'm not sure that any civ that starts the Cult of the Dragon can be considered "good".

I wish Brian Reynolds would hire these guys and get back into TBS.

From what limited time I had to play this so far, I am Liking it. I started off Bannor, thinking I would make a huge army of crusading Paladins or somesuch, only to learn that actually getting good units is Hard. And then I learned that the Confessor casters I was able to get easily don't actually cast Fireball, so now I have to go back and train up my arcane tech.

Is it just me, or are the normal ground units weak as piss?


Anyway, the Demon civ decided to spawn within spitting distance of two of my northern support cities, so now I'm up there with a sizeable stack, including 2 hero units and a bunch of Crusaders with a few Confessors/Prophets as healing/support.

Unfortunately, it's practically impossible for me to engage directly in melee, as the lead demon wtfpwns whatever I send at it. So for now, while I am teching to Paladins, I am just using Ring of Fire on the one enemy stack to keep them under control.

Also, my long-time southern neighbor/ally has decided I am vulnerable. Too bad her only targets are my heavily defended capital, and another city that's defended almost as much as my capital.

PS; Why does it seem that The Order, the religion I founded, sucks?

It's all a matter of how you use it.

Promotions are a huge deal, and while the barbarians seem like a PITA, they are really there for you to farm up exp on your early melee units. You also probably need to tech up your weapon metal upgrades (bronze, iron, then mithril), and as Bannor, your big strengths are in the holy line--specifically your pallies, and don't forget to build the mercurian gate--it'll steal one of your cities for the Basium civilization (which you can choose to actually swap over to if you like), but they will be full ally with you--you can even tell them what to research.

Before summoning Basium, get yourself stocked up on lots of units--Basium will declare war on any Holy Veil civs he finds, and drag you into it.

The Order is pretty damned awesome once you figure it out--and Bannor is a good civ as well. I highly suggest you study the wiki, especially bookmark the spells section--your casters have 3 "types", and there are like 14 different nodes of magic. Based on their channeling level (which they don't gain promotions in directly, but from being upgraded to mage/summoners, then arch mages) they get different spells, and you won't necessarily know what to promote on each level--yet you must spend your promotions to get to the unit level where you can upgrade to the next type.

Oh yah, and don't forget your custom/specialized civic--Crusade I think it is.

Fuck.

Hella reading.

We're going to set up a multiplayer game of this at some point soon right?  Otherwise its so not worth it...

I can't run anything bigger then a 'standard' sized game as the turns begin to take up to 30 seconds (and I start to want to put my head through the screen).

...  that's what I think a multiplayer game would be like.  If we were all in the same room, and drinking, and giving each other shit for taking so long it's sounds like it would be fun.  But not actually knowing any of you, I wouldn't feel comfortable saying, "will you hurry the FUCK UP!" over ventrillo.

also, I HATE THE GODDAMN WOLF BUG!  I've stopped playing anything but tropical just to keep them from going spawn crazy (which doesn't seem to bother the NPC civs very much... bastards!)

Yah--it's one of the reasons I moved to the kurio's--I was getting about 2 turns every 90 mins micromanaging 20 cities of the vamps.

The wolves breeding out of control should be fixed next patch according to Kael, but personally I just periodically open up the world builder and delete 'em if there are too many--especially once I've gotten level 6+ on all the units that want it.

I'm really loving this so far, and it's rekindled my love for the game. It made me realize that the primary thing missing from Civ IV was variety, in units and technologies especially. I actually want to try every race just to approach the game from a different angle. I'm finishing up a Llosafar(?) elf campaign and just teched up to the Elven Flurry, which are crushing my enemies cities with only some meager bombard support.

My only complaint so far is that I can't change the type on a mana node. I made some bad decision early on (not realizing you only need 1 mana of each type) and now I have some useless nodes that I'd love to switch to another type to try out some other schools of magic.

If you get 3 of one node type your arcane units automatically begin with that type of magic...

Ok. Now my original like for the game just went over the top.

First Lanun (pirate) city = Innsmouth. Second = Dunwich. Etc. Of course, went for sailing tech and the Octopus Overlords.

The variety between civs is definitely refreshing, can't wait to see the addition of quests and whatnot, this game is going to be insane.

Yeah the variety is great.  The decision to limit the # of units in Vanilla C4 was because people complained about "early obsolesence" in Civ3.  You'd get your first unit of x type.. then the very next tech would obsolete it, so they simply reduced the number of unit types out there.  Taking the unique racial units in the direction FFH has would have been the better choice. (Particulalry since the "unique" units in C4 are just replacements for base units.)

I didn't know that about the 3-nodes, Ched. Thanks for the tip. If he could add-in overland spells (other than rites) and the mana pool of MoM I'd be in complete bliss.

Personally, I find the number of crap obsolescent units that clutter my build menus obnoxious in the the late game, particularly given the fact that things seem to be listed in random order (city improvements followed by sea units, followed by land units, followed by more city improvements, followed by a couple more sea units...). YMMV.

mmdv

It would be nice if you could filter out buildings/units you don't ever want to see--but that's Civ IV mechanics for the most part I think, not the mod itself (although I did read somewhere that they forced non-obsolesence on some units by using "Sir Not Appearing In This Mod" as a unit all can upgrade to, but can never get the tech for).

I just found out last night that the "multiple of one mana node type" is even more complex: 2 gives you level 1 spells without burning a promotion, and 3 gives you level 2. Would  be useful if the mana nodes weren't a relatively scarce resource, but with a just about mandatory requirement for a water node, followed by whatever additionals you may want (fire is very nice for many races for example, and law/death can be pretty important if you go unyielding order archmage/liches).

The one down side I've found is some of the scripts don't do a ton of checking, especially the Armegeddon stuff. I routinely find myself entering the world builder and "helping out" the other races by giving them more land, especially if they wind up forming their cities in the middle of the arctic tundra. This is even more important for the Infernals, since hell terrain doesn't spread through the arctic, effectively dooming him to nothingness.

That is new.  Also note that different mana types have different effects; Death adds 1 unhealthiness point to all cities, for example. 

Fireballing Arch Mages are super uber; get a stack of 2-3 and you pretty much roll through another civ. 

I like meteor better ;)

I was just happy when I finally killed a Red Dragon and took his Loots.

It's funny how the civs are so tied to play styles--for example I rock at vamps, and kuriotites, but damned if I can figure out those pesky elves.

The AI keeps beating me to FoL[/i], and I'm the only elf in the game. My production and research rate sucks, and they are all out expanding me as well. Gotta be missing something!

Got enough forests? Elves w/o forests are pitiful.  Also, job #1 early-on is expand, expand, expand.  Build a few token defenders in a city then start cranking settlers, planting cities in heavily-forested areas first.  When you finally get FoL Priests > Adepts since they can improve the land and then forest it.   I didn't develop magic as elves until mid-game.  Getting to longbowmen first was the key to the defensive strategy.

Elves are a very defensive/ builder play style.  If you're typically the warmonger/ aggressive type it'll be quite difficult to do well as elves.  I use pacifism and militaristic as my early civics.  Pacifism seems to keep other civs from seeing you as a threat, and militaristic helps cover some of the gold penalty for having defensive units, while upping settler production time.

Even if another civ gets FoL first, you still get a missionary once you finish researching it - it even gives you a contact to the founding civ when you convert over.  Guardian of Nature (or whatever the civic is) helps out a LOT with how the elves are typically played. 

Also, I've found that I often *need* to use Gilden, their early hero unit, to raze/conquer a city or two in the very early game and get some breathing room.  A defender/builder kind of sucks when you have three cities and everyone else has five.  Then I usually research up to Rangers (ignore bronze working and beyond) and go knock down a few more cities... and then get bored and start another game before the late game starts.

Of course, I play on Noble, so you're on Monarch or something you can safely ignore me  :-)

I was thinking how one of the civ's that are barbarian would play well on higher difficulties when the barbarians are ridiculous.

Even if another Civ gets a religion first, you can still snag the Patriarch if you level up a priest early enough. I don't know what's happening in my current game, I shoot for Octolords and lock down my civ so no new religions can spread and then purge. But...no new religions popped up! I think I've got Kuri, Embers, and ol' Auric as playmates. They all adopted Octolords so far except Auric, who's just an ornery old cuss. So I sent the Black Pearl Wind over to pay him a visit, loaded with a couple mercs. Apparently mercs can't take over cities or pillage. The pillage part kinda bummed me out, I was hoping for some lewtz, but at least he's basically a non-threat now because they're smashing his army up pretty nicely.

Built a couple pirate coves to base out of, playing as Lanun is fun. The food bonus in the sea is incredible on an archipelago map, especially since the only mithril is in the arctic regions. And gunpowder is on the exact opposite side of the planet. Grr. I plopped some units on it and sentried a bunch of pirate ships around it.

Another oddity, I sent some Drown over to a jungle island so the lizardmen would attack them...and they left them alone. I fortified on a hill, though that made them too unpalateable, so I just sat outside the ruins but they ignore me. I can't really attack them because they're equal strength and the lizards edge out my drown with their 10% jungle defense bonus. Grr.

Such a good mod.

I'm really getting into the Sheaim/magic tecs.  Started a Standard size Terra map, added a few extra civs to make it crowded, and promptly got held down by a single bears den that was right next to my capitol, limiting my initial land grab.  I slowly build up my three cities, get some conjurors, get Ashen Veil --> Infernal Pact, and the Hyboreom show up... on the uncolonized continent.  They're currently spreading like wildfire (hellfire?) over there.  Still early in the game though, going to be a good one.

Barbarian civs are extremely dificult.  You have to stay at war constantly or you fall waaay behind.  If you are the production type this civ is not for you.


BUT if you play to crush...

yep. Grab irrigation for quick growth, then just rush for bronze working etc for better weapons and start rushing down your nearest neighbour. Kuroites died to my Orcs that way. Then I tried to take on Lanun but my strikeforce got wiped by 3 ogres from their wonder. The bad thing is my civ auto-raze a captured city, so I can't really profit much from the improvement, so I pillage everything with my marauding stack.

Does anyone play with the baslaphers or whatever they are called?  Can you win through culture?

More details of the FfH version included with the next expansion are out. It's a completely different version.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/796/796807p1.html

It doesn't sound as good either....sounds more like a single scenario than a full-blown, total-conversion mod of the game.

Bleh.  I'd much rather chip in a few bucks for them to keep updating the current mod than to play what that sounds like.

They've said they're going to be continuing to update the current mod as well.

After about 5 games fuciking around I'm sort of kinda getting the hang of things again.  Still playing like a super n00blar but really I was never super into Civ although i did play the early one a ton on SNES and I played the futuristic one at a internet cafe for awhile back in HS.

So I've got a starting to mid strat I like w/ the Agnostics (Grigori?) anyways, the wolves thing is fucking weak.  It ruins some games so bad.

The mod has 4 milestone versions. Currently they are on Fire + a few patches.


The development team does not accept donations, instead directing you to UNICEF if you want to give money. The 'official' mod looks to be similar only in name and doesn't have anything to do with the design team other than borrowing a few concepts.

Tonight, I discovered the joy that is Loki and his traveling circus.

Heh..I spent some time working with the custom map scripts--trust me, it's worth it. I played with landmasses, but found SmartMap--ffh to be the best, by far. They are pretty damned easy to get running, and only require you to create a custom game to use, and give some pretty cool ways to adjust the maps that are generated.

Hmmm, I like it. I'm not really patient type so it took a while to get a good game going, but damn when it's good going it's hard to stop. The one more turn syndrome just keeps kicking in. Add in the 'hmm what does that do?' factor when encountering new units, I'm hooked. I spent 6 hours already in a day glued to a Standard size map with 12 random civs.

The best part is when I switched over to Evil, whacked the Belsiums (damn angels keep knocking on my front door) then I noticed the lava and forest fire spreading...very very awesome feature. I deduced that it's gotta be that Hyborum demon town that causes it, (I was Ashen religion after capping a holy city, maybe that's the cause of the lava spread?) Anyhow I switched over to neutral after kicking their super unit with my own. Fantastic. And the land tiles gradually turned back to normal. Just when I thought the worst was over suddenly there's a time trigger where all farms disappeared...woooot. Back to rebuilding again  :-P

I want to try a solid landmass type game with Loki just culture pwning people.

It took four pages of commentary for me to download this, but I did.

I started a game using the neutral seafarers(Lunen?). I'm doing alright so far, Octopus Overlords and all. However, every other civ has converted to OO. I'm also at peace with all the evils, and haven't found any good guys yet. I tried to snuff out the weakest civ on my island, but to no avail. I focused too much on seafaring stuff, and not enough on regular military. Maybe once I have some mages, or something, I'll be more effective.

I'm finally getting close to the endgame of my Lanun game. Lanun kick ass with mercs+pirates, it fits their theme imo. I knocked the shit out of Auric as I had begun in my above post, and with my Air-buffed ships it was a matter of a few turns wiping up all his cities. Having had a time getting some barbarian cities to adopt my culture, I just razed all his and teleported in settlers with the (zomg overpowered) Nexus.

Now I've got Guybrush (singing shanties ftw) with his mage buddies and a buffed contingent of mercs ready to deal with Ashen Veil and it's game over, man. The good guys are stuck on their island because of those nasty, nasty pirates. Gotta be careful sailing the seven seas, eh?

On development, Shadow is slotted for after the official Civ4 expansion's release. They're still updating Fire like mad (check for patches often, up to h now).

The trick with Mages is that they start out as Adepts with no real offensive power, then can be promoted to Mages (enabling Fireball) once their level is high enough. They do gain experience over time, but it's pretty slow. If I plan to use magic heavily I build a bunch of Adepts as early as possible and save up some money to pay for their promotion. They are only strength 2 to start so leveling them via combat is pretty tough. Once they get Fireball they are nice for bombarding defenses, but the collateral damage seems to cap at 4 units, so heavily defended cities (6 or more units) tend to heal units back to full unless you have more than 3 fireballs hitting them each round.

I started a game with the Luchuirp and the golems are turning out to be unstoppable. They are significantly stronger than units of their corresponding tech level and can gain a +50% attack bonus out of the gate if you get Barnaxus up to Combat V. For reference my Iron Golems, which require Iron Working tech, are strength 9 (+50%) while it seems that the best that can be built at that tech level is around strength 5. I just loaded up 3 ships from my starting continent with them and I'm getting ready to unleash some automaton terror on 'Evil Island'. Their only real weakness is that they regain life about 4x slower than normal units, but I sent Bambur (a Hero with the Repair ability) along to keep the momentum going.

I am in love with this game. :heart:

So what difficulty do you guys play at? I've been repeating the usual copper rush strat with 2-3 different civs ( I like randoms) and it seems like even Prince AI does stupid things like building a crap load of weak defenders and teching up to non-military stuff that becomes XP fodder by my STR 4 early stacks. I just cleaned up 3 neighbouring civs in the same continent on Prince with no sweat, grabbing the Pact of Nihon to get 3 Ogre that functions as city bombarders are awesome too, plus they are STR 6. Maybe I'll up the difficulty up a notch to see how things turn any different.

Hell terrain spreads in Ashen Veil nations automatically.  It will spread in evil, neutral, or good depending on the armageddon counter. 

Monarch tends to have a good chance of kicking my ass rapidly if I'm not very careful.

v0.22 is the current (as of this posting) version.  v0.23 will be the last vanilla mod; after that, the mod will require BtS.

Best marketing tool evar.

Having a hoot with this playing as the Sheaim - through my process of summoning demons and razing cities managed to crank the armageddon counter up to 100 - the world now consists of 2 big continents, my nicely Sheaim one, and a smoking, barbarian-racked, hellfire infested ruin which used to contain everyone else.  I am a bit disappointed that even though the Sheaim exist to destroy the world, it appears I won't get any victory until I finish off the last good civ, and then turn on my demon allies to get a conquest victory.  I won't get largest %age of the world, due to my razing strategy, and the same for legendary cities, since most of them are smoking, demon-infested ruins.

Still, lots of fun, and already planning my treehugger elf game.

Will I have to get Both expansions to continue updating?


Also, finally starting to clean up my little island with the Bannor. One of my commanders got cheapshotted attacking a city with a 98.3% success rate, but it's ok. I can now pump out mages and Paladins (having the Dragon's Horde in my capital to boost production is helpful), and still have one of my good heroes, plus Sphener. Once I clean off my island I just need to concentrate on cranking out fireballing Mages and more Paladins/Crusaders to clean out the Land of Evil (ie the other island).

Mmm, I don't think you have to destroy Hyborem so long as you summoned him.

Yeah, unfortunately I don't think is an actual win condition associated with the AT...however, theoretically you should get a religion win once you own 80% of the cities in the game?

Seems kind of odd they're requiring BtS when they explicitly stated that Warlords didn't add anything they saw fit to include.  What's BtS adding that's so special? Or is it simply the $$ from Firaxis including their mod in the pack.

Functionality.  New expansion allows modders a loooot more tools and things they can add.  The guy who heads up FFH had to get extremely creative (example, sir who cannot be named unit) to get half the things working.  The new expansion should allow them to clear out a lot of clutter from the code and also allow more flexibility to what they can implement.

I think one of the specific things mentioned was a quest system, but I would bet/hope the tools get a lot better as well. Ironically, Civ IV's modding tools are really bad--the FFH team had to make a spreadsheet that auto-generated XML just to have some type of relatively easy balancing mechanism, and I've definitely seen better world/mission editors.

I think so.  Due to armageddon hitting 100 all the countryside in my lands is going to pot - so my population are starving as the world burns around me as I cackle maniacally hahaha!   I'll see how it goes tonight - right now the good guys (Bannor) have some really big cities so my pop isn't that much more than his, but once I go on another bout of razing I'll see what happens.

See above.  Add to that, Kael has said that the AI is much improved and has kicked his ass at high levels that he used to play FFH at.  I'm not sure how much of this move was genuine interest in the improvements, and how much was "omg, I get to play with real devs", but my impression he's honestly impressed with the improvements in this upgrade.  He isn't going into much detail though, due to NDA.

As for money, the FFH guys arn't seeing a penny of it.  Certainly the devs have a huge interest in seeing the FFH crew get on board, and I wouldn't doubt if they've made a number of improvements into BtS specifically to support modders.

Crap. I just went into late game as Hippu on Monarch. Managed to wipe out 3-4 civs on standard. the last 3 is gonna be hard to chew when I discover I couldn't get Cannons as part of civ weakness, I just had to suck it up on my 120 g merc spam. Was funny waging war with 0% Research rate and merc spam army, I'm guessing these guys are one of the abusive civ since Mithril + Merc & Good Economy = near unstoppable. Was funny seeing the Dwarf civ throwing everything at me in one turn while I was busy wiping another. I just kept rebuying mercs with my 700 g per turn wartime tax rate. And I love taking that vs Dwarf unit promotion, hahah eat 40% more STR u stinking midgets.

The most awesome moment has got to be when I threw the huge stacks against a crossbow hero. Took 10 merc deaths before that bastard went down.
Here's the weird part tho, I thought i was gonna win the Religious victory condition cause everyone is under my Kilmorph religion and I have the holy city. Indicator stays at 62% on the Victory Screen. 18% more to Victory (80%) ...I'm not sure how this works, do I have to 'purge' other religions in those towns first? Cause every corner of the earth is covered with towns already, I'm not sure if I'm missing any. And waging war with 4 STR Catapult....urgh.  :-P

I'm not sure.  I won once buy building that temple thingy to L7 or whatever it is.  Was that a religious win?  It felt analgous to the tech win in vanilla civ4 since you have to research to get there.

Yep, that's the religion win.  The hard part is pumping out enough of the correct great people for your religion.

can someone figure out what made my game crash? I capped a dwarven town last night and crashed. So I figured I need a break and called it a night.
Then 15 minutes ago when I booted up Civ4, it happened again as I took over the same town.
Made a save of it. Anyone wanna test it out for me?
http://www.geocities.com/steven_xan/save.zip

keylogger

oh wait wrong forum.

Actually that's the altar win I think--you build 7 altars of Luantaar or whatever.

Religion win should simply be your religion is followed by 80% of the population--but yes, I think non-state religions in your cities counts against you. Get those confessors busy stamping out the heretics!

I've had a few crashes like that - always when taking a city (not always the same city either).  The only way I could get around it was to either take the city with a different unit (that seems to stop the crashing), or wait until next turn before taking the city.

tried those 2 solutions , didn't work :( it's a holy city for Order too. Dang it. The culture strength is making it hard to get an outpost going and the the dwarves are on the Divine stage of the Altar too.

Which version are you using? I had this crash (type at least) on the base download, but grabbing patch f (and I think they are past that now) fixed it for me.

just redownloaded the patch. Same thing happened. I tried using World builder method:
1. Grabbed town. End Turn. Crash to Desktop.
2. Grabbed town, razed it. End Turn. Crash to Desktop.

QQ

If it's happening after you end turn, it's something one of the other civs are doing I'd think.  Might want to check out what they're up to.

New fan = computer is not overheating now.  I plan on spending the next few hours playing...


[/orgasm]

Cool!

...sorry. Too deep into Gothic right now, looks like it's going to keep me occupied for at least another couple weeks on this playthrough. And then I'll probably play through at least once more, but not right away. I'll probably tackle Medieval 2 (in some low res crap because they don't understand widescreen is hip) and wait to hit the FfH2 pipe after the Civ4 expansion comes out.

New shit.  Updated first post.

Patch B is out, important in that it fixes some more CtD issues.  There is also more media (movies and music) given as a seperate download, here (http://www.gameflood.com/Mashup/Index.cfm?intModID=9529).

Started a new game on Sunday and got around to building the mercurian gate. Once completed.. no angels. Hrm.

Wonder if it's a bug or if they just won't come for me because I'm neutral.

I thought only Mercurians got angels?  So unless you built the gate then switched to them, you don't get angels.

Are the unplayable civs now playable?  Drow, Sidar, Illians?  Didn't see anything like that in the .23 patch notes - unless this is completely different.

No, those won't be added until the next major revision, where they go through and add more features (this go around added Mercurians and Infernals). There's a player-made mod that adds the Svaltalfar.

Yeah, I know I meant the city I built the gate in didn't pop-over to the Angel civ.  Frustrating when you've set up an entire island with the intent to turn the cities on it over in the first place.

I figured out what was wrong, though.  Even though the infernals were in the world (the game won't let you build the gate if they aren't.)  they weren't on my list of contacted civs.   Seems like an odd bug, but it was easily fixed by just buzzing their city before I bought the gate.

Sorry to necro, but thanks for this thread. I ended up buying another copy of civ because I couldn't find the original. I'm glad I did. The only problem I have is that I dl'd FFH before buying Civ, so it was version 2.022, and now it crashes all the time. I got the newest release from the website, but 2.022 games don't play with 2.023.  :cry:

Necro!

Dunno how many still play this, but I do because it's  :heart: for the fantasy turn-based lover in me.
Game was updated and a version released last week-ish for the BTS updates.  Current version is .25 and requires the recent BTS patch.  Modder says he'll spend another week or so doing bugfixes, then move on to the next phase, "Shadow".

Wait.  There are still a ton of bugs, but Kael is the man.  Will be worth checking out in 2 weeks.

Definately.  There's tons of stuff that's wrong with the FFH migration to BtS, but they're putting out patches left and right.  I haven't tried patch .25 yet, but the FFH scenario was fun if brief.  There's enough with the included mods and scenarios to be entertaining.  I'm not as satisfied with the BtS expansion proper; I think Firaxis could have done more.  Espionage is a good idea but not as good as it could be, and corporations haven't had all the bugs ironed out yet.  Your mileage may vary, and some fans are loving it.  My money is on FFH being the best part of the expansion.

I find I'm loving corps.. if I found them first.  Otherwise, they're fucking drains on my cities.  They could have been so much more.

Haven't found too many bugs in my FFH game, but I've only played through the first 6 or 7 techs so far, since I dl'd it sunday.

FFH is on patch e.  All within a matter of days (if that).  I do not know what Kael does for a living, but he is all about this mod.  The other day he even remoted a random noobs computer and found the root to some random issue. 

This game made the expansion worthwhile, but the bugs can bite (ahahahaha).  It may seem bug free, but they are there and always hit later in the game.  For example, hidden nationality hides you from others knowing what civ you are, but you can still destroy/take over other civs cities.  Think about that for a moment. 

They did slide in a shitton of new stuff, which I  :heart:

Heh, yow.  Esus for the win.

Is it officially marked the official version now unlike 0.24? Sweet, gotta grab that after work. I'm excited about those random world events if nothing else.

I really love this game. for some reason both regular Civ and ffh crashes when I play movies but it's still cool.

I can't seem to find a link to the new stuff in .25, anyone have one?

Link (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=245949)

Also, download civ 3.13 patch first.

Sorry, I should have been more specific - I can't find a link to see what the new features/balancing things are in .25.  There's gotta be more to it than just the patch notes.  Are all the civs playable now, etc.

A couple of threads down.

Link (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=245186).

Latest installment was released today (FFH2 .30) (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=254859), first post edited to reflect this (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9428.msg274326#msg274326).  I recommend waiting a few days so Kael can iron out the bugs. 

List of changes:

Fixes:
1. The AI now correctly values buildings that allow units to be produced.
2. You can now create spider pens with spiders.
3. The Dragons Horde unit is correctly spawned if the city with it is razed (this fix was obsoleted by the equipment system).
4. Manes and Infernals are correctly produced when cities are razed.
5. Lifesparks can now cast Heal.
6. Mud Golems now defend themselves if attacked.
7. Units can only trade Orthus's Axe once per turn.
8. Removing features won't remove Yggdrasil or the Tomb of Sucellus.
9. The AI now remembers event attitudes correctly.
10. Only the Balseraphs can Cage slaves.
11. Hall of Mirrors doesnt cause getVisibleEnemyDefender errors anymore.
12. Betraying units dont clear stacks/cities if they jump to the wrong tile.
13. Fixed a python error with the Earthquake spell.
14. Fixed an error with no upkeep civics and the adaptive trait.
15. Fatique isn't marked as requiring the unit to be fully healed.
16. Cure Disease now works correctly.
17. Fixed an error that caused Governors Manors to not retain their production bonus through save games (could also cause OOS's).
18. Units killed with Prophecy Marks now decrease the AC correctly.
19. Pirates are no longer treated as hidden nationality even after revealing their nationality.
20. Fixed a Waiting on Civilization spinlock issue caused by hidden nationality units grouping with non-HN units.
21. Players are no longer presented the option to switch to civics they can't adopt.
22. Diseased and Plagued promotions will now be passed correctly in combat.
23. Killing Hyborem or Basium correctly causes the player to lose all his traits.
24. Removed the move requirement on missons (note to self: may cause ctd's, spinlocks and cranberring of the testicles).
25. Added a block to keep the AI from disbanding heroes (or any unit that doesn't require military support).
26. Immobile value and miscast chance on spells are being set correctly (formorly it was overwritten by the miscast chance and the miscast chance was never set).
27. Religion specific improvement art is now displayed.
28. Fixed an exception error in Vassal diplomacy.
29. Fixed an error with Vassal's taking former player slots (from Bhruic's unofficial patch).
30. Colonies have met all players the origional empire has (from Bhruic's unofficial patch).
31. Colonies can't trade techs their origional empire couldn't if no tech brokering is on (from Bhruic's unofficial patch).
32. Colonies get the origional empires world map (from Bhruic's unofficial patch).
33. AI Players won't hate you for declaring war on their friend if they are also at war with them (from Bhruic's unofficial patch).
34. Vassals can't be a players worst enemy (from Bhruic's unofficial patch).
35. Fixed a warscript issue that could cause vassals to declare war apart from (or on) their masters.
36. The warscript won't autodeclare wars for human players anymore.


Additions/Removals:
1. Added the Empyrean religion.
2. Added the Council of Esus religion.
3. Removed the Council of Esus wonder.
4. Removed the Cult of the Dragon religion.
5. Added the Cult of the Dragon guild.
6. Added the Guild of Hammers guild.
7. Added the Ratcatchers Guild guild.
8. Added the Guild of the Nine guild.
9. Added the Circle of Gaelan guild.
10. Added the Aeron's Bounty guild.
11. Added the Brotherhood of Wardens guild.
12. Removed the Guild of Endeavors wonder.
13. Added the Guild of Hammers wonder (founds the Guild of Hammers guild).
14. Added the Guild of Hammers Spread event.
15. Added the Aerons Chosen event (founds the aerons bounty guild).
16. Added the Gurid unit (unique barbarian hero).
17. Added the Margalard unit (unique barbarian hero).
18. Added the Great Beast Gurid event (misc, a great beast has been spotted in the wilds).
19. Added the Great Beast Margalard event (misc, a great beast has been spotted in the wilds).
20. Added the Subdue Beasts promotion (allows beast capturing, learnable by recon heros).
21. Added the Circle of Gaelan event chain (misc, found the circle of gaelen).
22. Added the Cult found event (misc, founds the cult of the dragon).
23. Added the Cult spread event (misc, spreads the cult to other cities).
24. Added the Negative Cult events (cause disorder, reduce culture, sabotage production).
25. Added the Whitefire spell (Sun 2, Divine, damages all untis within 1 range, extra damage to vampires).
26. Added the Revelation spell (Sun 3, Sorcery, destroys all illusions and removes invisibility and hidden nationality from all enemy units).
27. Added the Blinding Light spell (Sun 2, Sorcery, immobilizes all units within 1 tile, easily resistable).
28. Added the Crown of Brillance spell (Sun 3, Divine, does damage every round to all surrounding enemy units).
29. Added the Mezmerize Animal spell (Satyr ability, capures animals without combat).
30. Renamed the current Satyr unit to the Fawn unit.
31. Added the Satyr unit (Fawn upgrade).
32. Added the Aurealis unit.
33. Added the Summon Aurealis spell (Sun 3, Summoning).
34. Added the Guild of the Nine mercenary events.
35. Added the Brotherhood of Wardens spread event.
36. Added the Mercenary event (Deal).
37. Added the Mounted Mercenary unit (Hippus mercenary replacement, art by Chugginator).
38. Added the Ecclesiastic unit (Empyrean Disciple).
39. Added the Vicar unit (Empyrean Priest).
40. Added the Luridus unit (Empyrean High Priest).
41. Added the Temple of the Empyrean building.
42. Added the Mary event (misc, experiments on a young girl show promise).
43. Updated the Patron of Knowledge event (inspiration).
44. Updated the Farm Bandits event (crime).
45. Added the Overcouncil wonder (Empyrean only).
46. Added the Undercouncil wonder (Council of Esus only).
47. Removed the Twisted Spire wonder.
48. Added the Pirate Harbor improvement (over time Pirate Coves will upgrade to Pirate Harbors).
49. Added the Pirate Port improvement (over time Pirate Harbors will upgrade to Pirate Ports).
50. Added the Adventure event (misc, your hero wants to invesitagte local ruins).
51. Added the Jade Torc equipment (event reward).
52. Added the Rod of Winds equipment (event reward).
53. Added the Healing Salve equipment (event reward).
54. Added the Alchemist event (deal, a traveling alchemist offers his services).
55. Added the Enchanter event (deal, a traveling enchanter offers his services).
56. Added the Leviathan unit (unique Barbarian hero).
57. Added the Great Beast Leviathan event (misc, explorers have spotted a great beast in the seas).
58. Added the Odio's Prison unique feature (boosts defense of all allied units within 3 tiles by 25%).
59. Added game options to disable each of the religions.
60. Added the Myconid unit (Khazad only, art by seZereth).
61. Added the Spores ability (Myconid special ability).
62. Added the Castle improvement (+25% defense, +10% defense to allied units within 2 tiles, +10% heal rate, upgrades to a citadel).
63. Added the Citadel improvement (+40% defense, +15% defense to allied units within 3 tiles, +20% heal rate).
64. Added the Mutate event (a unit has a chance to enter a chaos mana flare).
65. Added the Revelry world spell (Balseraph only, starts a golden age).
66. Added the Veil of Night world spell (Svartalfar only, all units gain Hidden Nationality).
67. Added the Warcry promotion (grants units +1 movement, blitz, +1 strength and a 5% chance of wearing off each turn).
68. Added the Warcry world spell (Hippus only, grants the Warcry promotion to all units).
69. Added the Mother Lode world spell (Khazad only, grants 10 gold per mine) (loki).
70. Added the March of the Trees world spell (Ljosalfar only, transforms all your empires forests into Treant for a few turns).
71. Added the Divine Retribution world spell (Mercurians only, does damage to all demonic and undead units in the world).
72. Added the Hyborems Whisper world spell (Infernal only, allows Hyborem to take control of an Ashen Veil city) (loki).
73. Added the River of Blood world spell (Calabim only, all non-calabim cities get -2 population, calabim cities get +2 population).
74. Added the For the Horde world spell (Clan of Embers only, 50% of converting each barbarian orc unit).
75. Added the Birthright Regained ritual (allows the empire to reuse their world spell).
76. Added the Wild Hunt world spell (Doviello only, creates a wolf for every combat unit, wolf strength is modified by the units strength).
77. Added the Raging Seas world spell (Lanun only, does damage to all non-lanun units that are near to water).
78. Added the Worldbreak world spell (Sheaim only, causes destruction in all non-sheaim lands based on the AC).
79. Added the Sanctuary world spell (Elohim only, kicks all non-Elohim units from your lands and keeps them from entering for 30 turns).
80. Added the Arcane Lacuna world spell (Amurite only, Amurite arcane units gain 1 xp per upgraded mana node in the world, returns all upgraded mana nodes to raw mana nodes).
81. Added the Rally world spell (Bannor only, Create a Demagog in every city and on every Town Improvement, only usuable during a crusade).
82. Added the End of Winter game option (the world starts frozen and gradually warms up to the normal terrain types).
83. Added a game option to disable the thaw mechanic.
84. Removed the Education civic option.
85. Removed the Religious Discipline civic.
86. Removed the Military Discipline civic.
87. Removed the No School System civic.
88. Added the Membership civic option.
89. Added the Overcouncil civic (makes the player a member of the Overcouncil, only good or neutral players may join the Overcouncil).
90. Added the Undercouncil civic (makes the player a member of the Undercouncil, only neutral or evil players may join the Undercouncil).
91. Removed the Metal Casting tech.
92. Removed the Pikeman unit (UU's preserved).
93. Removed the Monarchy tech (combined with Feudalism).
94. Removed the Alchemy tech.
95. Removed the Golem Mastery tech.
96. Removed the Copper Golem unit.
97. Removed the Golem Workshop building.
98. Removed the Thieves Guild building.
99. Added a function to confirm the action before the player catss a global spell or a spell that will cause war.
100. Added the Mirror spell (unit creates an illusionary duplicate of itself).
101. Added the Alazkan the Assassin unit (Svartalfar hero, has the Mirror ability).
102. Added the Impersonate Leader spell (allows the player to take control of another civ for a few turns).
103. Added the Settlement mechanic.
104. Removed the Dwarf Slaying promotion.
105. Removed the Elf Slaying promotion.
106. Removed the Orc Slaying promotion (raging barbs just got nastier).
107. Added the Legends world spell (Kuriotates only, gives +300 culture in all your cities).
108. Added the equipment mechanic.
109. Added the Ardor world spell (Grigori only, resets the great people counter for that player).
110. Added the Steal spell (only usable by Council of Esus worshipping Recon units, steals an equipment from another unit in the same tile, may cause war if detected).
111. Added the Empty Bier equipment (+2 defensive strength, Donal Lugh starts with it).
112. Added the Nether Blade as full equipment (+2 Death strength, +80% vs heros, Rathas starts with it).
113. Added the Religious Fervor world spell (Malakim only, creates a priest in every city with your state religion, priests start with 1 xp per city with your state religion).
114. Removed the Unquestioning Obedience tech.
115. Removed the Patriarch mechanic (removed the patriarch promotion, become patriarch spell and call holy war spell) as those design aspects are better represented through the councils.
116. Added the Mask spell (available to all recon council of esus units, hides the casters nationality).
117. Added the Teutorix unit (Malakim hero).
118. Added the Shadowwalk spell (Shadow 3, Sorcery, allows the unit to ignore building/terrain defense bonuses).
119. Added the Blur spell (Shadow 1, Sorcery, makes the unit immune to first strikes).
120. Added the Azer unit.
121. Added the Summon Azer spell (Fire 1, Summon).
122. Added the Sprawling mechanic.
123. Added the No Death Mana, No Entropy Mana and No Shadow Mana Overcouncil vote options.
124. Added the Develop Secret Codes Undercouncil vote option (Nikis-Knight).
125. Added the Enlist the Nightwatch Undercouncil vote option.
126. Added the Fund Dissidents Undercouncil vote option (Nikis-Knight).
127. Added the Golden Hammer equipment (useable as a weapon, or can be given to a zitizen to make an engineer).
128. Added the Gifts of Nantosuelta world spell (Luchuirp only, creates a Golden Hammer in each city).
129. Added the No Unique Features game option.
130. Added the Read the Grimoire spell (require the unit to be carrying the Infernal Grimoire, triggers a random spell, could kill the caster).
131. Added the Shadowrider unit (Council of Esus national unit, art by Chugginator) (loki).
132. Added the Spread the Council of Esus spell (all Council of Esus religious units can use it, costs 25gp and doesnt sacrifice the unit).
133. Added the Ratha unit (Empyrean chariot that recieves a bonus vs recon units) (loki).
134. Added the Nightwatch unit (Council of Esus archer unit with poison and the ability to upgrade to assassins and Shadowriders) (loki).
135. Added the Jackpot event (economy, a citizen wins more than the local gambling house can afford to pay).
136. Added the Carnival Star event (inspiration, a talented performer shows himself at your carnival).
137. Added the Gambling Ring undercouncil vote (Gambling Houses production cost reduced by 75%) (loki).
138. Added the Slave Trade undercouncil vote (Allows memebrs to buy and sell slaves) (loki).
139. Added the Smuggling Ring undercouncil vote (Adds an additional trade route in all cities) (loki).
140. Added the Buy Slave and Sell Slave abilities (only usable if the Slave Trade vote is enabled).
141. Added the Open Borders undercouncil vote (loki).
142. Added the Mistform unit (art by seZereth).
143. Added the Summon Mistform spell (Shadow II, Summoning).
144. Added the Wane spell (Sidar only, converts a unit of level 6 or higher into a Shade) (loki).
145. Added the Shade unit (can be joined to a city as any sort of great specialist except for a great priest) (model art by C.Roland).
146. Added the Theatre of Dreams wonder (+2 culture from all artists in your empire, boosts happiness).
147. Added the Pillar of Chains wonder (generates hammers from unhappy workers, negates civic anger for the players team) (loki).
148. Removed the Monument building (consolidated with the Obelisk).
149. Added the Blaze spell (Fire I, sets a forest or jungle on fire).
150. Added the Slave Escape event (misc, a slave dissapears).
151. Added the Slave Revolt event (misc, slaves rise up against you).
152. Added the Gela equipment (Unholy +2, Hyborem's trident).
153. Added the Staff of Souls equipment (grants Death affinity, Barbatos starts with it).
154. Removed the Arcane Golem unit.
155. Removed the Shield Wall unitclass.
156. Removed the Lames tech.
157. Removed the Armorer building.
158. Removed the Armament Molds building.
159. The Flurry is now a Ljosalfar/Svartalfar UU.
160. Removed the Celerity tech.
161. Removed the Velox Workshop building.
162. Removed the Heavy Crossbowman unitclass (combined with the crossbowman).
162. Added the Crime Rate mechanic (buildings/guilds influence the cities crime rate, crime events prereq a certain crime rate in cities before they will trigger).
163. Added a Dynamic Invisibily system (invisibility applied by promotions).
164. Added the Hidden promotion (invisibility that lasts until the unit attacks).
165. Added the Into the Mist world spell (Sidar only, all units become hidden).
166. Added the Hide spell (Shadow 2, Sorcery).
167. Added the Ghost unit (Sidar Assassin UU, with access to the Hide spell)
168. Added the Ratcatchers Guild Removed event (crime, the Empyrean uncovers the members of the Ratcachers Guild).
169. Added the Ashen Veil Deal Sallos event (deal, a demon lord wants you to train his rebelious daughter).
170. Added a Gaelan hero unit (granted if you complete the reckless apprentice event chain and found the Circle of Gaelan).
171. Added the Promote Settlement ability (to transform a settlement to a city).


Balance Changes:
1. Beastmasters start with the Subdue Beasts promotion.
2. Moved the Scorch spell from Fire1 to Sun1.
3. Moved the Summon Sand Lion spell from Fire1 to Sun1.
4. Rangers can't move impassable anymore.
5. Mercenaries lose Hidden Nationality and can no longer be built, they don't cause war weariness when killed.
6. Mercenaries can be purchased in any city with the Guild of the Nine (recruit cost reduced from 240 to 120).
7. Mercenaries can be sacrificed to add the Guild of the Nine to a city.
8. The first person to research Currency founds the Guild of the Nine.
9. Slaves can be forced to fight in the arena, if they win they become warriors.
10. Typhoid Mary (renamed Mary Morbus) can no longer be built, instead she is gained through an event.
11. Hidden Nationality units can't capture units or cities.
12. Forest and Jungle defense reduced from +50% to +25%.
13. New Forest defense reduced from +25% to +0%.
14. The Orc promotion now gives +10% attacking into or defending in jungles.
15. Forts reduced from +25% defense to +10%, they upgrade to Castles and give +5% defense to all units within 1 tile.
16. Razing a city with an AC razing religion (the Ashen Veil) won't trigger a population raze AC penalty.
17. When Treants die they leave new forests in their plots.
18. The Council of Esus grants visibility into civs with the religion to the holy city owner.
19. The Council of Esus can't be seen unless the player has it as their state religion.
20. Moved the Apprenticeship civic to the Economy civic option.
21. Moved the Scholarship civic to the Cultural Values civic option.
22. Tower of Eyes moved from Astronomy to Optics.
23. Mithril Working now requires Engineering.
24. Removed the +1 Happiness from the God King civic.
25. Republic civic maintenance reduced from High to Medium.
26. Wrath Unleashed event applies the enraged promotion to units instead on instantly converting them to barbarians (use them or lose them).
27. If you scrap units with a chance to become barbarian they become barbarians.
28. Theocracy civic loses its unhappy from non-state religions and gains unlimited priests.
29. Guilds civic allows unlimited Sages, Bards, Engineers and Merchants.
30. Social Order civic grants military happiness.
31. Crusade civic loses its GPP penalty.
32. Agriculture civic increased from Low to Medium upkeep.
33. Sacrifice the Weak civic unhealthy penalty increased from -2 to -4.
34. Chalid moved to the Empyrean hero.
35. Kael renamed to Gibbon and moved to the Council of Esus hero and given the Impersonate Leader ability.
36. Burning Blood makes units immune to fear.
37. The Sidar get +1 hammer from their Engineers, +1 culture from their Bards, +1 research from their Sages and +1 gold from their Merchants.
38. Asylum's chance to make units produced in the city crazed is reduced from 25% to 10% and it no longer effects heroes.
39. The Great Library gives +1 research to all sages in your empire.
40. Sacrifice the Weak civic requires Infernal Pact instead of Corruption of Spirit and no longer allows population rushing.
41. Open Borders moved back from Exploration to Cartography.
42. Great Prophets can create all the holy city buildings as well as the secondary GP (easier on the AI and new players).
43. Elves can build all improvements in forests (easier on the AI).
44. Slavery civic is now useable by all evil players and does not have a religious requirement.
45. Moved the +1 gold from towns and villages from currency to taxation.
46. Chalid gives +1 votes on the Overcouncil.
47. Made Crown of Akharien into equipment (stays the same in its wonder form, makes the unit immune to magic when worn by a unit).
48. Made Sylivens Perfect Lyre into equipment.
49. Made Infernal Grimoire into equipment.
50. Made the Dragons Horde into equipment.
51. Shock II, Formation II and Cover II reduced from +80% vs their given unitcombat to +40% (Nikis-Knight).
52. Mary given 2 points of Poison strength (Nikis-Knight).
53. Obelisks changed from +3 culture to +2 culture, loses its -1 gold and can no longer support an artist.
54. The Grigori Palace gives +15% GPP growth.
55. Carnivals can support 1 artist.
56. Ancient Towers will upgrade to castles if they are worked.
57. Reduced inflation on higher difficulty (above noble) levels.
58. Macemen (ranmed to Champions) can upgrade to Paladins and Eidolons.
59. Archers can upgrade to Horse Archers.
60. Longbowmen can be upgraded to Crossbowmen, Arquebus and Marksman.
61. Minimum level 6 to upgrade to Marksman units.
62. Taxation requires Mathematics.
63. Instead of granting +7 food Yggdrasil grants +3 food, +2 with Way of the Forests and +2 with Commune with Nature.
64. Instead of granting +7 trade Dragon Bones grants +3 trade, +2 with Trade and +2 with Construction.
65. Instead of granting +7 hammers Remnants of Patria grants +3 hammers, +2 with Education and +2 with Fuedalism.
66. The Infernals don't need to be in the world to create the Mercurian Gate, tech prereq for the Gate moved back to Fanaticism.
67. Dungeons no longer get 2 Unhappy from Liberty, removed the -20% maintenance from dungeons, reduced war weariness from dungeons from -50% to -25%, Dungeons reduce crime by 10%, moved the tech up form Feudalism to Masonry, reduced the cost from 200 to 160 (did anyone actuallt build dungeons before? yuck).
68. The Festivals tech requires Calendar now.
69. Invisible units will defend their teams cities (no more "woodelf defense").
70. The Ratcatchers Guild headquarters will relocate to the maps city with the most crime and population.
71. Blitz requires Military Strategy (previously it was Celerity) and Drill 4 (instead of Combat 5).
72. Drill promotion line opened up for all all unit types (instead of just archers).
73. Added the Hero promotion to Govannon.
74. Govannon can train units how to cast Blaze and Blur.


Cosmetic Changes:
1. New darker terrain (by seZereth).
2. New Malakim Warrior model (by seZereth).
3. New darker Acheron skin (by seZereth).
4. Added the Mana bar.
5. New Puppeteer model (by seZereth).
6. Leader help now shows the leaders alignment, hero and world spell.
7. Renamed Morgoth to Sandalphon.
8. Added a balloon popup when a hero is killed.
9. New Empyrean and Council of Esus founding movies by Hexagonian.
10. New Succubus art by seZereth.
11. New Svartalfar warrior and scout art by seZereth.
12. New Sidar Scout and Sidar Warrior art by C.Roland.
13. New Balseraph Scout art by seZereth.
14. Renamed Maceman to Champion.
15. New Infernal Ranger, Mage and Horse Archer art by seZereth.
16. Khazad vault status is now displayed with the gold total.
17. New Freak art by seZereth.

Patch "e" released- see first post.   Also someone typed up a summary since the Wiki is dead currently. Patch fixed the uber lich guy who would kill you on site.   :awesome_for_real:

He could?  Guess I'm lucky in that I never found him until I had 3 archmages with +2 stars.  He died quick to 9 high-damage fireballs.

He spawns randomly, so if he is nearby he will wipe you out pretty quickly with a series of elementals and grim reapers.  Taking away the summoner trait will allow one to survive!

I did have one awesome game where I was the orc leader (peace w/ barbs 4tw) and had him spawn next to my capitol.  He would constantly take out bad guys and allies alike- was very very awesome.

I read the notes but if there's anything in there about evangelism, I missed it.  :cry:

This is more of a vanilla civ question, but what determines the type of Great Person you get? I used to get a lot of prophets, but lately it's been sages to the exclusion of all else.

Also, can anyone explain how religion is spread? do you only get free acolytes when spreading the Order religion? Is it random, even with the Order?

1) If you look at your city, it'll show a Great People Points bar.  Mouseover to show percent.  It's based on wonders and specialists - if you have engineers working your city, you're more likely to have a great engineer.  If you're getting sages, you probably have a lot of science stuff.

2) Spread is fairly random, but I believe you have to have open borders.  When you discover a religion you get your free prophet you can use to found the religion in a city if you don't have one already, so from there you can build the temple (having the religion is a prereq) and build a prophet army (temple is a prereq for this).  If you found a religion, you can use a Great Person to found a wonder in the holy city (alternately, you can capture the holy city it was founded in).  These wonders also push the spread of the religion. 

Esus is the one exception.  There are no prophets for it; instead, any unit built in an Esus city with Esus as the state religion can spread Esus, for a cost of 25 gold.  Unlike prophets, the unit is not destroyed.  There is a bit of a problem at the moment, because if someone else founds Esus you're unlikely to get it to spread to you, because they're unlikely to adopt Esus.  Rush it if you want it.

Kael is beginning to release information for the next major push- looks like more world spell balances and lots of events, including race specific events!

God, why can't game dev houses be like this guy?  He openly admits to this being his first foray into software development.

Soo I managed to get to play as the infernals, but the world spell that they're supposed to have isn't on my unit order bar. ):

edit: And it's really good.

Necroing this to avoid spamming the What are you playing? thread with FFH2 questions.

I dug around the wiki a bit, but I am too much of a novice to even begin to know what to look for there. Some quick questions-

What are the ruins and other crap scattered on the map? I understand some of them are exporable dungeons, but others don't see to do anything.

Speaking of dungeons-what all can I find in them? Do I need a big task force like in MoM, or can one or two units do it safely?

I see talk of unit promotions- is that done only through combat, or are there improvements you can build that stream XP to certain units?

Is there any sort of walkthrough for the first 100 turns or something? I am lost and don't really know what questions to ask. Other than-

Is there a good n00b civ? I banged through a few dozen turns with the dwarves and one of the other good civs, and one of the evil civs, but I don't know enough about the game to even be able to tell ther difference.

This gaming diary might be helpful, at least for me it gave some clues for the game mechanics. The first link below goes to the start of the diary, but at some entries the link for next part is missing so once you run into a missing link, select the next one from these:

http://fidgit.com/archives/2008/12/fall-from-heaven-ii-madness-i.php
http://fidgit.com/archives/2008/12/fall-from-heaven-ii-send-in-th.php
http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/01/fall_from_heaven_ii_gandalf_wa.php
http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/01/fall_from_heaven_ii_victory_la.php

In the last one he says there will be one final entry, but I couldn't find it.

Perfect! Gracias.

Also, theres an in game encyclopedia.  You can look up just about everything you see in game, so its a good way to learn.

I haven't played in about 6 months, but Elves were always a fantastic noob race. Build on forested areas and focus on getting druids so they can cast the "create forest" spell all over the place.  Tons of food and production bonuses.

I also liked the Sheaim, but found I was much more effective after learning a game or so via the elves. 

Best hint I can give is if you take a leader with the "Arcane" trait build as many mages as early and often as possible.  Then try to take as many of the crystals (then build  other mana nodes on them) as possible.  The Arcane trait grants your mages experience at random, so they'll level without having to fight (which is good because they're fucking squishy as hell.)   Then they'll be able to cast tons of silly shit and destroy cities.  The mana nodes give you access to different spell schools.  If you have 3 of a mana type, your casters gain that spell school without having to invest a talent point in the first spell rank.

Watch out for the elves if you don't play them.  I don't know if it's fixed or not, but you'll find several of us referencing them and their damn cat priests.  They'd build a ton of the fuckers, stack them, and then spam "summon cat" 25+ times, destroying almost any garrison via attrition without losing a single member of their 'instant army.'

The links should work fine, but here sone quick answers for the impatient.


Some are explorable, some are guard towers which increase sight range when on them, some are razed cities from an unfortunate enemy.


Its a random chance of different things happening. Which range from getting allies and benefitial Promotions to harmful promotions, spawning enemies or the exloring unit just getting imprisoned or dying. The higher the level of the unit, the better the chances for a good outcome, but numbers only matter if enemies are spawning.


Some units get XP over time, with buildings or wonders increasing that XP gain, some buildings/wonders give units XP on creation. Arcane units are a good bet if you want free XP, as are heroes who get 100 free xp over time.


The Elves are THE newbie civilization. Also, the Lanun if you don't mind sticking to islands and exploiting the fact that the AI is too dumb for naval warfare.

It's slightly more complex than this:

If you have :
1 node of a mana type, your magic users* will be able to train in this school.
2 node of a mana type, your magic users* get the first level spell in this school for free
3 nodes of a mana type, your magic users* get the first two levels of spells in this school for free
4 nodes of a mana type, your magic users* get all the spells in this school for free
*mages and some special units (e.g. Sheaim witches that come through the portal, hero units that cast spells)

So, if you know you are going with a heavy mage focus, build a "throw-away" mage as fast as possible, have him build on as many nodes as possible those schools that you want for free, THEN build your mages that will become your archmages.  This makes for very powerful archmages.

You sacrifice flexibility (many different schools) for power (you archmages don't spend training points on spells, they spend them on range and power), whoever came up with this design was very clever.

:(  I started typing notes and I couldn't stop.  Maybe this will help, definitely you can skip.

Note 1: Good races to learn the game.  As mentioned, the elves are a solid race that is easy to use (mostly due to the economy) - if you happen to start in an area that doesn't have forests, restart the game.  If you are getting your feet wet with elves, it's better to focus on ranged, beast and priest tech, they do very well in these areas. (the aforementioned druids are in the priest lines).
Note 1.1: The Dwarves (Khazad) are good if you start with mountains and a source of cash nearby.  Definitely research the Earth-mother tech. Do your best to keep cash on-hand as it increases the productivity and happyness of your people (I don't remember what the exact mechanism is for this).
Note 1.2: The Hippus are all about mobility.  If you are playing on a large landmass, they can be very powerful.  Worth researching Honor tech (it gives a religion) as it has one of the more powerful heroes in the game that makes Hippus lack of siege unimportant.

Note 2: Unless you are playing the Grigori, religion is very important.  Until you are more conversant with the pluses and minuses of not focusing on religion, it is advised that you try hard to be the first to discover whatever religion you want for that game.

Note 3: When you feel like you want to try a mage-focused game, play the Amurites.  When playing as the Amurites, definitely always get at least two fire-nodes as this will give you three sources of fire mana, which will give your mages fireballs for free. Fireballs are cheaty-good.  Getting the Firebow unit with the Amurites is also a very good idea.

Note 4: Many of the races do not play anything like any of the other races, which is why this game is so very, very replayable (unlike, say Civ 4, oddly enough).
Note 4.1: Sheaim.  If you are playing with all the rules turned on (i.e. not a custom game), you need to play the Sheaim very aggressively because 1) this race is really, really good at early aggression and 2) eventually everyone hates you (because you are destroying the world).
Note 4.2: Illians.  Goal here is to last long enough to create your god unit.  Then have your god unit fly around the map and destroy everyone else.  Aggressive turtling is advised.

Note 5: Barbarians and the races that love them.  Barbarians are actually a very useful way to get cities and amass a veteran fighting force.  Choosing to play as a race that is friendly with the Barbarians (Clan of Embers or Doviello) places more pressure on you to find a non-barbarian target early in the game.  I think these races are difficult to play, but maybe that is because I'm too reliant on taking barbarian cities.  This is also a decent point to make about something else - most races need to be aggressive fairly early in the game if they are going to do well in the mid-game.  The Elohim and, to a lesser extent the Elves (Ljosalfar) can play a more defensive game if that style of play is appealing to you. 

The Kuriotates can as well, but in a different way - they are like rats and can spread rapidly without actually taking other cites... most NPC races consider this to be an act of aggression of another form, so you will be attacked.  Since taking cities doesn't actually give you that much of an advantage, in the mid game it's easier to pump out settlers until your cancer has spread to all colonizable land mass.  This is another race that plays much differently than the others.

For your first civ, you might want to read a guide to get to learn them. You mostly want to learn their focus and tricks.

As mentioned, elves are great because you can build in forests without cutting them down, so you get lots of production. Later on treants will spawn if you're attacked in an ancient forest. Druids can upgrade tiles and plant forests (with proper upgrades), as can your treant hero unit. This is pretty cool on tight maps, because you can build in deserts and arctic zones other races might avoid or be stunted in; or take over a stunted civ and upgrade their terrain.

You basically want to figure out which strat you want to take, arcane or religious (mages or priests) and stick to that; as well as the usual combat focuses of mobility vs naval vs metal upgrades.

Also, http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15583.10  :why_so_serious:

Ooh good link. Jesus, Lum should have written a strategy guide for it!

Started a game last night as the Clan. Kind of got screwed with initial placement, two decent cities then a big stretch of desert. Luckily, there are all kinds of barbarian and animal mobs beating on everyone. Bannor got wiped out, and they were next door to me, but the spider likes to drop my warriors. My first 'real' playthrough as Clan, teching to metals almost exclusively. One word: Warrens. Hey, pumping out two warriors for the price of one is pretty cool, but getting two settlers for the cost of one is amazing!

Been pumping out warriors like mad, about half slip past the hidden spider and I'm massing them for future slaughter after I do a bit of expansion with my doubled settlers. Getting around the spider with settlers by using a galley, the peninsula I'm stranded on is very close to a resource-rich part of the mainland, so I'm jumping over.

Normally play on archipelago or islands, one of my few continent games, I just let everything go randomly. So far I've found three good civs (four counting the extinct Bannor), so it's going to be a tough one for the lone evils on the continent. Luckily, the dragon spawned in a city between two good civs, buying me some time.

Started a couple of games last night. Played Elves on the Erebus map for 30 minutes or so, but decided to start again after losing a 2nd city to barbarians. Tough to fight them off when you have nothing but shit warriors for the first 200 turns...

Tried again as the dwarves. Founded my capital JUST out of range of the Mirror of Heaven, but got it with my 2nd city. 3rd city on the coast. Trying to get a 4th near the Pool of Tears, but there is an invincible barb giant spider lurking up there that has eaten everything I can throw at it. Finally got some better military tech, so maybe I can squash it eventually. Have the Shaim pinned in right next to my 3rd city (culture bombs ftw), so I am sure there will be blood soon.

Really feels a lot slower paced than vanilla, which is doubly frustrating because I am really just feeling my way around the tech tree and don't have a plan yet. Makes for tough going when I start up a dead end/wrong path.

FFH2 start is a lot tougher with the barb cities, and is not very forgiving of non-specialists. The double fun of that tough spider unit is that it's also stealthed if you don't have scouts...like the Clan I'm currently playing. Such a great gameplay element, though, it's really added a lot to what could be a pretty standard opening phase of the game I'm in right now. I'm so far from the battlefront that I hope I can expand quickly enough without the spider soaking up too many units/cities, because the goodies are already pulling way ahead in technology. The horde...it's time to march!

Luchuirp are so awesome, I left off a game with them because I was so dominant it was a matter of just cleaning up the rest of the planet. You want to really stick to golem tech: golems and the buildings that upgrade them. One upgrade is fireballs, so all your golems (even your worker unit) can cast fireball. Unless you meant the Khazad dwarves, who I haven't played yet.

Yeah it was the Khazad. I ended up founding a religion, but I am not sure how much good that does me. It seems like each one is really different- is that the case, or are they mostly the same?

They're all really different.  It's a complete change from vanilla, where you just wanted to found them so you got the capital and that sweet, sweet religion income.   The FFHopedia in game is really good at explaining the differences.

Order : Militaristic Good Guys - Temples boost military unit production
Ecclesiastic : Scientific Good Guys.

Rune of Kilmorph : Neutral Money money money - Productivity Wonder
Fellowship of Trees : Neutral Healthy + Ancient Forest Growth in borders

Ashen Veil : Armageddon worshipper - Plague Zombies & Fire Priests able to cast ring of fire - DEADLY
The Deep : Unique evil units & wonders and culture boosts.

I tried a daring move on that huge map. Since I could ferry settlers across the peninsula gap and had scouted out a slight bottleneck just short of the three good civs, I rushed a ton of settlers over there (Clan doesn't have to worry about settlers getting killed by barbs). Varn Gosam had the same idea, so it got pretty tense as we land rushed to cut off each other's expansion. Then I discovered that Mahala had a city on the other side of that damned spider in the south and was expanding, so I rushed to also cut him off (this is where warrens shines, popping out double settlers like mad). Fortunately, he wasn't in land rush mode like Gosam and only got in one city before I firmed up that border.

However, in the middle of all this my golden age ended, just as I was starting to tech towards wealth. Clan has money problems :) My units went into revolt, but I was able to switch to God King and make just enough to keep units from revolting...but no research. Then a wonder I had forgotten I had started hit completion and I was able to finish my expansion and grab the first few monetary techs. Barely got my infrastructure in place as that golden age ended. The interim was interesting as I really had to squeeze my civ to have enough money to keep the units from revolting (lost about six total). Recalled all my troops, went God King (capital on the ocean + rivers), spread religion, expanded trade routes, traded food resources for money resources, etc.

The first expansive golden age put me in the lead of the evil civs and the second eked out the lead of all (known) civs. Also resource grabbed like mad, have one of the two iron deposits on the continent and all but one of the mana nodes - three fire (free fireballs on all new shaman!) and a death.

Game has been fun and interesting, completely different from anything I've played before. Still not sure how it'll go, I managed to not piss off Gosam too much, but war is nigh and I'm stretched thin and completely out-teched by all the good civs. Some more military tech to flesh out my new iron resource (plus mah elephants!), pump out some shamans now that they're born with fireballs and can learn summon skeleton, if I have enough time to firm up the massive new empire, it's friggin' clobberin' time!

I just started playing this recently as well, and it's just a shitton of fun. It's like MoM and Civ had a baby and while he's a bit homely he's still fucking genius in most respects. The narrative hooks are really great, and there's a bigger variety of interestingly random or complex shit that can happen. I had a Fawn in the early game get the Subdue Beast promotion and he happened to survive an attack by a 5 strength giant spider while scouting. So then I had a spider with Hidden Nationality and I proceeded to more or less smash the crap out of a few barbarians cities and take them easily and then moved on to rip up Van Gosam in a completely deniable manner.

Right now the big issue for me is Acheron the Red Dragon, who is sitting in a very big barbarian city surrounded by stacks of almost every remaining civilization in the game, but none of them seem interested in actually attacking him. I tried moving a stack with several heroes, a lot of champions, two trebuchet, some werwolves, the Yvain, treeants, priests and tigers to see if I could take him out. The entire stack barely scratched him.

He gets beat on until he has an insane amount of promotions then the AI just stands around and looks at him. HUGE stacks of catapults or cannons are a good way to whittle him down.

No, I mean really huge. And his Hoard is kinda lame.

Varn Gosam just summoned the Mercurians across the bay from my front lines. That should be interesting. Luckily, I had just begun grabbing some naval techs because my galley discovered an island with GOLD in them thar hills. Time to make that bay full of pirates, heh.

Cut off Gosam's rush, but Mahala slipped a stack with a settler through. Don't know where the hell he was going, he passed up two good sites (one with mana!) and I was able to strand him in the middle of the desert, so he disbanded the settler.

Then my nascent pirate fleet found out that just off my southeast coast is the land of the sheaim (Gosam and Basium are west/southwest). I have a feeling Basium is going to try to lay a holy road through my borders...

Then the barbarians decided I'm too snooty with my book-lurnin' and called off our truce, with a crapload of them in my borders. Mid-game is certainly getting interesting. But I've got the groundwork lain for a big military push (third golden age fleshed out a lot of the midlands), about to get mithril and have four fully-optimized military production centers and two naval centers. Also ready to start pumping out shamans now that I have 4 fire nodes, 3 death nodes, so mages start with a nice spellbook (might swap out the 4th fire for a death to get quick liches/spectres).

Something to try is the Orbus modmod (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=315887) (you know, mod of a mod). It expands out the economic side of the tech tree, adds corporations (because come on, what's a medieval globe-spanning empire without the Hansa and the Bank of Rothschild, er, Vivaldi?), fixes some of the underused civs (Sidar have more immortal units now in place of the kind of sad waning ability, Amurites have tons more mage-style units) and adds some entirely new civs:

Mechanos: Steampunks. Devils? Mages? KILL IT WITH FIRE. At the top end they get a mech. Really. And helicopter gunships. Surprisingly not as broken as you'd think (longbows shooting down gunships is a Civ trademark, I think) since gunships are just strength 11 infantry units that can fly. They also get the ability to build factories that can increase production 50% in every city, so there's that. To balance all this out, they don't get mages OR religious units (instead they get "adeptuses" stolen from WH40K for all their healing needs)

Scions of Patria: originally in Fall Further (another modmod which I don't think is maintained any more). Undead Romans. Has lots of interesting quirks, such as fallow cities (they ignore food, just like the infernals) that grow thanks to how well you worship the elder gods. Really, there's a percentage chance of spawning new settlers (which are used to add pop points) based on how well you dig up artifacts and the like. Plus you get an insane immortal mage that randomly flips out and kills people (including your own).

Tlacatl: also originally in Fall Further (there they were 2 civs, good and evil - here it's merged into one, and you can select good or evil leaders). Aztec lizard people that love jungles and make more.

Dao and Palatinate: two civs that just got added this past month so I don't have much experience with them. Dao are an Asian civ that autospawn elementals similar to the Sheam and the Palatinate are the Empire from Warhammer.

One thing to remember with this: there will be balance issues. Kael is AWESOME in terms of being gatekeeper for "don't add this cool sounding ability that breaks the game". Modmods for FfH came about because some people wanted the cool sounding abilities anyway. Generally the AI can't play the new civs well at all, for example (I've never seen them do well as Mechanos, probably due to lack of religion). It's a fun sideshow, but vanilla FfH is much more polished.

I still play this game entirely too much so hit me up if you have strategy questions.

Acheron got a HUGE buff in the past few patches - now his city spawns cultists that cast fireballs at attacking stacks. It was put in to prevent people from using cheesy exploits to kill him, but also makes him effectively unkillable (which is why the AI is avoiding it, they know they have no chance). Your best bet if you HAVE to take him out is to get in stacks of assassins to kill all the mages, and then follow it up with dozens of suicide cannons to soften the dragon up before your level 15 hero maybe has a 50% chance of killing him.

Or you just avoid him, which is what I've been doing every game.

Edit: oh wait, Yvain? Treants? Trebs? Are you playing as Elohim FoL or something? Normally you'll have either druids OR siege.

Unless you have a hero with maxed out combat and drill scores, you have no chance whatsoever. (Maxed out drill = up to 4 free attacks, which hopefully will finish him off before he eats you. Maxed out drill is critical for heroes in general, the free attacks makes them survivable when the AI throws 50 units at you.) If you do, build a LOT of trebs, and suicide about 20 of them at once to soften them up.

Also, my FfH screenshot is a lot more  :ye_gods: :pedobear: :awesome_for_real: then Tom Chick's "Gandalf wants beer" shot:

(http://sjennings.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/empire121.jpg)

I'm definitely going to check out the modmod, I was bummed Fall Further got abandoned before I had a chance to get to it. Also, maybe the best FFH2 screenshot I've ever seen. HYBOREM WANT BANANA!

Another thing I figured out a little too late in my Clan of Embers game...those goblin forts? You can buy units from them. I was buying up some chariots when the barbarians broke away from our peace treaty. So many cool touches to this mod.

The modmod handles goblin forts differently (at least for non-Clan players  - not sure if they handle them the same way for Clanners) - there's already a system of forts extending culture similar to vanilla Civ4, and when you take a goblin fort, you can raze it for cash, take it over as your own fort, or just enslave all the goblins.

I'm currently playing a fairly epic Orbus game as the Sidar, because I never play as them. Took over a fairly large chunk of the world unmolested and made a green haven of FoLeaves worshippers, then ran into the Doviello over the mountains to the north and Hyborem shitting up a big chunk of world to the east. Well, unlike vanilla FFH, in Orbis recon units can cross mountain ranges. So the Doviello snaked some barb cities I had my eye on in my 'quadrant', we declared war, and started duelling with rangers in each other's rear areas.

Meanwhile, Garrim Gym the Luchiurp, who surprisingly enough is not only not sucking but actually is in the lead, summons Basium and immediately declares war on Hyborem and his patron, the Balseraphs (who are #3 - I'm #2). The rest of the world then all jumps in on the war and starts sending expeditionary forces to get in Hyborem's business. It's actually pretty damned epic.

And... Hyborem is the only thing between me and a straight shot into the Doviello. Guess who's entering the war!

Oh, shit. In my rush to get my mana nodes set up for free promotions, I forgot my favorite thing about death mana....spectres get death affinity. Set up four death nodes and not only do you get all the death promotions free, but your summoned spectres are str 3 + X death, where X = amount of death mana nodes. So str 7 summoned units, take a couple summoner promotions with the xp you saved from the free promotions, and....yeah, I remember why I liked that strategy before. Also, double your mage power with archmages + liches. Yeah. Gotta get on that one tonight, I'm just about ready to start building my mages.

Since you talked about it I decided to give Orbis another try (my old computer was too slow for it, at the beginning after each turn I waited about 5 seconds) and finally it is playable. Gotta sink my teeth into it this weekend. First to find out whats different about it in detail.

Hitting the end of my consolidation and upgrade phase, starting to put together my armies. Gosam and his buddies have been getting real demandy for tribute and all good civs are now annoyed, even though I've tried to keep them somewhat happy. So far two of the evil civs have come running to me for vassalization, I accepted Doviello since they're basically in my borders now, but the Illians are surrounded by the good civs...sorry, Auric. You're on your own, pal.

Doing a secondary expansion phase with my new navy so I could get the last two mana nodes I want (for 4 death and fire) and stumbled across the only mithril node in the world just shy of Os-Gabella's conquest push (it was a rough game for the dwarves, who are now extinct). So I quickly diverted one of my colonization queen of the lines to nab that island at the end of what is now her archipelago.

I'm about 11 turns from getting the Nexus, finally. Not used to playing a civ that's not research-heavy, hopefully one of those twinkle-toed mofos doesn't snag it on me the way they did the Catacomb Libralus.

Three turns to swap civics from aristograrian to my military-religious government. I wanted to do it just before I pumped out my shaman, as they'll get an additional 4xp at creation, but I also then had to wait 3 turns + 2 for build time...and the turn I come out of anarchy, Auric (who after I snubbed his vassalage went to be Logos's vassal) cast Stasis. Sonofa. Last night session was anarchy + stasis :|

Stomping the last bits of uncivilized lands with my stoneskin ogres to get them leveled up for fighting Basium when it inevitably happens.

Basium is really insanely difficult to deal with. I'm playing the Sidar and the elves summoned him. We were all friendly and shit but they were in my way so I tried to see if I could shove them aside. Angels of Death all over my cities: time to go back to the last save.

It's inevitable. Auric might be safe for a while longer due to being Elohim's vassal, but all the other evil civs are on the other side of me, so he's likely to come after me. I rule the seas with my privateers, I launch them incessantly if the opportunity arises. Not only can you smack down other players until they get their naval shit together, but you can blockade like a mofo and after you get a decent amount of blockades going it adds up. Especially handy when that bastard Auric casts Stasis  :oh_i_see:

Gosam will probably trigger it, though, he's mighty pissed at me and has been for most of the game. Just about everyone is at least annoyed with me. Between my upgraded stoneskin ogres, Hemah (who is turning into a badass with summoner upgrades plus death and fire lines) and the shaman I'll be building at the end of the stasis, I should be in decent shape. I was also ramping up war stack production with ogres and catapults, and soon some cultists. Pretty close to the start of the end game.

One thing I'm wondering - how to see invisible units (since you mention the AoD)? I had a bunch of mistforms that were smacking down an expansion island pretty hard until I suckered them into attacking Hemah's spectres. Couldn't see them with anything I had, though.

Don't you have hunter/scout units?

Yep, had lizardmen scouring the island, escorting workers, etc.

Finally got out of Stasis last night  :oh_i_see:

edit: RTFM helps:

Wow, I started playing that Orbis mod.  The new stuff is really nice!  I really like playing the Scions of Patria, its a very different way to play, and I love all the lore that comes with it.  Not sure if I've really figured out how to be totally effective with them yet, but I like the mechanics.  Anybody have some good suggestions on how to actually raise the damn population quickly?  Still trying to figure out the best way to raise the Awakened spawn rate fast.

I didn't know that.  Shadows seems more worthwhile now, nice.

Quick session last night - got my shamans pumped out, did some exploration with my stoneskin ogres to level them up a bit. Got a couple magic items for the ogres and one was possessed by a demon (random rage + demon promotion), so I'll just plop him behind enemy lines and let him cause havoc, he's raging across a barbarian isle right now.

Nice to get shamans that automatically jump to level 5 mages with 1 free tier of body (vassal mana) and full free tiers of fire and death. Let me upgrade their strength and summoning skills without having to buy any spells. I'll turn 4 into liches and have 4 as archmages, then start rolling.

Sweet.  Gonna try Lums Mod Advice.  Also updating title/original post since we are now up to patch "M".

edit.  First post updated, includng links to the mod Lum wubs and Kaels announcement from today,

Very nice.  He'll have to make some changes (Goodbye, Gybrush!) but it'll be nice to see it as a standalone and see what other tweaks he can make unchained from the CIVs engine. 

Tough to jump from modder to dev, but I hope he does it. That one guy has been responsible for more gaming hours in my house than every other developer, maybe even combined, in the last few years.

I just hope he sticks to TBS. Any developer in the TBS arena should hire Kael ASAP, before he makes a great indie game and starts his own Firaxis.

I have to buy whatever he releases just to pay for all the hours I spent playing FFH2.

Hey maybe all the totally derivative/stolen stuff will disappear, along with the typos!  :heartbreak:

EDIT: Eh I guess I don't care so much about derivative, but the 'borrowed' art combined with the horrible spelling just stops me from enjoying this mod at all, honestly.

But I had a great laugh when I realized that at least two leader portraits were LotRO concept art.

...... Really?  SERIOUSLY?

Yes, really. I have a pretty low tolerance for fan-fic-y bullshit in mods, too, so all that stuff in the 'story' missions didn't help, add on that it was full of grammatical and spelling errors, the art was all 'borrowed', and there were enough characters lifted from other works to make Blizzard blush, and it just adds up to a package I can't enjoy. The gameplay was fine, but not amazing or anything in the way I was led to believe it would be by this thread - in order for me to get past all that other stuff it would need to be awesome and special in the way that, say, Mount & Blade is. As it is I'd much rather play vanilla Civ 4.

I feel the same.  I'm hoping  Elemental: War of Magic will be a better game.

Uh, Elemental: War of Magic is being made by Stardock with an experienced team that has shipped several successful titles (GalCiv I & II, Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod).  It's not even remotely the same league as a 'mod' as far as resources to devote to art assets, polish and story.

A budget of (probably) millions vs. what ever you can get done in your spare time.  And also something that will cost 60 bones vs didn't cost you a dime to play.

I guess what I am saying is that I totally don't get the comparison, it's like someone saying "Man, built in your garage airplanes sure are flimsy." and someone else responding with, "I hope F22's are better".

Too true. The upcoming xcom installment will blow all the tactical competition out of the water.

More like "Man those labels you made for your homebrew beer look totally cheap, that's why I only drink Miller light!"

:oh_i_see:

Remember that time that one generic civ was in a desperate fight against another completely forgettable generic civ? Against a modder who made things like an army of fire-throwing golems that might attack you with their allies, the insane clowns and naval overlords. Sure, it might be a bit fan-ficy, but vanilla civ is really vanilla after you've played it. I could see if it had some event system like Europa Universalis to give it flavor...but it doesn't.

I realize I'm a resident fanboy of the mod, but what other fantasy builder tbs game has been released lately? Last good one I played was Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. And there is so much more depth to FFH2.

Sure, Civ 4 isn't Alpha Centauri, but it still resonates with me more when I get nuked by Gandhi than when forgettable-character-from-some-dude's-D&D-homebrew-with-a-picture-stolen-from-Icewind-Dale does something annoying. There are some nice gameplay ideas in the mod, I won't deny it, but they're surrounded by too much garbage to put up with (for me).

EDIT: This little derail went on too long probably, continue enjoying the mod.

I was not really comparing them.  I was responding to Ingmar's post about FFH2 lack of polish.  My point was: Elemental has similar gameplay (I hope) but much better polish. Ingmar and me are interested by FFH2 gameplay but are having trouble with the lack of polish.  For us, Elemental will probably solve the problem.  It as nothing to do with development budget or price.

From what I see form Elemental in this early beta phase right now, it will be sufficiently different from Fall From Heaven 2 that there is little overlap.

I think the home brew beer analogy is quite apt. Art assets are expensive, and while I'm astonished what they managed to do without a budget, I certainly hope there is an improvement if they become commercial.

I am, of course, a lore bitch and therefore don't have the same problems because I read everything relating to that lore over days. But I see shades of that happening in Orbis. It has good improvements, but the new elements are somewhat grating. I guess the whole FFH experience would be the same for people not acquainted with the lore.

I don't want to beat up on people for having a different opinion, but expecting a mod to have great artwork and polish seems like a recipe for disappointment.  The most I would expect from any mod would be that they have some interesting/new ideas.  That, to me, makes the mod worth the price of admission (which is a download and install... which is free apart from the time it takes).  So, given that you said you thought there were good ideas, to then say, "it lacks polish" seems uncharitable.

Fair enough. It all depends on your own reality.  I don't have a lot of time for games these days so I don't evaluate them on price/value.  To me, the decision is simply: I have 5 hours this weekend, which game do I play?  FFH2 doesn't make it because it lacks polish.  The gameplay is intresting, I would gladly pay 60$ for a more polished version.  The same thing could be said about Dwarf Fortress.

Let me clarify it a little then.

1) I don't think expecting proper spelling and grammar from a mod or a game really falls under the category of expecting polish. It falls under the category of expecting a little minimal effort beyond 'run spell checker'. I'll make exceptions for mods or games made by non-native speakers of course (although frankly King's Bounty is testing the limits of my patience), but this isn't one of those.

2) In a vacuum, yes, some new/interesting ideas is plenty to make a mod worth installing, and when you're talking about that sort of thing I can get past the hangups I have with FFH - the Native mod for Mount & Blade would be a good example. The dumb story stuff was mostly a toggle you could turn off (bye bye dark knight invasion) and while it drove me crazy that they thought it would be a good idea to rename one of the NPCs to "Aragorn" it wasn't in my face all the time, and the gameplay tweaks were worthwhile. This is more of a total conversion than a mod, though, and when you get to that point I think the bar goes up. Be original with your names and places and if you can't write well, don't dress up your story missions with so much story text. Take a page from HOMM3 and just use a fairly minimal dialogue box here and there to give me the little story I need to actually play, don't throw me a multi-page story about your Mary Sue sea captain saving some girl from being raped.

3) As far as art goes, the art doesn't have to be anything special, but I find it jarring to see a piece of art I know from somewhere else shoved into a context I know it has nothing to do with. There are roughly a billion people on deviantart who would be willing to throw some leader portraits together for free just for a chance at some exposure, too.

Many of the writers on FfH are non-native English speakers. It's pretty obvious a lot of the scenarios were penned by one of them. They could desperately use an editor, but, well, hobbyist project.

In any event the scenarios are only a small part of the overall mod, and the main mod is free of Russian-mangled English and Mary Sue Lanun heroes.

Fair enough, I assumed the main guy was also the main writer.

Oh, shit. Don't bother with the scenarios :)

The borrowed art doesn't bug me, because I don't know the original sources of most of it, and it fits the setting. I was chuckling last night about the "some dude's d&d homebrew" when I started reading the first Malazan book, or when I was considering the new Feist novel (both authors inspired by their d&d campaign settings). Not saying Kael is a Erikson or Feist (err hell no), but discounting the game because of its roots is a bit silly, since it's one of the best fantasy strategy games ever made.

Once you get a feel for the different civs and their playstyles, it really does become compelling when that asshole Varn Gosam and his bastard paladins encroach on your civlized orc society of polite tea drinkers and bone crunchers. I hope you give it some more time, Ingmar. I was frankly surprised you didn't like it, given our tastes in gaming run somewhat similar.

At least I got a heads-up on Elemental out of it, even though that game looks more like a civ/homam hybrid (which is AOK). I really wish they'd make another Age of Wonders, with the depth and variety of FFH2. Then again, I'd like to see FFH2 add the trading sim of the Anno games, but I'm wishy like that.

Orbis is currently sucking up all my MMO time.  Lum, thanks for pointing it out!

Its pretty genius and has a shitton of paths to take.  Once I got over the "OMG HOW CAN I PLAN AHEAD" aspect and went with the flow I began to seriously enjoy myself.

I just wish I could figure out how to run the Mechanos civ.

A steampunk civ is right up my alley, but I have struggled to find a working model. I guess I need to explore the tech tree more and figure out the optimal path to steam powered awesome and guns.

That's how I got going with FFH2, just tried to kind of rp the research paths until I hit the 'oh shit' moments (like finding fireballing workers for luchuirp or something).

I totally forgot that fireballs have fire affinity (duh), I've been so focused on death mana for my awesome lich/archmage summoners (and Hemah the double summoner) that I've not really cast fireball. I got the unique feature that gives fire mana, I figured it was appropriate to burninate the barbarians guarding it when I noticed my fireballs were suddenly 1 stronger. So now my death affinity is at +6 and fire at +5, and I just captured two new nodes, muhahaha.

Also had a couple cultists that have been around forever doing the Inquisition, with some decent priest upgrades (religion was tertiary in my research path); upgraded them to Eidolons that  really enhance my stacks of doom. My stoneskin ogres are getting ridiculously high level. I normally don't play this militarily, so it's wild to have such a massive and powerful army (and navy, I've basically shut down the oceans). All over but the final showdown, pretty much.

It's actually easier than most civs, simply because quite a bit has been removed (and replaced with OMG guns).

Most of the arcane techs (the mana types, the mage promoters) are useless since you can't use mages. Most of the divine techs are useless since you only have techpriests. So your tech tree climb is going to be pretty focused on economics, which is good, because you also get tools to make your cities monsters.

You're weakest in the early game (you know, before you get the guns). You DO get free iron from the start of the game, so if you start right next door to a hostile civ a warrior rush is actually pretty doable. However you're probably going to want to turtle up and tech up. Your key tech is Steam Power - this allows you to have your tech priests get Refined Mana from nodes. Each Refined Mana node you have hooked up gives you a research bonus, and they also power your factories, which are far better then other civ's forges.

Mid game you should have -

* Boris, who isn't a hero (no free XP) but is immortal (he's Frankenstein, just give him some power and he's good to go), so if you keep throwing him into battle he'll be a pretty good 'hero' unit
* Feris, who IS a hero. Both a pretty decent ranged unit AND an assassin, so she's always useful in sieges.
* Airships - not only can they transport units, they can also bomb.
* Handgunners - Longbow replacement, better in every way (and cheaper, I think)

Late game, you unlock -

* Goliath, the mecha. WHIRRRR KILL
* Flamethrowers, replacement for phalanxes, better in every way (they do MASSIVE collateral damage and tear cities up)
* Gunships, your champions that can fly
* Howitzers, the ultimate ranged unit which will tear up cities even more than flamethowers

Generally you want to wait until late game because that's when all the toys open up - however if you concentrate on economics you can fight off most enemies by spamming mid-tier units faster than your enemy can kill them thanks to all your cities being production powerhouses.


Ironically, you are weaker in the end-game than most other civs, because you only have one holy-crap unit (Goliath, who isn't THAT great), no archmages, no high priests, no druids... basically you'll be spamming howitzers and gunships to support your death-stack of Goliath, Feris, Boris and supporting adeptuses. Not really fantastic but it gets the job done.

Thanks, Lum!

I'm just now finishing up a playthrough with the Amurites. I managed to end up isolated on an island -- so now I'm in the last few turns remaining phase and am just now trying to unleash a jillion mages, chanters, and spell-casting melee units on another dug-in civ.

This sounds like a good second game...only 80 turns to go!

I love this mod more and more.  I tried both the good and evil lizards; very interesting.  My main issue with them is lack of invade power.  My last game, for example, I got invaded by like 3 other civs and managed to hold them off.  Luckily I was able to create my dragon and toast a bunch of their cities.  Problem was I could not make headway into their territory.  Large part of it was lack of jungles in enemy territory.

Whats the deal with the minor trait?  I noticed when I played the evil lizards I got upgraded seemingly random and got new traits in lieu of the minor one.  I dug into the forums but saw nothing. 

Anyhow, time to give the Mechanos a whirl!  I cannot stop playing, poor LoTRO is feeling abused.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I've just managed to push myself into supremacy as Mechanos following Lums suggestions above.  After a very long drawn out war, I've finally defeated the god damn dwarves, and have a pretty bad ass army setup.  I could probably easily crush any of the smaller civs at this point, so only question is to see how I do against the next ranked civ down from me (The orc civ), who do have a pretty big empire built.  At this point I think I've built myself up enough though that I'm unstoppable, but it was a good game!  The dwarves summoned the Angle civ, and in the course of the war, I was dealing with several stacks of 30-40 run priests, and at least 70-80 god damn Angles in various stacks throwing my invading armies back.  But luckily for me, Howitzers destroy everything!  And thank god for the flamethrower infantry.

The Minor trait begins as a penalty (hefty minus to culture and research, I think) but allows you to unlock a new trait based on your actions. For example if you are the first to found a religion you can take the Spiritual trait. Once you do you lose the Minor trait.

oooh.  I like this.  My minor evil lizzy leader turned into a power house thanks to this mechanic.  Thanks for making it clear!

Still grinding out my Clan game. The Good alliance /finally/ declared on us, around turn 560. I was already halfway through wiping out Hippus with my Lich/Archmage/Hemah stack of Wraith casters (10 wraiths/turn, 22 strength thanks to buildings and 12 death mana nodes). Trying to keep the territory and level up my units a bit slows it down from the ultimate death march it could be.

So when the Good alliance declared, I threw all my culture producing cities (mostly done building improvements) into producing Shamans. Which were created with enough xp to make them insta-mages...which means an army of spectre-casters (something like 15 or 16 str, though, not quite as nice as the wraiths). I forgot to crank out defensive units for the beachhead + defending conquered lands...but my thoughts for defense are turning toward pillaging given the measly 10 AC.

Reason for needing a beachhead: Elohim cast Sanctuary about 2 turns into the war after I bribed his vassal Auric to invade him. Auric must've been champing at the bit, he grabbed one city right off the bat. The Sanctuary cut off the route between my empire and the Good alliance, so my Nexus invasion was stalled until I could get some Queen of the Lines into the bay.

About 580 turns into the game now, maybe 36 hours  (granted, I believe that includes AFK time).

That's awesome dude.

About 300 turns in, I generally get bored w/ all the micromanagement, so props to you!

Damnit, I can't get orbis to run. Locks up as it starts building the world.  :heartbreak:

This is another interesting mod to try: Wild Mana (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=345653)  Emphasis less on new civs and units (though it has some, mostly from Fall Further), more on making AI more effective. A lot of it has been folded into the main FfH mod.

Just did my first Infernal campaign. Very fun turning the world to hell. The first time I tried it I waited too long while I tried to spread Ashen Veil and get a big war brewing. Went back to a save (was playing Lanun to start) and just went hard at Infernal Pact ASAP and got rolling. Spread Ashen Veil enough before the Infernals that when the apocalypse really got rolling, I was getting 3-5 Manes a turn from other factions getting their asses kicked by the Apocalyptic leaders.

Avatar of Wrath really has to get crushed right away, though, or those Iras get out of control.

I wonder if Elohim's sanctuary bugged on me, he's still under sanc. Hippus is long gone, and I landed my pincer marine attack of two fleets filled with my insta-mages on the good continent, hoping to drive a wedge in before Elohim's border re-opened. Well, I've wiped out Basium and Gosam and on my way to wiping out Ljosofar while Auric tucks his johnson hoping I don't turn on him for vassaling and friending all the good civs. Been trying to keep a rear guard of ogres to fend off elohim, as well as some reserve mages led by an archmage, but they're just wasting time up there.

After I finished off the Hippus, my lich/archmage/hemah doom squad is hitting the far end of the good continent to seal things off. Game's pretty much over now, just too many strong summons for anyone to put up much of a fight as long as I don't make any strategic mistakes in advancing the mage stacks. Ljosofar is the toughest thanks to the treant spawns in ancient forests, I keep getting 10str treants behind my lines.

Should probably hang this one up and start an Orbis game, I've settled 70% of the planet between expansion and conquest.

At 75% you trigger victory in vanilla Civ4. Dunno if that's the case for FfH or not but you can probably simply force-vassal everyone at that point anyway (except Basium but you already wiped him)

I turn off everything but Conquest victory  :grin:

Very very side note, but what the HELL is that one song in the soundtrack? The one that has a guy who sounds like the offspring of Enya, Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Droopy singing, "I wish I could give you something else?" and something about torture. Wow. It's so bad it's kind of good.

I think it's some goth band that donated that song to the mod. I remember it got credit to that effect a while back.

Most of the themes come from this album (http://www.amazon.com/Ka/dp/B001D7JSMK/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1273016060&sr=8-9) if you're into them. I like the Basium one! (It's track 9)

Is there a Wonder or other ability that can be used to force you to declare war on another faction? Or does Basium declare wars independently of you? I'm playing as the Malakim w/Basium in my current game, and like clockwork I keep being forced to declare war against the Elohim. At first, I thought it was because of a Defensive Pact I had with the Bannor, but I cancelled that after the first time, and I don't show as having a pact them now.

First time I've summoned Basium. He's kind of inert if the enemy is: a) overseas and b) not Ashen Veil. But if you declare against someone on the same continent as his original city, holy crow, he drops a bag of hammers on their head. I had to race him to claim the city I wanted that had a mithril node.

Yep, that'll be Basium. Touch on the aggressive side when it come to AV civs. Bit odd that he's declaring against the Elohim, unless they went AV?

Did they pull out the Arcana stuff out of the sojundtrack? I haven't actually played in a while now.

FFH tuned me into that band. In the absence of Dead Can Dance, they're the best remaining alternative.

Basium will always declare war on the founder of the Ashen Veil (defined as someone with both the AV state religion and holding the AV holy city). And since Basium is hard coded to be the vassal of whomever summons him, that puts whomever summons Basium at war with them as well.

You can also be drug into war by accepting someone as a vassal who is at war already, and building "The Draw" (the ritual that allows the Illians to build Auric Ascended) will cause the entire world to declare war on you.

How, exactly does vassal stating work anyway? I'm the most powerful civ in my Mechanos playthrough. I'm at war with all of the evil civs, but I can't get the good civs to vassal to me. Does the war flag have something to do with it? Is it based on alignment?

ETA -- NVM. Forgot I hadn't switched to feudalism.

I could have looked through the thread but...

Is there a good newbie guide / wiki for this?  I haven't played Civ anything since I played it on PS1 way back in the day.  I'm not even sure what order to tech up just to keep my cities happy and healthy especially healthy, it seems like a real struggle to not have diseased as fuck even after building every sanitation tech I could get my hands on.

Also for a welcome to Civ again scrub FfH2 race what are some suggestions?  I'm looking for something where I'll mostly be just building cities and tech'ing while playing defensively so I can get used to those systems again.

The Elohim are stronger on their home turf, which makes them a good defensive civilization, plus they have a World spell that hinders all enemy troops from entering their territory for a few turns.

A fine first builder civilization will be the Kuriotates, though. They only can build a few cities (3 to 5 depending on world size), but these cities are production powerhouses. They can work an additional plot ring around them and thus support the largest cities of all civs. And as you don't have to landrush you have a smaller area to defend.

Here is the Fall From Heavin Wiki with links to other pages.

http://fallfromheaven.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

The wiki is pretty light in info, lots of dead ends. But between that, the FFH2 forum, the manual and the civopedia, you can usually figure out most stuff.

I'd go Ljosofar for a first civ. Because they can improve forest tiles without removing the forest, they are massively productive, kind of easy-mode. And there isn't much of a twist to playing them.

As for your issues with health, did you mouse over the icon in the city screen to see what's causing it? Get healthy resources and build the buildings that tap into that (smokehouse for pigs/cows. granaries for corn/wheat, etc); build the health buildings (which you've done, herbalist should keep most cities for a while, though); choose your civs wisely. A strong combo is artistograrian, good synergy.

My first instinct was Ljosofar as well, but I avoided civilizations that are shut out of specific weapon groups (no siege engines, therefore reliance on fire magic or Giant bombardments) and might teach him wrong approaches (woodland workers). But yes, they are a splendid and safe first choice.

Ljosofar (good elves) are a good turtle race, as are Khazad (dwarves) since you get a bonus for huge treasuries.

Other then that, if you haven't played Civ in years, um, you have some catching up to do. One thing to remember is that barbarians are a LOT more aggressive in FfH - garrison your cities and don't send settlers out without an escort.

Not quite always. I'm playing Balseraph/Keelyn, founded AV and have Kandros Fir as as a vassal. He just summoned Basium and I ended with Basium as one as well. Got an Angel from a dungeon pop soon after...

Things I wish I'd know earlier.

Mages with high power fireballs are OP. Make all your magic nodes fire, give you mages the run speed and range extension talents, then just zip around mowing everything down with fireball spam. They can be moved to the coast to nuke incoming ships, and since fireballs siege they can replace cannons.

Assassins eat mages.

Hawks see assassins. Always keep a hawk or two in your mage stack.

Bannor running the crusade civic are great fun.

This also works with other lines of magic. In my current game I went with death magic (see above) - which is probably the best because you can double your tier 3 casters (4 archmages/4 lich), with Hemah (who can double cast), that means 10 22str Wraiths per turn with no damage to the superstack (indeed, leaving a couple with the stack makes for awesome cheap defense).

The tier 2 Spectres aren't quite as good, but the same principle, since fireball is a tier 2 spell. Anything with a tier 2 summon that has affinity would work if you pump up the mana it has affinity for. Remember some buildings can give mana and you can demand all of your vassal's mana.

I got orbis running finally.. had to reinstall Civs to do it.  One thing really bothers me is that you can't cast liches unless you're certain civs.  Played the first game as elves and couldn't get my lich-elves and arch-elves.  Very disheartening.

Also, the boats don't have the crew promotions from FFH anymore (Pirate, Longshore, Normal crews) and that really cripples you at times.  2nd game using the Erebus map program had me trapped on a peninsula because there's so goddamn many mountain ranges.  I was able to build one city then had to spend a looong time pumping research into ships to get to something with cargo space so I could expand.  By the time that happened the other civs already were into the mid-game with 8-10 cities each.  *starts over*

Think you found a bug. I'm pretty sure he's supposed to break vassalage and declare war once he summons Basium.

They're unlocked with techs.

So I finally got around to downloading the package on Steam right now.  Can't wait! Haven't played in years.

Unfortunately that means I was screwed that game no matter what then.  Ah well, another scenario I now know to just restart the game if I find myself in.

Civ4 absorbed my soul yesterday.  I just played a regular game though.  Can someone break down what Colonoization, Warlords and Beyond the Sword are?  Are they just scenarios that are loaded into the game when I click the icon on the desktop?

BtS adds a ton to the vanilla game - you should be playing that as your vanilla Civ4.

Colonization is a remake of Colonization. If you don't know that game, shame on you, go sit in the corner.

Warlords, I dunno, multiplayer stuffs?

Well yeah I played the original Colonization.  I was just wondering how the game plays out.  I loaded up Beyond the Sword yesterday and hit single player, and started a game.  I guess Beyond the Sword is just an update with some fancy scenarios that start you off at gunpowder?  Or does science slow down, or does it add anything different to the game?

I don't use scenarios, don't know about that. Don't know how the new Col plays, just got it. BtS is vanilla civ ++. Espionage, corps, more units and techs, new civs, yadda.

Aaah ok, so that's what BtS added. 

Warlords was the first expansion pack which BtS essentially made obsolete. If you just buy Civ4 + BtS the only thing you're missing from Warlords is a few scenarios.

Which is all irrelevant because you should just install FFH2  :awesome_for_real:

Crap, I knew I was forgetting something (even if it is the name of the thread).  This is so going to fuck up my workout tonight.  I hate rushing at the gym.

Edit to add:
What is the difference between what's included in the game and FFH2?  What's the difference and do I need to download anything different?

First post has the download link. Make sure BtS is patched (yay Steam), then install FFH2 and then the FFH2 patch. You can also install the media patch for FFH2.

BtS might not be patched after Steam's download?  :oh_i_see:

I'll play around with it later.

No, I mean Steam takes care of that stuff for you.

Oh.  Good.  I thought you were being sarcastic.

S'okay. Sometimes I'm not even sure when I'm being sarcastic.

So I played a bit of FFH2 last night.  Interesting mod.

Single player, used whatever the custom map generator selection was (The one that made the best "fantasy map").  First one was me stuck inside a mountain range surrounded area.  The second was more open bit more with "choke" valleys.  I had no idea what race to pick though so that was confusing.  The dungeons etc were pretty fun, but the barbarian hordes were relentless.

I was busy taking down a Barb town and right when I was about to take it over the next turn, some other race just plopped down and took it from me.  Meh. 

It's incredibly slow paced, at least my Civ was.  I was making scientific discoveries every 30 turns or so after the first 2 tiers.  I couldn't make money to save my life either.

It's all pretty cool though. 

I don't normally use the "fantasy" map generator, just the normal ones.  Actually, I mainly use Pangea or Lakes because none of the civ games or mods have ever done Navel invasions worth a damn. 

But yeah, the game is much slower paced than a normal civ game.  Everything takes longer to build/research, but everything is also much more varied and has a bigger effect on the game.  You basically need to make sure that your first city has a bunch of plots that will make you money.  The amount of money you generate directly effects how many research points you generate in a turn.  So if you have a couple of big money making plantations in your initial starting city, it will help out big time.

I like fractal.  You aren't really sure what you're going to get.

Questions:
-how and more importantly what are the conditions to get the free new abilities on casters?
-the religions?  Each have a temple and that lets you create missionary units?  State religion?  Is there somewhere I can read up on the religion system?
-are granary/smokehouse worth it at all earlygame?  I'm starting to think until I can make one for around 10 turns its a waste of my time compared to having 3-4 extra units.

I've got more but can't think of them atm.

Adepts get free spells of a mana type if you have enough mana of that type. 2 Mana gives them the Level 1 spell for free, 3 Mana gives them the Level 2 spell for free (if they are eligible to Level 2 spells, so they have to be upgraded to Mages).

Religions give you Missionary Unites and Priest units (with temples). Priest units can gain xp over time (like Arcane units) and can cast divine spells. Also, each religion has at least one religious hero that can only be built once in the game and there are some buildings that are religion-specific as well. Religious units leave you if you abandon their religion as a state religion.

Here is a manual in pdf-form. It is a bit old but it still gives you an overview of the features. I have it in a binder next to the computer for quick browsing.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=8635

I generally build Granaries/Smokehouses. The quicker growth rate usually balances out the waste of time relatively soon, especially when the new citizens can be brought to work in a mine :)

Judgement call on the food processing buildings. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Usually if I'm not rushing to some goal and it's a production-heavy, food-light city I'll build them. Also (obviously) they're a good multitasker if you've got health issues and the appropriate resources to tap into the health benefits.

Tebonas covered it pretty well. The main thing with mana is whether you want to specialize and get free spells in a school and more powerful affinity summons or have versatility of many schools of magic, but less powerful. If you're getting your main school of magic for free, your upgrades can be spent on spell extension, magic resistance, mobility, etc. But then you won't have access to giving your units as many buffs from multiple schools.

Specializing in a mana type gives you:

* Free abilities for mages (4 mana sources = every spell in that line free once you hit Archmage) freeing up those ability points for other things
* If you have units with "affinity" to that mana type (druids, spectres, Chalid, others) they gain strength with every mana source. This can be a game-winning linchpin.
* Some mana types have inherent bonuses - for example Mind mana sources give you a flat research bonus.

Being a generalist in many mana types gives you:

* Unlocks spells in that mana type - you almost always need at least one mana source for that type to begin learning abilities (some units start with a free ability that bypasses this, such as Vampires with death magic and Illian priests with ice magic)
* Special buildings are unlocked if you get one of every mana type in a tech line - for example having one of each mana type in Necromancy allows you to build the Tower of Necromancy which lets you summon more and stronger skeletons

Religions:

* let you build units that can heal. This is important! (So important that civs that are hard coded to be athiest like the Grigori get "medics" instead)
* give you access to religion specific heroes if you're the first one to build them (Rosier the Fallen and Mardero for the Ashen Veil, Valin Phanuel and Sphener for the Order, Chalid Astrakein for Empyrean, etc etc) These are some of the most powerful units in the game
* having a state religion gives you inherent bonuses to each city of that religion, depending on the religion (usually happiness, Ashen Veil gets a research bonus instead)
* allow you to build temples that have bonuses depending on the religion (mostly happiness and culture bonuses, health bonus for Fellowship of Leaves, etc)

Basically if you don't have a religion you are crippling your city growth; civs that can't use religions like Grigori have that as a penalty to offset other bonuses they may have.

More questions, haven't looked at that pdf yet, not sure I want to look at a pdf I have real reading I could be doing..

-Resource reveals:  When you get animal husbandry/mining etc. which reveal a new resource will it show up on tiles behind fog of war or just ones you have revealed?
-City health bonus:  What is the maths behind the forest tile health bonus?  I'm always too scared to cut down trees to get the precious hammer boosts because I can't seem to tell which ones effect the health of the city.

I've been playing and enjoying evil humans starts with Ill, but I'm still very bad at the early game.  I like the concept of rush Philosophy to get the building that gives them 3 free casters transition but I need to work on my expansion strategies a little since I often find myself behind Civs like Doviello who pwned me in my last game thanks to some treacherous bullshit from the Eloheim and the fuckhead Dwarves (god I hate Dwarves).

Those 3 casters don't have hero but do seem to give themselves abilities over time, I'm going to pay more attention to what is going on in light of what you guys said.  It has not seemed to work the way I would expect based on this comment
I've never noticed casters being given an ability choice that was limited to 1 spell, I've noticed they can only get the spells linked to mana types you have but I need to watch more closely in future games.

Everywhere, assuming you've explored them once and the square isn't black.


Trees only give you a health bonus if you have certain Fellowship of Leaves-centric civics, and the mouseover on each will tell you in that event. Generally only resources will give you health bonuses (as opposed to food, which is different).

You get half a health point per forest tile before any modifications no?  The treehugger bonuses are for happiness I thought.

Only on my second serious FFH2 game.  The mod totally lives up to the hype it's getting around here.  I played the shit out of vanilla and BtS and this is a whole new game.  They ripped out all the late game micromanaging craziness so I actually want to finish games.  Once vanilla games got to air units I usually didn't last long.

Anyone got an exact link to the correct file for this, and instructions on how to install it to steam?
There's about 3 files on their webpage, and it's not 100% clear which one you need.

I have both FallfromHeaven2.exe and FallfromHeaven2031.exe but neither of those seem to be the current one.

First post in the thread.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=308020

You need the mod and the patch. It looks like Patch "n" was released on May 15, 2010.

You don't "need" the music pack, but it is somewhat nice.

Installing into steam requires re-setting the install path. If you use google to search the Civ Fanatics site, you can find a discussion thread that gives you the path you need to use.

Thanks - that was making me unsure, since there's usually a full update for these things.

Heck, I didn't even know about Patch N until you asked your question. It took me forever to find the install path info -- wish I'd bookmarked it now that someone else needs it.

If you run Beyond the Sword once from Steam, the installer for FfH will be able to find that.  At least, that was my experience.

It is something like this but I need to do more testing before I'm convinced, also are you thinking it counts the 21 squares the city can use or anything within its influence area?

There is also the penalty to health for jungle tiles but I always play on cold setting so it hasn't come up often.

A few more questions,
-what the fuck do I do about fire?  I've had fires rage around for like 20 turns it feels like before they decide to go out.
-does having a unit in your starting city make it grow faster?  I haven't noticed the typical undefended unhappiness but sometimes it feels like the city grows quicker if it is defended.

Manual pg 163, Water sphere promotion 1 spell: Spring. Desert -> Plains, also puts out fires in surrounding tiles.

There is undefended unhappiness but depending on difficulty level a city has to be a certain size before it can be unhappy.

If it works like vanilla variable early growth rates in cities is probably mostly being caused by building workers or settlers.

I wish there was a list of what spells are unlocked by having what mana resources, anyone help me w/ that?  Couldn't find it in the pdf manual.

The manual kind of tells you since it gives the icon associated with the spell/mana type, IIRC. You still have to figure out by comparing to other stuff, though. There isn't a simple key.

Actually I accidentally found it clicking around after you posted that.  Page 183 has the Spell Spheres section which does exactly what I wanted.

Well, fuck. I've been doing it the "I don't read the ToC" way this whole time.

Page 183 it is, then.

Also, the Promotions section of the civopedia shows the I/II/III promotions for each mana type, you can click through those to find spells and effects.

So damn addictive. Civ4 not so much, but this mod is worth the price to get the game. The variety in how the game plays out and the factions play is really quite well done. The Erebus map allowing me to focus defence a bit and the AI in the most recent patch being quite lethal are all good too. Considering how much it adds the balance is pretty decent.

It's now beaten BC2 in hours played (90+ hours) .. not bad for a 10$ steam game

Orbis is addictive also. 

Huge thanks to Hoax to for pointing me at this mod, think I may get back into Civ 4 for a bit and will be sure to have my wife check it out as well.

Also the obligatory screenshot post for me.  :awesome_for_real:

I feel as though I'm missing something.  The only thing that really seems to work for me is to tech up through the metals, and then slowly grind through stacks of 15+ city defenders.  Even with focusing on expansion at the start, I seem to stall out at 4 cities before my neighbors have me boxed in.  I haven't seen much in the way of magic so far, and typically it's a complete mismatch of some poor wizard getting run over by a legionnaire.  Plus the forced reliance on taking a few siege if you want to capture an enemy city, and the utter uselessness of carting around your own mages, because an assassin will pop them off.

Where's the Master of Magic?  So far, it's really playing like Civ IV, with some different names for techs and units.

So it sounds like you're skipping the magic trees completely, and unsurprisingly finding that armies not supported with magic resemble World War 1.

Assassins targeting mages - have a high defense unit take the Guardsman promotion and keep him with the mages. Units with Guardsman take the hit from assassin strikes.

1st level adepts are useless (death 1 has a cheap summon, others have mildly useful buffs). Promoting them to 2nd level (mages) requires a tech and experience (mages get a trickle of XP every turn since if you use them in battle directly you're doing it wrong). At 2nd level a lot of useful spells show up - death 2 can summon spectres, which are cheap and effective cannon fodder. fire 2 can summon fireballs, which are better than siege in almost every way. At 3rd level (archmage) which requires more XP and a high level tech they become among the most powerful units you have, through monstrous summons mostly.

Also don't neglect priests. You *need* healing in this game to keep offensives moving quickly.

You also need "supercombatant" heroes - every nation/religion should have at least one. Get it up to level 10 or so and they will be your armored spearhead, cracking the nuts of defended cities so that weaker units can follow up without dying.

Dominions 3 is far closer to MoM than FfH2 (IMO).  FfH2 has the 4x part down a bit better but the Dom3 has more of the pieces overall.

• Rush Pact of Nilhorn and get Curly, Larry and Mo who have siege early on (and are nationality hidden to boot).
• Rush to Wizards with fireballs (suggest as least three fire mana nodes) and you don't need to take siege (which is slow).  you need some method of keeping the assassins from your mages.  Scout units can see hidden.  If you get the Honor religion (I forget the name) you get units that cast a spell that exposes invis units.  DO NOT move your Wizards right up to the city, fireballs have a nice range, use that range.
• Take the mage civ and rush to Firebows, which are that civ's upgrade to Longbowman.  They get fireballs, and therefore act as both a good attacker and siege all in one and assassins crap their pants when they see them.  Upgrade them to a str 10 fireball-casting bad asses who ignore walls for the ultimate "screw you" to defenders behind their walls.
• Take the world-ender civ and rush to the Pyre Ghouls.  They are, all by themselves, dementedly good.
• Choose to play a completely different game by rolling the Balseraphs and wage social warfare with Loki.

Rushing to a particular tech is as important as having a good base so your cities don't suck.

The meta-point here is this:  this game is awesome because I only listed a couple of different options to get around the need for siege or the frailty of mages.  But, at the end of the day, mages are frail... lichs, on the other hand...

If you want a great early expander, try a Clan of Embers game. They begin the game allied with the barbarians and have a hero that can take over barbarian towns bloodlessly, you can buy units at goblin forts. My most recent game was the Clan and it was scary powerful in the early game (lagged behind in the mid-game, slow tech, but caught up to dominate the end game militarily).

These guys like fire mana, I'm all about death mana, as outlined previously in this thread. I guess if you're a good guy fire mana is a better option :)

I typically have one mana node in my entire tiny empire.  Am I expanding too slowly, or am I having some bad luck?

You start with 3 mana types, and a couple buildings can give more, and some unique features will give you a single mana. Generally nodes are pretty sparse unless someone casts the ritual that spawns more. That's generally how you work your way up the arcane strategy, very dependent on what you have available. Getting multiple nodes is a bonus (free spells, allowing your mages to take non-spell upgrades, or get more spells), as long as you have a single source of any type you can learn all the spells from that school (as long as your mage unit has the appropriate casting level, of course).

I've been playing only Illians and I've finally made some progress, I'm currently in a game where I wiped out my nearest neighbor on a warrior rush + priests of winter + stasis (world spell).  I took over most of his cities which was nice since I didn't need to expand.  I then expanded, taking a Barbarian city and moving quickly to Bronze to get more out of my warrior based army.

I jacked up the Calabim when they wardec'd me dropping them to a pair of cities and taking one of their best cities for myself but then the Daviello (sp?) wardec'd me on my western border (the Calabims were all the way on the eastern border) so I forced the Calabim into peace, moved west and just finished mud stomping the entire Dav civ into the ground driving them into the sea and securing my western flank.  Just in time as now the pirate civ has 2 vassal states including my eastern buddies the Calabim and has declared war on me and wont even talk to me about it.  My priests are marching east, Wilboman (big ass hero unit) is almost done and I have iron now so I think I can raze this bitch to the ground as well.

I really fucked up my mid game transition as for awhile I was at 0% research since my armies and conquest cities were draining so much gold.  I've adopted currency and gold is now pouring in only to be met with unhappy citizens all over the place.  Dungeons for everyone and I'm trying to sort it out.  Mostly its because my empire has been cut into 3 pieces so I'm not getting all the special resource trade I should.  Once I wipe out the pirate civ's lackeys it will be time for a big ugly war with the Dwarves (who the game score says are in 3rd place I'm in 6th).

I think I'll quit after I see how a war with the dwarves goes, I see now some bad mistakes I made and I want to try this opener again with them in mind.

Ice mana is the shit, slow just lets you tactically abuse the fuck out of people and once I get the religion tech (around 30 turns to go now that research is running again) I will have the tier 3 ice spell which sounds awesome.

All of this is on Monarch and for someone who hadn't played Civ4 until 2 weeks ago I think that is ok.

Well, you're doing better than me. I just upgraded to Noble after owning the map with the Mechanos (orbis mod) and am now back to plain old FFH2. I'm really trying to figure out the Sidar, but may be forced to swap to another civ as I think their special units aren't that special. The shade thing is nifty, but I need units, not dudes I can convert to GPs.

I may have to use the Sheiam (sp) because I was zerg rushed by Pyre Zombies and now I want the firey death action as well.

Are people using the Erebus map type generally?  In my first few games I though it was amazing but as I play some more civs and get a handle on the mod as a whole I'm liking it less and less.

The main reason for this is that both initial civ location and the nearby terrain features play a HUGE part in how the game plays out.  The difficulty swing going from Noble to Prince to Monarch seems to have been dwarfed by geography.  I got smoked by a civ on Prince that was given about 1/3 of the map uncontested and yet totally dominated a Monarch game because a couple of civs were stunted by chokes with barbs or nasty red dragon placement.  I may also be bitter because I'm trying out the Malakim and Erebus refuses to start me anywhere but in some insanely unproductive desert expanse.

I'm hesitant to pop over to a Pangaea or Continents map for fear of messing up the feel of the game but may start doing that.

To be honest I use Erebus but have a quick peek around with the world builder. It's a waste of time starting out your empire to discover you are boxed in to a tiny patch of desert with the "Guardian of Pristinus pass" on the exit. All the resources are pretty rare and some of them, such as having lots of mana nodes and summons with affinity or mithril make a big difference to the game. Really rewards expansionism or dumb luck. Also not sure if building a town on top of a hidden resource destroys it... that would suck.

Won a "Boredom victory" playing Elohim by building the tower of luonnar. Trying to maximize great prophets and fortifying my position since I'd read that all the AI will attack when you get to the last stage. Turned out they don't so while they're having a jolly little war, and each of their turns is taking a minute or so, I'm just watching the little grey bar fill up.

I also really want the Svartalfar / Esus / Recon combination to work. It sort of does but Esus comes so late and you can't give religion to experienced units. That and I'm just not sure they can achieve enough for all the micro-managing. Easier just to make military units and go pillaging. Still, good practice for overcoming my tendency towards playing very defensively.

We will see, things have gotten a bit more dicey.  I smashT the Calabim like I figured I would, they only really had assassins and archers and the assassinate your catapult trick only caught me off guard once, after that I just slowed the shit out of them and it was gg.  A human could have made it more costly for me by keeping the assassins in his towns since my catapults don't have commando, move 2 and I don't have haste atm I think I'll get haste from now on for that kind of situation.  Sadly though the dwarves are trying to win through religion and have been converting my cities to the tree hippie shit and they are literally expanding along every one of my border.  Also they aren't really Dwarves they are Luichurip they just have a leader that looks like a dirty Dwarf and their color is brown so they confused me.  Meanwhile some upstart fucker tried to sneak a city onto the coast only a few tiles from my border and despite it causing war between me and literally everyone but the Brown Luchirp elf-dwarves I really wanted to kill I took it out instantly.  So now I'm going to have to beat up on the other major power bloc and possibly buy off the pirates (last time I checked with them it was costing me 200 gold for a 10 turn peace).  To make shit more interesting right before I saved for the night the fucking blight Armageddon event hit and my cities are all super fucked, dealing with that tomorrow.

Starting to read through manuals and such and learn to properly play this.  A few quick questions that will maybe help me out.  What should I look for in a starting city and how early should I worry about making settlers to make more cities and how many?

For starting location I just look for some place where I will have at least two resources that I can develop early like Wheat, cows, fish, gold, etc.  Rivers are also very good.  If I haven't found a decent site by turn three I just restart but that's rare.

Early game is all about the land grab so you want to build new cities as fast as you can without bottoming out your economy.  Each new city will incur maintenance costs that can cripple you if you go too fast.  I imagine strats differ more here but I will generally try and keep my cashflow in the black at around 70% research.  Another way to keep the costs down is to expand all around your capital instead of striking off in a particular direction.  Alternatively you can move your capital to a central location once you have most of your cities placed.

Food is vital in early game, along with commerce.  Focus on techs that will let you expand ASAP (agriculture for example).  Early land grab will complete set the stage for mid game; if you slack off on this you will have a much harder time surviving.

A river is ideal in most cases, though you can be strategic and use oceans affectively (especially if you are Lanun).  Heron Throne is good for an ocean starting strategy.

Generally I grab the basic techs then beeline towards whatever religion I decide would be effective.  Being the founder of a religion really pays the bills by end game along with mana bonuses!

Never used it. I've gone for continents the last couple games to get more war out of them, but traditionally I like islands (1 large per civ) with archipelagos and running naval/marine battles. In those games Privateers become some of the most important units in the game, and Lanun really has an edge with water walking.

For early land-grabbing, I look for food resources. If you can set up a couple really productive food cities to pump out settlers then workers, you can get a nice solid base set up and hopefully still have time for that second wave of settlers to grab more advanced resources/strategic points. My last game as the Clan was entirely set up by my food-based expansionism, plus rushing fishing because my capitol was built on a peninsula with four (!!) ocean food resources. Despite most of the rest of the peninsula being desert, the initial food producers plus a galley were the keys to setting up the later stages of the game.

I tried the Erebus type map this morning, I like the idea of it but I ended up in an almost unplayable position. Pretty much on a sizeable island, but is was largely desert, almost no resources anywhere. Not even fish on the coasts and a couple hill giant barbarians trapped with me wrecking anything that left a town.

The Erebus map routine seems to suck of late. I've had the 'zomg no resources' problem you mention.  I've also seen the blocked-in thing for the first time when I installed the M patch and tried Orbis a few months ago.   Plus on a few giant maps I've had only 8-10 mana nodes for the whole damn map.  Rites of Oghma gave a whopping additional 2.  :oh_i_see:  Ran a map using one of the vanilla civIV routines and there were a LOT more resources that were a little better distributed.

I've been running huge cold Pangea with low sea level and natural shorelines and its generated good games. Erebus is far too imbalanced in terms of starting location for my liking.

For two or three months last spring I was hosting an RP game of FFH2 with whatever CivFanatic people we could dredge up on their FFH IRC channel. The quality of the games ranged from mediocre to  :drill: :drill: :drill: . What was amazing was that, after a few weekends, we consistently managed to find nine or ten people to play in line with the fluff for their civ and religion choices - Clan of Embers players were hyper aggressive and preyed upon the weak, Elohim spread their cities across the world next to holy sites, and the Illians would brood in their northern wastes and generally act like has-been conquerers with chips on their shoulders. In short, it was awesome.

Unfortunately the game is extraordinarily poorly balanced, takes five or six hours to get going (hard to find that much time, even on a Sunday afternoon) and will invariably be dominated by "pave the world" types.

I generally play Pangea maps.  Currently running Mechanos civ.  Got the Sheim south of me, gonna invade them tonight and get some more sweet, sweet mana nodes to fuel my army of destruction!

Its going to be brutal, but if I can pull off the invasion will provide my frontline army with +4 strength (they have 4 mana nodes that I can see).   :drill: :drill: :drill:

playing Orbus this weekend.  Just terrific.

I'm not really thrilled with the Armageddon counter, all its done to me so far is delay my inevitable victory and drag out games.  If I can win a couple more in a row I'll move up from Monarch.

You can switch it off in the options when you start up a game. I generally turn the red dragon (Acheron) off because having it roost next to me is a pain. It's there for ages, making a dreadful noise, for an awful long time.

I have to RTM , but is it at a certain point that a bunch of all the other civs are suddenly supposed to always declare war on you?  That's happened to me in FFH2 and Orbus no matter my faction.

Some things trigger all-out war, yes.  Illians casting their world domination spell, trying to build the tower of mastery. (or rather, having all the towers so you CAN build it, it seems.)  Being the last evil bastard in a world of goody two-shoes seems to do it as well.

You probably are not maintaining a large enough military.  Even your friends will eventually declare war on you if the land you own are easy pickings.

I started a game as Sheaim now that I have the Steam version installed. I find that the second time I play a civ I have a bit better idea of what I'm doing, so this one has been wicked tough but much more fun. Went with the continents map with islands, got Bals, Illians and Calabim on mine. Shit economy because I was rushing for Ashen Veil, and just when I hit the point of researching Corruption, a great person showed up and gave it to me! My expansion was stunted, I got two cities and Archeron decided to move into my corner of the continent.

Then I did my old trick of isolating expansion from the other civs, I got lucky that Illians (at my southern end of the continent, in the west; south east corner is the dragon) were close by on the other side of a bottleneck, with their weak culture I've already flipped one. The Calabim and Balseraph are at the northeastern part of the continent. and I was able to barely rush to get a couple cities in the jungle there, securing the central continent for my expansion. I'm pretty sure Calabim is going to go to war, we literally had a race of settlers. I had dropped the two cities that would cut off the bottleneck and, being in a jungle, they didn't expand the culture border fast enough and he slipped a massive stack through. I barely got a city founded between a mountain range and lake without a single turn to spare.

And right about then I built Rosier, got a tar demon, and my army shifted its core from warriors to pyre zombies and diseased corpses, many of whom were vet warriors from the ridiculous amounts of barbarian generators all around me. Rosier is finally cleaning those out now, but sheesh. Slowed my workers, too, because all the workers needed warrior escorts and still had to run and hide from lizardmen and the stream of stacks of 4 orc axemen from multiple barbarian cities.

To echo what Ched is saying about military, Calabim shifted to war civics just before I cut off his expansion and he was sending a stack of axemen (whatever the 4str Calabim units are) to take out my two bottleneck cities in the jungle, which were defended by single warriors initially. Then Rosier and my zombie/corpse reinforcements showed up to bolster and he turned tail back into his territory. We're still Friendly, but I know what he's up to.

Civs get more aggressive as the armageddon counter goes up, especially vs. opposing alignments.

Decided to do something different with Patria.  Instead of doing a zerg city spread I am going to create a super city based on military happiness (the civic that gives +1 happy per troop).

Theory is I can pop settlers out lickety split by mid game and completely dominate.  I did build a second city to bottleneck the Mechanos civ south west of me; they started on an isthmus so cannot spread now.

Didn't have much time to play last night, but I noticed Calabim went all naval, a few triremes and galleys, and thought "Ah, shit, he's end-arounding my bottlenecking!"

Then I gained Optics and started work on my privateers while rushing some settlers up the land route I had lain in. I'm still stretched pretty thin, but I can see the way through if my workers can handle the massive jungle I inherited...and if Auric doesn't decide to bash down my back door. And if we can keep the goodies over on their continent and maybe buy Khazad out and send him after the goodies during the middle game.

Super city plan has gone riculously well.  Hit around 26 pop then zerged all the surrounding land.  Next goal will be building up those populations.

Originally I planned to offset my army of destruction with the money civic (unlimited merchants, +1 gold per specialist) but ended up switching to religion one (unlimited priests).  Still have plenty of cash rolling in plus huge production boost.

Going to try Clan next. Won my first Tower of Mastery victory with Elohim on Monarch. Had a hilarious sequence of finishing the Tower of Necromancy, getting attacked by Khazad + Basium, which would have been hard to hold off with the rest of the world also attacking, so did Sanctuary. Was able to take a few cities of other enemies while knowing I couldn't be invaded on my vulnerable frontier, was pulling 2k gold per turn so I had about 40-50 turns to survive to buy the Tower outright. When Sanctuary dropped, I sacrified the Elohim hero to force global peace. Had Birthright Regained in production before any of this started, so it was about 15 turns from completion when I forced peace. When peace ended, I fended off invaders on all boarders for five turns, finished Birthright Regained, hit my second Sanctuary, and there was nothing anybody could do about my completion of the Tower.

My Sheaim game is getting vicious. Keelyn went after Flauros, so I was bought a bit of time there. But I forgot privateers require a metal, and I've none. Since I'm ignoring the metals tree and have no copper, I'm kinda screwed. Keelyn at one point offered me some copper for death mana and all my treasury  :oh_i_see: I fought a named fire elemental from a dungeon...but not until he had lit the jungle on fire. Didn't notice it smoking until it caught fire and had spread smoke, but I made a nice fire break and now the jungle is burning down and new forest replacing it  :grin:

Auric went nuts with culture, when I finally got a caravel out exploring, he's only got three cities and some good resources. Might have to knock him off before he gets any more troublesome. 4 death nodes now, ready to start pumping out my death mage army and get to work, supported by those sweet demons from the planar gates.

Elohim is being a real bitch putting down the AC, it was low anyway (15) and she's got it back to 7, dammit. She's also rolling over her continent, so I've got to get my stuff together for the later stages of the mid-game. And Tsanuke as usual is pissed off and wants to kill everyone, no idea where he is, though. I love this mod.

Culturally stole Calabim's horses and traded them to Bals (who he's warring with) in return for copper, which allows me privateers to hound his fleet. I love passive aggressive war options, letting Bals get bled during the war effort to weaken Calabim for my invasion.

I think I like the continents map with islands turned on. You get nice localized intrigue without having to deal with a ton of civs all at once. There are two continents in our local group, with war raging on both, but separate. I just ran into the second continent group which is also warring, yet to explore the whole thing, though. So at least three separate mini-campaigns going on and about to ratchet up as we get more navies floating.

Patch N released, mostly bug fixes.  First post updated if you need the link.

Correction, it's the Hemispheres map with continents and islands. I had continents set to 2, but might try random.

Scions if easy mode if done right.  Going to try Illians next.

Was having fun with Clan--cleaned out an entire continent of factions early with two stacks of goblins before they bled me dry of money (goodie huts + graveyards + sacking other faction cities keeps the fires burning for a good while) so it was only five factions left when I got Bronze Working. Concentrated on money techs while I sent the Clan hero over to the empty huge continent which was now loaded with barbarian cities. Conversions galore. The only thing I didn't know was that at some point, the barbarians decide you're too civilized. This didn't happen until I'd flipped the whole continent, more or less, but it did lead to a really epic thing where the Clan hero was surrounded by a shitton of dispossessed barbarian troops out for vengeance against him, and he fucking killed every single one in a single turn of defending himself.

Unfortunately the surviving factions are relentlessly driving up the Armageddon Counter, so now the Wrath has appeared while I'm midway through crushing the Balseraphs. Most of my cities are pretty heavily defended and I have the Nexus, so I can load up heavily on D in a single turn if Buboes or Wrath show up on the horizon. But I don't have an endgame hero capable of taking them on, and also a lot of my units are scurrying around with the Wrath thing trying to kill leftover barbarian elephants and such.

Bals and Calabim got tired of my shenanigans and they made nice with each other and attacked me...when I rushed my troops to the border, Auric decided to invade my southern flank. Calabim had a sick army of summoners and Auric had been sitting back pumping out weenie units for years. Someone somewhere was keeping the AC too low for me to get much through my planar gates, and I had just started my future lich army (meaning I had a couple of crappy low level death adepts). I got totally smashed.  :awesome_for_real:

Using the same map format, I like it. Changed continents from 2 to random and upped civs to 13 total. Usually play random civ, got Bannor. Luchuirp are my neighbors, but there is a raging set of barbarians that have been slowing things down so far. Thanks to upgrades from defending my cities, I was able to grab Orthus' Axe pretty early on. Seems most of the civs have cast their world spells, the one that summons Mokka and the frostlings dropped a metric fuckton on our continent for some reason, luckily I had just parked some archers in my cities and converting to Order had given me a bunch of low level priests for some minor healing. When I next was able to scout the continent, there are at least four barbarian cities, luckily Archeron chose another home this time.

Beeri Bawl is getting pissed at my normal tactic of finding a choke point and dropping a city there, cutting him off from the majority of the continent (but also saving him from the barbarian ravages!). When they switch to the Warfare tactics, you know they're not happy. Pumping out tons of wood golems....so I just keep the trade open and gift him with techs, the short peace treaties you get when you make trades/gifts/demands has kept him pent up long enough to send a massive army of very upgraded archers and priests to the chokehold, not making the same mistake I did last game!

Khaldun - Clan are one of my favorites. Get your shamans leveled up and use the nexus to pwn. Clan is kind of weak end-game, but if you can get enough mana nodes you can go for my super mages of death strategy. Some like fire, I like death! With a few stoneskin ogres (or even summoned units if you pump their affinity high enough) to guard the mage/lich stack, it's all over but the cleanup on aisle 5. That's actually kind of how Calabim crushed my front lines, but with vampires rather than liches.

Buboes is max promoted and I can't do much besides pour defensive units into a city ahead of his attacks and let them absorb it. I keep trying to get some stoneskins and mages set up enough--I think maybe I'll go around and reset some of my nodes, maybe. When the Apocalypse hit, I lost all my promoted mages, which was painful.

This mod is extremely brutal but replayable.  I highly recommend Orbis.

Finally got the barbarian raids toned down a bit and sent my hero unit out to clean up the lairs (which is how I found the barbarian cities all over the damned place, I've never seen so many pop up so quickly). Then who does my galley run into on a scouting mission? Hyborem. What the hell is he doing on an empty continent in the early game? And he's got a whole gaggle of units, including several Champions that are almost as buff as my hero unit. But the big man himself, nothing I can really do about that now, and he's just sent a train of settlers out, ffs. Should be able to get up to a war footing pretty quickly, but with the amount of midgame units he has in the early game (with one city) and settlers he's sent out, he'll have half the continent before I can even start to retaliate.

How the heck did he show up? Crazy.

Buboes finally ate it when he had a couple of bad rolls against my alpha stack-guarded city. Still took three stoneskin ogres, Chalid Astrikein and an assassin to bring him down once he was wounded badly during the previous turn's attack. Then it was a race against Grigori to recolonize the continent that Buboes and the Avatar of Wrath had scoured clean, but I swarmed it with settlers and got a domination victory finally.

I managed to rush to Ashen Veil really quickly in one game with Lanun, going super-heavy on tech progress, and got Hyborem in the game when most civs were in their early development. But it's rare to see the AI do that.

Just lost one because the map was insanely wide open.  There were 2 civs on the coast myself (Illian) and Bannor along with two goods to my west.  I opted to kill off the kuriotates first, which was easy with Priests of Winter but he had built so many cities I wasted too much time.  Meanwhile I discover bronze and realize Bannor has it and he quickly goes to Axemen before I can come back and take it from him.  He expands out and had me at insane disadvantage.  Fucker.  I think my early tech order and handling of my first city did me in also I'm just not used to so much goddamn open land I must have changed my map setting and it caught me off guard in the actual game.

Ok, looking over the manual I guess he just spawns /somewhere/ when an npc civ gets to Infernal Pact. Maybe it just caught me off guard because it was nearby and I had already explored that area and knew it was empty of npc civ cities (except the mad barbarians, of course). Going to be a tough one.

Auric Risen or whatever is awesome.

60 Str hero unit? Supported by Druids and Priests of Winter?

GG Rival Civ.

Druids? Aren't they leaves religion units how did you get those just on the 10% chance of taking over defeated living units?

Nope.  Nuetral civs can build them.  The dwarf one is pretty sweet (Earth affinity) and the Scions of Patria (Orbis only) are insanely powerful.

I'm realizing that one reason I'm grooving on this expansion besides liking a lot of the elements it adds to Civ IV in terms of gameplay is precisely that the factions are so different, and that they didn't get too hung up on "balance". About the only weakness Civ IV has for me is that the factions are so blandly similar and that there is such care taken not to really make them be too much like their source culture. FFH2 factions are *really* different to play. Yes, some of them are absurdly easy to play once you get them figured out, others aren't, but it makes every game feel different beyond just the random map and placement on it.

(I use the Big & Small map always: I like the results better than Pangea, usually.)

Khaldun, that's exactly it. If the civs in Civ4 had the flavor the civs in FFH2 have, I might actually play it. I haven't played vanilla civ 4 since I played a single game when BtS was released. Before BtS (well, FFH2), I had sadly discounted the game as a vanilla game that didn't have much to pull me back to it. It was fun and replayable, but always felt so bland and unfinished. I think BtS finished it, more or less, but it was still bland.

So...loaded up my Bannor game last night, expecting the worst. I had the feeling I had when my Sheaim game hit the crux point. Bought some peace with Beeri by giving him some cheap techs, then BLAM great person shows up and we go into Golden Age #1. That finishes off Fanaticism, which is pretty great for Bannor. Pump out some settlers, confessors and archers and make a quick line in the sand in front of Hyborem. Still don't know that it will hold, but my production centers are up and running and I have access to units that can at least stall him when he gets around to invading, and it will stop the spread of hell terrain across the unsettled lands (which I'm about to settle post haste).

Also built a couple privateers, one to keep Beeri from landing a settler in the unsettled lands and another built for speed to circumnavigate. Again on the hemispheres map(islands, random continents), came across four or five more continents that were settled. All the good leaders jumped into the overcouncil and we all traded our techs with each other, bumped most of us ahead of the evils in the score list, the neutrals are doing well, too, though (12 AI civs). Signed a defensive pact with Beeri, unlikely he'll get invaded but I wanted an ace in the hole in case (inevitably) Hyborem invades me.

And depending on the balance of expansion/military production, I'll probably end up invading him with my crusaders rather soon.

You should really write this up as a radicalthon Sky, with pictures!

Eh, I'd have to think about it while playing. I write these up the next day at work :)

Took a break for a few days, some GTA4, some APB  :uhrr:, finished most of the trim staining for the living room, rewarded myself with a couple hours of FFH2!

Ok, so I should jumped on Hyborem when he first spawned and my first Order hero could take him. I forgot he's a hero unit and he leveled up to where I could maybe take him with my two Order heros, but would lose one. I thought I would nab some Paladins as backup at that point, so rushed for them (and Sphener!). Got Sphener, which is awesome because a) he's a great unit and 2) he can clean up any hell terrain that I gain from culture. Hyborem split the end up the continent, my Crusaders are split into two armies now, both fairly weak excepting Sphener.

So about shoring up Sphener with some paladins...yeah, I've got no iron. So I look around...NOBODY has iron. Well, three civs do. Two are evil and hate my guts. One neutral civ has two deposits...and isn't mining either! I was thinking about gifting him some techs when BAM, one of my mines discovers an iron vein. Woohoo! Paladins rolling out now, the Crusade is almost in place.

Next step is declaring on Hyborem and then building a navy to go visit Os-Gabella. Fight her over there, so she doesn't come over here!

I was really kicking ass at my game last few turns because of Auric Risen and his 40%-100% Snowfall spell just wrecking anything.

Killed off the nearby continent and basically doubled my land mass, but had enough gold tech to keep myself positive while this rolled out.

Then as I started to take over some of the lose island civs with Auric (flying ftw), I lost the game.

Hell ftl :(

My games are always epic because I turn off all victory conditions except conquest :) There can be only one!

Doing a Bannor game on Emperor. Basically I'm finding that if I can get Pact of the Nilhorn + Guild of the Nine it's close to fucking game over for the AI players. Nilhorn is early or nothing, but if you get it, you are almost guaranteed to be able to absolutely nuke the shit out of your closest neighbors--the three giants once they're promoted a bit are as devastating in the early game as Auric is in the late game. The only challenge is to get gold techs fast enough to keep up with your conquests, but it just so happens that along the way to doing that  you can pick up Guild of the Nine usually. This time the only surprise so far was that the dark elf lady got together a respectable fleet of trieremes while I was mopping up barbarian cities on my large continent and then managed to seduce Khazad in the south of that continent to join in an attack on me (I was best buddies with Khaz before he attacked). Wasn't really ready for that and had to fall back a bit to consolidate an alpha attack stack. But they didn't have enough to hammer down archer-defended cities, so they only made a bit of a bite in--and then I got Fanaticism and the crusade began. After the dust settled, I went poking around the rest of the map almost hoping that there was a big evil empire out there that had taken advantage of the distraction to grow, but there's just the Malakim over in one corner diddling along.

This thread made me reinstall Civ 4 and installing the mod. Are there any decent starter guides out there ? This seems to be a lot more difficult than vanilla Civ4.

Definitely more of a learning curve, there's still a lot I need to learn. Check out civ-specific stuff at the civfanatics forum for FFH2, the manual isn't bad for learning some concepts, the civopedia isn't too bad. Between those you can get most things figured out after a while. Best just to jump in and try to learn one civ at a time, each plays differently.

I found out a nifty trick last night - Sphener has a spell to quell unhappiness in whatever city he is in, for as long as he's there. I had him clean up a barbarian city at the outskirts of my empire and decided to see what that spell would do on a freshly captured barbarian city. Quelled the unrest and popped the border out to 1 square wide without the intervening time normally needed. Nice! Not sure if it sticks when he leaves, have to play around with that.

Anyway, you have to watch out for out of date info, but start here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=222845 and that subforum in general.

I did a few games without going for pact of the nilhorn. It seems to be a bit of an early game cheat mode.
I only went for crusade recently, got a bit of a surprise with 113 units extra all of a sudden. That's a lot of extra work. I only did a few turns but am I right in assuming the crusaders don't heal?
As to healing the ent hero, I think he's called Yvain, you get while going through the hippie/elf path has a heal stack spell that doesn't seem to work. Is that a bug?

Crusaders upgrade to paladins, but champions upgrade to four or five high end units so you'd want a few crusaders for heals and the rest in champions. 

Confessors are a better upgrade to Paladin imo. I've let them auto-level a while, grab some priest upgrades, then pick the best four to make paladins. The crusaders are just my freebie town guards, they spawn within a turn or two of making a new city in my current game. Building paladins or upgrading crusaders misses several free levels confessors bring to the table, especially if your troop town has the Altar (mine has lvl 2).

Totally crushed the shit out of Hyborem with a three stack death punch, a hero + confessor + paladin with a few crusaders for insurance, had arbalest guarding the towns on the border. Popped Sphener in to quell rebellion the same turn I took his towns, sad and quick end to the demonic infestation. Up next, Ride of the Nine Kings finished in my troop production town, so the army moves on to Os-Gabella with some badass Knights riding along. Or at least whoever has the closest vein of mithril.

This is true. With 10% conversion chance upon defeating a unit and medic promotion, Confessor > Paladins is much better. On one game I managed to convert that Ember Priest who could spam fire ring and turned him immediately into a Paladin.  :grin:

I've been playing as the Lanun, and the Pirate sea-faring coastal city style really appeals to me. You can dominate a continents map by setting up tons of Pirate raiding ships, and your unique abilities make sea tiles even more profitable than land tiles. It's tons of fun to tool around the early game kicking ass with a STR 10 heroic ship that can rule the waves.

Don't forget to blockade everyone's ports once you've weakened their navy. The trickle of money from each port can really add up, and it's income you can get if you're shut down economically by revolution.

The sound effect for earning money was killing me when you have multiple ports blockaded... wish it would just play it once.

True. One game I had so many ports blockades my turn would end before they finished listing them.

Is my game bugged? As far as I can tell, for Domination Victory I just need 30% world population and 62% land ownership.

I have 87% world population, and like 64% land ownership, but it doesn't give me the win :(

Maybe?  I'd wait a bit and grow my culture a bit.  Generally for me it takes 64% land to trigger.

My game is def. bugged.  Made all other civs capitulate or eliminated them (one of them still shows up on the leaders list but has no units and no cities).  Still no victory.  I want my Win points. :(

Hey look at that, first time I'm getting somewhere at monarch.
Then this guy shows up. Any advice on dealing with these oversized critters?

Fireballs and a leveled up hero.

It turns out he wasn't much of a problem after all because he seemed happy with one conquered city so I had ample time to ship an army back to the mainland and kill him. I tried to capture him but apparently he doesn't count as a beast.

Could anybody explain how to combat inflation? I conquered my continent but I'm afraid that in doing so I've over-extended my empire. More than 50% of my expenses is categorised as inflation and I'm going bankrupt because of it.

Winter and Summer Palace improvements.  They work just like the regular palace for corruption control, but I think they have a smaller radius.  If you built them too early, you're screwed and will have to rely on just your courthouses.

As for those named ape/ lion/ whatever beasties I'm pretty sure they're still animals but you just can't capture them.

Yeah, focussing on money making buildings and courthouses/palaces balanced my finances out after a while. It still crippled me for 50 turns or so.
I think I need to raze cities more. 25 cities of which 10 were new put me down hard in this game.

Probably a dumb question, but what does it mean when units have 2 numbers under their strength?  For example, my archer units had 4/5.  I looked in the manual, and searched around CivFanatics, but couldn't find an answer.

I could be wrong (haven't seen it comfirmed, this is just my impression) but I think it's offensive/defensive strength.  For example, your Archers essentially act as if they have strength 4 if they're attacking something else and strength 5 if something else attacks them.

This is correct.

Not in the manual because it's a mechanic from vanilla civ, the player is assumed to know vanilla civ when reading the manual.

Vanilla civ scrapped offense/defense to the best of my recollection. I know it was a mechanic in 3, but it wasn't in release of 4.

Yeah it was added back into 4 by FfH and many other mods, because defensive-focused units are kind of important!

Yeah, forgot about that. I also forget that I had completely stopped playing Civ4 when Ched turned us on to FFH2. Even at that early stage of development it was so superior to Civ4.

That's my main trepidation about Civ5, I really didn't like Civ4 at all until Kael 'fixed' it.

Original Civ 4 just had nothing to make it stand out. All the civilizations were interchangable to the point of bland. All religions were meaningless beyond just having one. All the buildings were the same for every culture. They essentially tried to create a game about world domination under the rules of political correctness and wound up with something bland and repetetive.

My guess is that if they listened to their fans at all, or noted what was good / bad about their approach, they will have civilations with much more diversity and flavor. I want playing as the Russians to feel significantly different than playing as the Mayans. Also, have the balls to make religions actually mean something. The Total War games managed to do it without pissing people off, so sack up.

I don't hold much hope for that. My biggest hope for Civ5 is that Kael changes his mind and makes FFH3 for it :)

Well they are adding hexes, so my guess is that aren't trying to dumb the game down further. I think they learned the lesson that going for homogonization and simplicity wasn't doing them any favors.

I think they're just cutting religion entirely for Civ 5?

Sort of. They are in favor of a deeper social policies system. However, I think they have religious options within the system. How deep that goes, nobody knows.

From everything I have seen, your guess is wrong.

Call it more of a wishful dream, then. The more I read into it, the more I get the feeling that I'm wrong as well. This quote was from one preview:


So in the same statement you tell me that religion and espionage got cut, but most changes are about convenience and not cutting?  :uhrr:

Because there aren't many people buying Civ?  :oh_i_see:

I wish they'd stick to the fork: a console-based 'accessible' version (ported to the pc for 'new' audiences) and a traditional pc version that gets more complex each iteration, rather than the reverse.

There are plenty of neckbeardy war games out there so they don't need to take it too far. However, it seems like they have all these great ideas for new features, but they never flesh them out completely. The modders seem to have no problem taking that leap, however.

My take *cough (http://n3rfed.blogs.com/n3rfed/2009/10/in-which-i-briefly-return-from-work-and-twitter.html)* is that Firaxis is going for adding a lot more CivRev to Civ 5 - elimination of stacking, elimination of religions, elimination of espionage, and from screenshots, it looks ilke using CivRev's model of autobuilding roads.

I strongly suspect I will continue playing (heavily modded) Civ 4 when Civ 5 comes out and that they're OK with that - Civ 4 is for the hard core and Civ 5 is for the 'casuals'. And CivRev is for... uh... consoles!

I'm definitely not neckbeardy or hardcore, ffs.

The more I read about Civ5, the more underwhelmed I become. Kael really beat them up and took their lunch money, now they hide from complex games in the shallow end of the strategy game pool.

Thinking about this, I really have to disagree. You think they're ok with abandoning their prior playerbase? I know you're rolling in Lumbux and will but Civ 5 anyway, but for the poor huddled masses, I'm leaning towards this being the first Civ I don't buy on release (ok, Civ 1 I didn't get at release, but I did play the DOS version first!). Dumbing the game down is just shitting on almost two decades of loyal fans, Civ 4 was enough of a slap in the face with a limp vanilla something or other, the first lame expansion and then finally BtS made it somewhat decent, if not flavorful at all.

Right now it's looking like waiting until Lum or Ched find the new mod hotness a year or two after it's released.

To me it always comes down to, "What are they adding?"

The answer so far seems to be hexes. That's all I can really make heads or tails of when I look at the corporate speak. That ain't enough for $50, sorry.

I guess my current pessimistic view is "What are they taking away?"

Honestly I'm excited about the lack of unit stacking. Making war was always very frustrating because both sides needed to field tons and tons of units. Now, each individual unit will mean more because you will be able to field fewer overall units.

It's a shame they didn't man up and just flesh out each available religion to be distinct; instead, they're pussing out and just scrapping them. Losing espionage sucks too. Hexes, meh, I don't really care one way or another.

Sucked back into FFH2 for another game. Since I've been doing Hemispheres lately, I decided to change back to my old Islands setup with a twist. My traditional setup is Islands, archipelago, lots of tiny islands and one large per civ. This time I went for more small islands and more large islands than civs, to provide a couple battlegounds to fight over that weren't a home territory, naval supply chains, etc.

Though I then got Elohim and with my jamming research I was rushing magery which of course gives you the Nexus. I'm contemplating removing the Nexus and Obsidian Gates from the game, they're just too unbalancing. Not quite "I win", but Lanun should be dominating this particular layout. Of course, once I actually clash with them it could get interesting because they are in a position of power in any situation where I don't have a beachhead and establishing beach-heads on the far side of the globe (where Lanun is) will eventually play some havoc with the economy...

Does anyone else name their units? I don't name them all, but most of my more adventurous stock units I like to name. I feel it adds a lot when it's the Flying Dutchman rather than a generic Privateer that's sailing the seven (or twenty) seas.

I started naming my units a few months ago. It started out as a boon for a winning a totally hopeless fight or surviving a gruesome siege. Plus all the units in my aventuring party (the entourage of my exploring heroes). Those are individual names. Then I started naming arcane units according to their position (defensive buffers vs Combat Spellslingers). Still flavoured to the particular civs. Amurite Witchdoctors would be quite out of place. Those are job titles and sound accordingly boring.

I wasn't even aware that was an option. That would make it a hell of a lot easier to track everything in late game. I have been using the BAT mod in BTS civ the past week; it numbers each unit as it is built, so at least you can tell which ones have been around a long time. Crossbow 1 was a beast in my last game  :grin:

Now you can name him Frank.

For some reason I was just in the mood to start a Hippus game. I think my slightly turtley Elohim game spurred the want of a mass of horsemen sweeping across the plain.

Started a Big and Small map, snaky continents with lots of interspersed islands. Rushed Animal Husbandry while my scouts went looking for some horses (well, revealing map at this point). Netted THREE settlers from natives! Aaannd, no horses except for one past a choke point. And I mean none other, I had a few turns where I was just pumping out scouts because rushing AH and then horse techs doesn't give much to build, seven civ's worth of snaky continents and not another damn horse.

So I decided to get radical and restart the game (I always make a save on turn 1 - Hippus Start). And move my entire civ over to where those horses were. AND I got the three settlers from natives again, along with a worker and some cash to pay everyone until I could build my capital on turn 15 or so. Popped my three cities across the bottleneck, containing Malakim as the only civ behind me, and first on the list for the hordes to roll over.

Also decided on a new strategy for the bulk of the horse, giving them the withdrawal bonus, since it was already pretty high and I can pump a bunch out to overwhelm. I really wish I had a couple priest units to take care of the damaged units, but I'm hoping for a numbers victory, since I'm still light on building options (rushing horse archer) but have a pretty decent (new) starting position.

Its been a while since I played the Hippus last, but don't they get Horses from their Palace?

My first Hippus game. I think you're right.


 :oh_i_see: :uhrr: :grin:

Hippus bonus resource is horses.  :D

 :-)  yes, Hippus get horses automagically, no need to find.  That there were no horses was actually a pretty big advantage in that game.

I love the Hippus.  Hit and run / high mobility is just fun.  I find it fairly important to use the Pact of Nilhorn cheese though (highly mobile seige for the win!).  A pack of two of upgraded horse archers before anyone else has anything decent is Mongol-horde good.  Made me realize that always upgrading with strength wasn't a good idea (first strike and flanking also for the win!).

I've always been a first strike fan, so this is some new stuff. I also LOVE commando, using enemy roads is huge. Got into that with my stoneskin ogres in a clan game and they just stomped the shit out of people but were able to get away from any real opposition.

I also use first strike for my naval war vessels, but have always used flanking for my non-war navy, mostly because that leads to mobility for naval units, but the flanking is also really nice for both transports and explorers. I'm also lazy with naval techs and tend to use the middle-of-the-road privateers for just about everything. They're pretty flexible depending on promotions and configuration. Can be set up for decent mobility or 3 cargo or good first strike/combat, can stand up to anything until real warships hit the seas later on.

The best min-max promotions in terms of bang for the buck, in order, for melee units:

Combat 1 + Combat 2 + Combat 3
(Cannibalize here if an undead unit)
Drill 1 + Drill 2 + Drill 3 + Drill 4 + Drill 5
(Blitz here if a mobile unit)
Combat 4 + Combat 5
You're now effectively unkillable, go nuts with everything else.

The Drill line is how heroes can defend against 30 cannon fodder a turn and survive. First strikes cannot be overestimated. The first 3 combat levels is so you have a good chance of killing equal or lesser units outright with your first strikes. Since the AI relies on overwhelming masses of units during attacks, this will keep your experienced high value units alive and also earn them tons of XP for more promotions. A hero with Drill 5 is your best shot at killing insanely tough units like Acheron if you don't have 30 catapults handy.

With Divine units I like to get the conversion promotions and healing promotions first since they're usually utility rather than direct combat, and having a Medic 3 in your stack helps a ton with keeping attacks rolling. High ranks of conversion are helpful (especially vs assassins as they will aim for the lowest strength unit which is the cannon fodder you just converted) and on upgraded classes like Paladins they can be devastating. And of course conversion on a hero like Chalid or Sphener can be a game winner by itself.

With Arcane units it's simple. First 4 mages: Death 1 - Death 2 - Death 3 - turn into lich.  Now you can have 8 archmages instead of 4.

Have you ever gotten the Baron rolling in a game?  I always lose him at some point, and the werewolves themselves frequently become a liability.  In terms of flavor, they are awesome, as something to actively try to work with as a powerhouse, I haven't had much luck.

Just thought of something - if you move a werewolf onto the border of a npc that you'd like to take down a peg or two, and wait till the werewolf goes rogue, I wonder if it would be a decent disruption.  Lacking the ability to heal it, it seems like it wouldn't (again, seems like a large amount of setup for very little payoff).

I found werewolves/ the Baron to be best when combined with the Svaltfar's trait spell that grants hidden nationality.  Then I can just feed him stray units to produce werewolves at a whim.  Just be sure to stay out of striking range of cities who then pummel his ass into the ground.  Bonus if you can get a black mirror on him, too.

By the time the Baron comes rolling out he's really outclassed by other units. I think he should probably have the Hero promotion so he can passively gain XP. That would make him considerably more survivable given when he appears.

Along that line, I feel the same way about Orthus. What was once a society-ending terror is now a joke and free +1 fire item.

I restarted the Hippus game for the third (and final!) time, since I was edumacated about free horses.  :oh_i_see: Much quicker start, but the barbarians and animals are really much tougher in my original starting point. My scouts can't get past a pack of polar bear who apparently subsist on scout flesh alone. Also got workers instead of settlers from the locals this time around, I'm guessing it has to do with placing your capital (or not - giving you a chance if your  founding settler gets offed, maybe).

Anyway, I wasn't surprised when Orthus showed up right next to my fledgling town I set up on my far western border to keep a check on Malakim. I wrote the town off: no palisade, single lvl1 warrior (though with commando and combat I from Tasunke). They beat Orthus and my first horseman has a shiny axe to grind on barbarians.

There's got to be a happy medium for Orthus, he should've been able to take that town easily, maybe grab a Malakim town. Cause a little drama on the border, give each civ a chance to passive-aggressively redraw the border by regaining the conquered towns.

So are we going to make the FFH3 mod for civ5? :P

Orthus is a bitch once he levels up some.  Also, Orcs will tag along with him on his rampages; if you can nail him early its not bad - but give him 20 turns and ouch.

No FFH for Civ5 - see my first post.

:why_so_serious: :drill: :ye_gods:

Feeling inspired by Sky I, too, started a Hippus game since it's one of the factions I've never seriously played.

I wound-up behind a barrier of mountains in the south east corner of the map on a peninsula barely large enough for 4 cities.. if it wasn't littered with mountains.  Fuck you Erebus algorithm. Fuck. You.  Time to restart on the plains or something.

I've never done the Erebus map. Been experimenting with new map types a lot, though.

Hippus is definitely badass in the early game. My horse archers just rolled over Malakim in three turns, ffs. I had beefed a few of them up on barbarians, and the one with Orthus' Axe is basically a hero unit at this point. Going to keep that vanguard rolling and see how far I can conquer before it stalls out.

Only worry is the AC, since I'm razing as I go :)

I usually go Honor with Hippus.  Try hard to get Ride of the Nine Kings.  At that point, you can be wherever their armies aren't.  If they are too built up in one area and it's hard to flank/hit and run, move in Chalid and obliterate them.

Yeah, I was thinking of heading there for Valin Phanuel (mounted hero). Chalid is Empyrean, though.

Regrouping after the rush to horse archers, research-wise. Filling in a few builder techs and whatnot. Then I need to rush warhorses for both Ride and the Hippus hero. Guild of the Nine could be good, too. That could work with Order pretty well, too, given the trick I learned with Sphener in my last Bannor game. Take the city, send in Magnadine and Sphener, use Sphener to quell resistance and pop a 1-tile radius, hire some mercs that gain loyalty from Magnadine, roll on with the conquest...

If we're talking tactics has anyone ever had the fun of playing Balseraphs and using Loki to sidle into a city without culture and just... take it?  Probably only possible during the start of a game when culture is low, but very effective  :grin:

Soln, that is essentially the way I play Balseraph.  It works right away on any new city, where you are in the game isn't important.  It works after a couple of turns on relatively new cities, as long as the owning NPC faction doesn't have a prestige bonus.  Your main research lines need to be economic and the rush to the pyre ghouls (which are just over powered).

Sky, Empyrean = Honor.  Valin is from the more militant "good" faction, if I'm remembering properly.

Oops, my mind saw Honor and subbed in Order. That would also change my religion to Good. Hrm.

Bals culture bombing is great. It's hard to understand why there aren't more devs cribbing what Kael did, most factions have such distinct styles, and so many are a lot of fun, especially when meshed with other factions trying to do their thing. Not balanced, but when the fuck did balance matter? Especially now with most fps games putting in imbalance via "rpg" mechanics.

I agree, for a single player games balance should always take a back seat to flavor and diversity.  Not a "back of the bus!" back seat, but don't pull stuff from the game that is different or cool just because it's hard to balance.

For multiplayer games that aren't trying to do eSport, I'd say the same thing.  Just put metrics into the game that make it clear what the relative power levels are of abiliites, classes, factions, etc.  Then make the getting of the "achievement" awards scale based upon the relative power of the X that you are using.

I had that barbarian guy spawn next to a town, and he then mowed through all of my cities in short order.  What's the recommended garrison+buildings?  I figure a couple warriors and a palisade might do the job?

I had a single warrior in a brand new town (still building its palisade). Because I'm Tasunke, he had combat 1 and commando, and he barely lived. The first strike is probably what saved him.

Unless they toned him down in a way I don't know about, Sky was very, very lucky.

Usually if you have 3 warriors and a palisade you can count on being able to withstand an attack.  But he's a bit more intelligent now and won't just continue attacking, if one particular assault results in him having a decreased amount of health, he'll move off to heal. You need to finish him off at this point.

That WAS my plan, too.  But of course I wound-up with the Scions of Patria  right next door.  Hard to kill a civ that gets +50% vs Horsemen so easily with horses.   :heartbreak:  I've managed to contain them from expanding beyond their first city but I'm spending too much time producing axemen to actually take them out.

I lost my Civ discs during a recent move so I just bought the game. Sounds like a lot has changed in the past  yr or so since I've played it.  I think someone  earlier in this thread mentioned a new civ?

edit: nm  I have everything installed now and I don't see a new one. I guess I just misread the comment.

There is a new Civ (Civ 5) in development, it's not yet ready for purchase.

Decided to keep the steamroller running, crushed the svalts who had hunters as their top unit. They had a number of them, and I took a couple losses, one of which I was kinda bummed about, a horseman who had explored a dungeon and came out an enraged demon unit, the unit graphic changes to a skeleton on a black horse. He then went rampaging through the countryside, his rage was triggering pretty good but kept expiring when he attacked svalt workers. One tense moment when a barbarian giant walked past him, but he moved on before they engaged.

That's the kind of flavor I love about FFH2, took a fairly ordinary invasion and gave it a much more interesting and cool angle. The horseman who got Orthus' Axe I upgraded to horse archer before my initial attack on Malakim, I mentioned he's become pretty much a hero unit at this point..I named him Horthus.  :oh_i_see:

I foresee the end of Cassiel next, but it's going to be tough, he's pretty well-entrenched in a larger empire. Then the Clan, which should be a bit easier. Then I think I'm stalled at Luchuirp, they've already built Barnaxus. I doubt I'll have Magnadine by then. But I'll have conquered about 1/3rd of our massive continent.

I was playing as Hippus, had a horseman running around hitting dungeons, and one of them did the demon thing Sky mentioned to my poor horsie.  When I got control back, horsie was standing on top of a shiny new axe.

Overran the pack guy fairly easily, started a war with Luchuirp via the wedding gift thing, and I'm slowly chewing through them.  Magnadine is popped, and ready to go.

I'm playing so aggressively this game that for once having an uncontrollable unit wreaking havoc in the middle of the map is pure awesome. Was :( I found myself hoping he'd enrage after every combat, and was bummed he kept running into workers that exhausted his rage when he converted them. I do have a hell of a workforce now, though. Lots of pillage to pay them, too.

Ugh, booting up now.  Scion of Patria here I come!

Is everyone playing FFH or Orbis? 

Orbis here, feels more roleplayish to me due to more explorables.  :awesome_for_real:

Still haven't cracked Orbis yet.

Rolled over another Doviello who had a stunted start behind the Svalts. Some decent units, though...good promotions with few losses. I think Cassiel got too tough in the interim, I think the early game is about over and time to start consolidating my massive empire and figure out how I'm going to survive the rest of the game...

FFH, so many other things to play lately that I haven't looked at Orbis yet either

Running into a cash crunch now. The initial plan was to throw out a frontier to cut off Luchuirp expansion and simultaneously back fill the region around my capital. I moved so quickly that I left the south and southwest portions of my starting area unsettled (barbarian fodder for new units rolling out of my production cities). Last night I pretty much completed the frontier and some of the backfilling, but I'm in a serious money crunch. Rushing for Warhorses hasn't helped at all, even at 70% tech - and now 60% tech/10% culture for the frontier pops - I'm bleeding about 90gp/turn. When I was steamrolling, I was making a nice bit of dough from Raiding and mostly razing towns as I rolled over them. Still have about 2k gp in the treasury, but it's bleeding pretty good.

The next phase of the initial plan was to catch up on money and arcane techs and start round two of the steamroller supported by mages with all the nodes I've captured. Now it looks like I might just build my hero unit and try to grind through Luchuirp who has also been over-extending in a frontier rush when he saw me doing the same, might be my key to victory. Also, I'll have two true hero units (got the RoK hero, too) and two horse archers (Horthus and Mongo) who may as well be heroes at levels 10 or 11 each, Horthus has four items as well. I think Luchuirp only has Barnaxus for hero units. He's rolled out some champs and archers, so it could grind down my army pretty well.

Forgot to mention I steamrolled Cassiel, well, just because I could :) He pulled the pitiful 'send out a zillion settlers' trick, every time I thought I had finished him off, no death quotes...send out more horsemen to scout and find his little pop 1 towns in the jungle. Blah.

I've been playing using the Wild Mana addon. Orbis hasn't been updated in a while and the author said he's just going to do a new one for Civ 5 instead. Wild Mana has a greatly improved AI (some of which has been rolled into FFH) and has some automation features for mages (set your nature priests to auto-plant trees!). The improved AI *WILL* kick your ass. I play it a notch below what I usually do (Prince) and get my ass handed to me regularly. My last game, AI Calabim was pinned in an area below me, then came knocking with a scarily well put together force of vampires, archers, and catapults. My death was quite swift.

I was roundly trounced when I tried Warlord difficulty.

If Calabim end up next to me, I just restart now. I have no idea how to stop them.

I hate me some Calabim. Should try to play them next!

Their tech develops slowly due to the lack of elder council.  I believe that the game cheats a bit to make them competitive.  When you get the bloodsuckers rolling, they become very powerful.

It's been awhile since I've played Civ/FFH, so I'm still playing at the default difficulty (chieftain?). I'm not sure why playing as Malakim is so much easier than Capria/Bannor. I guess because I'm too passive/aggressive.


I don't know why, but I never had too much difficulty before with the Calabim. My main threats (I usually play as Bannor or Malakim) have usually been: Viconia, Hippus, and the Evil Clowns Whose Names Escape Me At the Moment :p. As I say that, I can't think of a time when the Calabim came after me with vamps. At most I had to kill the hero over and over again.

That would be the Balseraphs.

Their hero Loki is incredibly powerful in the early game. Leave a cheap unit/captured animal as a scout at your neighbours border to keep an eye out for settlers. Once you spot one, send in the clown and flip the new city. Leaving your neighbours pinned down in their capital surrounded by their former colonies now under your control.

Mimics (swordsmen, I think) steal promotions from defeated units. It's not uncommon for a high level mimic to have so much promotions (20+) you can't see his stats anymore. If you fight spellcasters your mimics will  be able to cast the stolen spells.
I usually use cheap warrior units in the arena until they survive 3 or 4 times and then upgrade them to mimics. Once the promotions start rolling in a stack of these mime playing, sword wielding, spellunking irritants becomes nigh unstoppable.

Never really paid attention to what difficulty level I played on before, I've been on cheftain  :oops: I usually play for more of a simciv empire building thing, but I've become more comfortable with FFH2 (at least with about a third of the civs, heh). Seeing as I was talking about a new Calabim game (my first!), I decided to start that game at Warlord.

Thus far the main difference for me has been the barbarian spawn. There are waaay more barbarians pouring out of the lairs, every five turns or so. Luckily, I knew there would be some more (but not that many!), so I'd beefed up on bloodpets (warriors). Having a scout retreat to my second town before the palisade was up saved it, two warriors got killed by the constant two-punch of skeletons and lizardmen; two skeleton spawns and a lizard spawn right outside its borders, no units tough enough to clean them out.

Same situation on the other side with my capital, a few skeletons and a lizardman every five turns or so. And then I find a barbarian town about eight tiles away. And then Archeron decides it would make a nice cozy place to hang out. Again, no units tough enough to clean it up before he moves in. So...now I'm also dealing with four orc spearmen every now and again, too.

Pushed for my vampires, though. They're not /too/ deep in the tech chain and after grabbing Agriculture right off the bat, I was set up for a Agristocracy. Combine that with Flauros' financial trait, and we're supporting all those bloodpets, able to expand decently and still 100% research. Got my first vampire, quickly ate some population and set out to clean up all these damned barbarian spawns. Within a couple turns I already have a str5 unit with regeneration, haste and death 2. Slowed my start, I know of about half of the dozen civs on the map, and I'm second-to-last...but that's about to change pretty quick.

Not sure which religion to go with, though. Don't like AV, and all the others except Order and maybe Esus have been founded. Maybe Esus? Or Order could be funny, Good Vampires!

Since you rushed to vampires you don't need religion, it's a distraction to you at this point, especially since you have Flauros (you don't need the econ benefit from having the religion founding city).

That said, if you play them again I find that the forest religion or the cthulhu religion have nice synergies with the vampires.

That was my thinking. I was just considering priest units, but since Vamps have regen...

I have two religions sprouted in my empire already, I've declined to make either my state, having no state religion thus far. My main decision factor was having Governor's Manors and not wanting the happy face. MORE SAD FACES! Bleed and cry, peasants.

Dammit guys.

/loading Wildmana.

Having Ashen Veil / Deep is good research booster that you wouldn't want to waste though.

Order is actually a good synergy for Calabim. You can bite the Order knight hero (the name escapes me) and turn him into a vampire, and you get basilcas which help a lot in keeping your teeming cities rolling.


Really though - just research up to vampire lords, then you are (literally) unkillable.

Vampire Lords + Nexus :drill: :drill:

In my sole Calabim game I just called it a win at that point and started a new one.

I'd say Nexus is one of the only things I don't like about FFH2, it's just way too overpowered. Pretty much any game you build the nexus is over at that point unless you really fuck up.

Wow, the rush to vampire and early barbarian onslaught really stunted my start. Then Khazad did some culture bomb on my border and took about three or four tiles width of the border from me. Bastard! My only option is to settler rush the jungle and hope to nab up a few more towns from the elves and tech asap to vampire lords. Khazad (or course) already has some seriously badass iron axemen that might actually lay a hurt on my three vamps, he's obviously working the metal techs.

Right now it's balancing a settler rush vs making some workers to improve my farmlands to boost populations for vamp food vs making combat units to survive long enough to get vamp lords. Meanwhile my cities are under-improved because they've been making so many units they haven't had time to build many beneficial buildings. Also low on workers due to the early barbarian infestation - I barely made it through the first 100 turns with all my cities intact mostly pumping out bloodpets. Whew.

Still, barring a serious attack from Khazad I should be able to turn it around once I have enough army to go on full offensive....Warlord is a lot more stressful than Chieftain was, but also a lot more fun. Every couple turns it's like "NOW what?" as some new threat turns up. Seems like a good balance of more difficulty vs not having to use game cheese to win. I don't mind a challenge but I hate metagaming and game cheese.

This is me as well.  My experience is that the Prince level was as high as I could go without going, "what?! NO FUCKING WAY YOU LEGITIMATELY GOT THAT YOU COCKSUCKER!!!".  At that point the game stops being fun for me.

As Calabim, you definitely don't want to skimp too much on workers or the basic city improvements (granary, breeding pool and smokehouse) because you need your cities to grow quickly to feed your vamps.  (I think you realize this, but I like to watch myself type).

Paelos, I do the same thing with Calabim that I do with Belseraph if they start next to me - build 9 or 10 warrior-class units and go on the offensive (and hope they aren't doing the same thing and hope I don't get screwed by the RNG).  Unless you have a really good starting position (and they have a bad starting position), I find that it's really hard to SimEmpire them into the ground.

I also made the mistake of trying to consolidate my position on two fronts by expanding both ways, Khazad is on a dead-end. I should've expanded into the jungle and let Khazad build up his towns for me to take over :) But if I lose, it's from what you mention Typhon, the workers. Not being able to keep my workers alive for more than basic roads and a few resources, as well as not having archery to chop down forests...that put a hurt on my city sizes. I'm trying to bridge that gap in vamp power by cleaning up the barbarians. These next 50 turns will pretty much decide whether I survive, thrive, or get utterly crushed.

And all that isn't addressing Archeron who is about a dozen tiles from my capital. :)

Khazad culturally stole two of my cities, dammit. One didn't hurt much, since it was a barbarian city I had just taken. The other one I Feasted down to 2 pop, but it still hurts a bit to lose it when I had only a handful of cities. Didn't help that we were under goddamned Stasis, so I was unable to counter whatever culture bomb he was using.

Understanding a bit more about the vamps, I think I might reroll on the same map and try a different strategy, rush farms and mining (for cutting down forests), maybe construction to extend farms...THEN rush the vamps.

It's a balancing act.  You definitely need to tailor your actions based upon your starting location with the Calabim, as they are 'weak' early on unless you're dealt a nice starting area.

I've had luck with your suggested strategy, but I find that you have temper that based upon those around you.  Sometimes the starting conditions just dictate that you have to churn out a dozen warriors and stomp on someone early and then build up infrastructure and THEN push for vamps.

When that is the case, it may be necessary to tech up a religion. THAT being the case, the easiest religions to tech up that you'll have synergies with are forests and cthulhu (the others have more steps in between and earth mother doesn't really have synergies).

All that babble I just wrote is yet another reason why I think this game is so great - at higher difficulty levels you can't just say, "I'll do X, Y and Z".  You often (especially with higher difficulty) need to say, "can I do X, Y and Z?  Hmm, Balseraph, no, I need to do Y, W, X and then Z".   There are some races were that is less important, but they play so differently that it's not a big deal.

Man, I love this game, but I've always played it on either the hardest difficulty or second hardest (the absolute sea of barbarians generated at the highest difficulty can get a bit aggravating).  Anything down lower is just to easy once your good at the game.  Theres just more re-playability for me when I'm struggling to keep up with the PC civs.

Turn 485. My army is parked next to the Ljosalfar capital. My Chalid Astrakein has aoe'd the entire stack of defenders into pulp. All defending units are still alive but they have very little strength left. I can't see how many defenders there are, the stack is too big but it's mostly tigers and priests of the leaves.

I finish my turn and go afk.

30 minutes later I return to my screen only to find the Ljosalfar are still attacking my army. A Stygian Guard is patiently slaughtering 12 tigers a minute (I hadn't put fast combat on). About ten minutes later all tigers are dead and the Priest of Leaves start attacking. They've been doing that for about 20 minutes now. As far as I can tell I haven't lost a single unit yet in this battle that has lasted over an hour by now. The AI has at least lost 800 units but just keeps throwing in more.

I think I'll just keep this running during the weekend.

I did end up restarting, grabbing agriculture and mining (for forest chopping) early then rushing vamps, then grabbing construction to extend farms. That seems to have given me a solid start, but I'm still in last place in the known civ list (about half known). About to push out my first vamps in the new game, finally. Had stasis cast again, the dragon again picked the town right by my capital (must be decided on map generation - and five bloodpets couldn't take out the two archers guarding the town), but this time I also had Mokka and friends spawn right on my doorstep. I was barely able to hold my newest city against Mokka (str8) by just spamming bloodpets in there until I won by freak RNG roll. Luckily the barbarian spawn was WAY down from the first game, that was ridiculous.

Still a fairly tough start, but I'm in much better position by getting my cities a bit bigger earlier and extending east instead of west. Next turn my first vamp rolls off the line, so I think I'll pop my world spell to boost their initial Feast bonus so I can get to a'conquestin' sooner. Nothing but basic warrior units for the first 150 turns or so is pretty brutal, I can skate on defense but there's almost no offense.

I forgot how easy mode elves + FoL was. :awesome_for_real: I damn near fainted when Decius/Calabim made Chalid, but then about 5 turns later he switched to another religion.  :grin:

Elves/FoL is only easymode if you have no wars in the early game. Late game you can have druids + Yvain carry you through, but they have very, very little offensive punch early on.

An interesting post on the topic, with some maths:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=356181

I always rush Archery + Longbows, then build nothing but defensive units.  There's nothing that can take a well-fortified Archer behind a palisade out for a long time.  Particularly in Orbis where you get the ranged strike before they can attack on their next turn.  Who gives a damn about offense early game.

There are a few early game situations where offense is enough to smack down enemies before they can go full archer, though: barbarian conversions or getting Larry, Curly and Moe and promoting them, for example.

Do you guys save/reload when popping dungeons? I think the game would be more interesting/difficult if I didn't reload often, but the rewards of clearing barbs are too great and the punishment for getting a bad roll are too large for me to seriously contemplate playing straight up.  

edit: I finally dl'd Orbis . consider yourselves e-slapped for not letting me know about this sooner. :drill:

Depends.  If my level 4-5+ unit pops a "powerful enemy" that wipes it out the next AI turn because of the stupidly powerful beast units in Orbis, I will.  If it was a no or low-level unit I just roll with it.

Usually only when it teleports my unit to a bad location. Most teleports I try to deal with, but teleporting my hero unit into the arctic before I have ocean-going vessels sucks. I like the barbarian pops, troop training!

Is there a way to set Priests of the leaves to auto-Bloom tiles?

Is there a Oribis manual? I thought the "everything has been changed" warning was an exaggeration.  (well, it is, but still: :ye_gods:)

edit: wrt barbs and troop training, I don't mind skels and orcs, but I've lost a couple of cities to lizardmen on bad rolls, so I pop them ASAP if I can.

2nd edit: I like the concept of Orbis, but the AI appears to be seriously lacking.  I'm at turn 300 or so and the other civs on my continent only have their cap cities.

Pick up Wild Mana - mod similar to Orbis, but has much better AI and auto casting.

I have FFH sitting on my hard drive uninstalled. I am essentially a total novice at Civ: I know the basics, and even some of the intermediate stuff, but actually being good at it eludes me.

Should I even bother attempting FFH? I read the big manual for it and looked a bit of stuff over for it; it seems really interesting, but is it a mod that's more for people who are already good at Civ looking for something different, or does it have something to offer the noob as well?

Play on the easiest level.  Expect to play ten games before you start going, "Ah ha! That's why they said each race plays differently".  Since each game lasts many hours (unless you get stomped), we're talking that much of an investment of time.

When teching up use the overview to get an idea how the trees are connected.  Use the encyclopedia to look stuff up.  Try to figure out what your races' unique units are and tech up those.  If your race can get a religion, in most cases racing for a religion is worth it.

To be fair, I think that's part of the fun.  It's not like you must play for 50 hours before you can do anything fun, it's just that once you attack the Ljosalfar and they suddenly pull a hundred Tigers out of their asses you can deal with it on easy difficulty and it becomes a reasonable challenge to overcome.  And you know to watch for that when you bump into them again on Noble.

I don't know that being masterful at Civ is really necessary to enjoy the game, beyond knowing the mechanics behind settlers and culture and so on, which you can pick up from FfH about as easily as you can from vanilla Civ. I agree that it's more complicated than base Civ (the magic system especially) but I would say it's definitely still worth playing.

I would as well.

Recently someone posted in this thread, "I don't get it!  This game isn't special at all!  Y'all are morons!"  (ok, not exactly like that).  I felt like they played it two or three times (maybe once), probably not being a fan of strategy games to begin with, and decided that FFH2 wasn't all that.  My point above was this - if you want to figure out why this special cocktail is so delicious, you're going to have to put some time into to get the nuance of how all the pieces come together.  A game or two won't do that for you.

Yep. Take the blandest kingdom with the most obvious description - like the super horsemen which name escapes me at the moment.
Skip weird ones like Balseraphs to avoid frustrations.

Once you get better at it, you can start RP-ing a bit to squeeze more fun out of it. 'DIE UNHOLY EMPIRE OF EVIL BEFORE THE MIGHT OF ORDER!'
This is why FFH is infinitely better than plain vanilla Civ. There's more flavor and variety to devour in every play.

I dl'd Wild Mana. It's cool and all, but I had problems with saves, and eventually with Civ itself (even on lowest settings, it ran sluggishly). I ended up having to completely uninstall Civ Mods and saves :(.

After several games of nothing but floundering, I'm beginning to get the hang of how FFH works compared to normal Civ. I'm still having a lot of trouble figure out what to really focus on for each civ. Like, I'm not sure which civs have a big religious focus for me to shoot towards, for instance.

There are strategy threads on the ffh2 forums. Once you get into things and want to know more "I'm playing Lanun, what's a good religious match?", you're at the point to start digging. Between the in-game civopedia, the manual, and the forums you can start getting an understanding of the game. That's one of the awesome thing, we've been playing it for years and still find out new stuff, and there are entire civs/religions I haven't touched yet. Still want to do Sidar/Esus or actually play the Infernal civ.

I'm also finding that there's a lot of stuff that you don't really know until you actually get into the game and try it out. Like the ship promotion that lets you carry units in it. I had absolutely no idea that was in there until I built my first non-work boat naval vessel and saw the Skeleton Crew promotion.

My main problem right now with someone simple like Hippus is that I see that a large part of their strategy revolves around being offensive, pillaging, and working toward their mecenary-hiring hero unit. So I start positioning myself toward that. But then I see my treasury is low and I start fretting and then switching my tech focus towards something that'll let me start building wealth in an economic city. I just have a lot of trouble committing to one path of action.

I don't know about anyone else, but I do about what it sounds like you do: specialize until it's not feasible. You need both science and wealth in order to get want you want (which for me is usually a religion, or civ wide Wonders, like Guild of Hammers, Nexus, and the one for mage guilds).

If you're playing Tasunke, low treasury means you need to be more aggressive for plunder bonuses. The other leader is a bit more buildery. My hippus game I was in the hole like mad but still ended up with over 2k in the treasury after four or six wars because of the rampant plundering. If you see a town, civ or barbarian, it needs to be plundered.

It's good to have goals and you need to beat opponents to certain techs but if you don't keep stuff balanced you'll gimp yourself because of the lack of cash/happiness/military power.

I installed fall further, the mod of the ffh2 mod, and had some great games with the scions - who have no use for either food or religion - but unfortunately the mod crashes my game a lot. I'm in this one game where I can't enter the borders of another civ or the games crashes...

Yeah, I was playing with Tasunke. My main problem was that I started in what turned out to be a pretty shitty location, with barely enough room for three cities that have no workable tile overlap, and didn't know that most ships could be upgraded with cargo space. A couple map rerolls later, I didn't have a greatly improved start position, but I at least had some barbarians and neighboring civs to harass.

But I started a new game as the Lanun. Wow I love this civ. They're probably considered overpowered, but man they're fun. Raced to Runes of Kilmorph, got their first hero early on, expanded hard for the early game, and with the exception of having some unhappiness/unhealthiness issues, it's been smooth sailing ( :oh_i_see:). I currently have the mostly-land-locked Hippus who already hates me blockaded with a bunch of pirates, even more pirates raiding patrol vessels from other civs, and two patrolling armies simply slaughtering the ridiculous amount of barbarians to my north for easy xp. I've been slacking on ground unit production, but I've started to pick that up since I now have two cities that are worthy production centers.

I'll probably build up my army a little more, crank out a couple more frigates, bombard the two well-defended Hippus coastal cities into powder, then roll in and wreck up the place, take their third and last city, and have a lot more resources for my own.

Would someone be kind enough to do a bullet-point list of things to do, and to avoid in this game? And some general tips?

I'm playing a Noble, randomed Khazad game, on Fractal. So far i have three (well, 1 and two half-cities really), founded the runes of Kilmorph and have developed most of my land with the typical Cottage and resource building mix. I have the pink human to my left, sea below me, Hippus scum (who've declared war on me because i wouldn't give them ale. Ha, fat chance!) to my right and a dragon or something above me (i think he has taken over a barbarian city). The war so far has consisted of him capturing a couple of workers and me sending a retaliatory dwarf raiding party to pillage their lands.

Oh and i also killed the orc hero guy by burying him in dwarf bodies till he coughed up his axe.

Tips for the game in general, or Khazad in particular?  I don't generally play Dwarves myself (I lean too heavily on Archmage cheese, and Dwarves can't make Archmages), but from what I understand the basics of the Khazad are:

-Strong economy = more money in vaults = more happiness and production = more buildings = strong economy.  Always try to have positive cashflow, the bonus from vaults can get pretty crazy (something like +40% hammers, I think).
-Most of the Khazad special units are siege weapons, I think, which is good since without Archmages, they'll need a lot of siege weapons to bring down cities and stacks.  You can also make siege weapons in forest tiles with the "Battering Ram" spell.  Mostly your siege is going to be paired up with melee units since you can't make longbowmen.  Stonewardens work, too.  Dwarves also get some weird druid that I haven't played with much but seems kind of gimp compared to the regular druid.
-Your world spell is pretty crap.  I have no idea when the ideal time to pop this thing is.
-Just a general impression: I don't think Dwarves are a "finesse" race.  They're not like the Calabim or Amurites where a handful of elite units are going to destroy an entire enemy nation while the rest of your army is there to support them.  Dwarves, I think, in order to conquer anything, have to throw a lot of soldiers at anything and take a lot of casualties.  I don't know that there are any "easy" tactics for the Dwarves, aside from out-producing and outnumbering your enemy.

Again, though, I don't know too much about them, that's just my impressions.

I think i meant more general tips (stuff like, casting Summon Skeleton on a Graveyard tile will summo three Skeletons instead of one), but thanks for those. The Khazad game died in a few turns anyway, since i made peace with Hippus only to be run over by a massive stack of Doviello.

 * Edit:

Started a new game with Sheaim, seem to be doing better now. At war with Balseraph, but creaming them with Pyre Zomies and a hero (someone or other The Fallen. Is it me, or are heroes really strong?).

Depends on the hero. Some are almost overpowered (mostly casters and Endgame Heroes), some are little better than standard units, with the only advantage being you can train them up without endangering them.

Rosier the Fallen is nice when you get him because he starts quite strong, fast and doesn't die that easily (he starts with withdrawal and can improve his chances). Basically he is an improved Mounted unit (comparable to the Horse Archer, Stronger but with less Withdrawal Chance and no First Strike). He is ideal for the Sheaim because the rarely go beyond Pyre Zombies in Unit Tech and heavily go for Magic Users (and Planar Gates).

The final tech for Horse Archers is Stirrups (1600 Research) which basically is a dead end tree (it just gives you stronger units) for increasingly large research costs.

Rosier needs Corruption of Spirits (900 Research) which also gives you Temples with more research, a state religion and disciple units with a fire damage spell. And ultimately one of the three big Endgame one-man-army heroes (27 str total). This is countered by the fact that you need the Ashen Veil religion, which is bad for most civilizations. The Sheaim love the Amargeddon Counter though, which makes him even more awesome for you.

Sheaim are about the planar gates. Having free mages popping out of your cities is pretty cool. Tar demons are decent defenders (for free), but I like the Mobius Witches. Building catacomb liberalus puts a mage guild in every city, which means any planar gate can pop an arcane unit. You will still want to build your core arcane units to be archmagi/liches so you can have more control over their promotions, but the witches can serve to cover holes in your mana types because they spawn with random mana schools. The higher the AC, the more units per gate.

I don't think I've ever had Revelers, Manticores or Minotaurs, though.

Finished my Lanun game with a surprise religious win. Now I'm trying something completely different and going with the Ljosalfar (using Thessa). I wanted something more mage-y, but couldn't decide between Grigori (I spent nearly an hour internally debating whether I wanted to go the summoner adventurer route or use magic purely for Adept/Mage support), Amurite, and Ljosalfar. The latter won out due to their defensive turtling nature which is a style of play I tend to fall in to at times (the fact that I'm also running Raging Barbarians has nothing at all to do with it, nosiree).

My main problems are how to tech them up and how fast/where to expand. I want to try to found the Circle of Leaves but in the quickie test game I ran, following that route while expanding to three cities didn't get me Archers until over turn 100.

With my current game I have what I think is a pretty good start position (that's an Yggdrasil tile if you can't see it, and hill tiles are the ones that look like the tile just to the west of that south-central mountain), but I'm unsure how to go about really exploiting it to take advantage of the Ljosalfar peculiarities with forests. Will the non-forested tiles be a problem? Will the lack of resources in the middle be a huge thing? From everything I've read I'll likely be going for an Aristocracy/Agrarian economy, so would I just plop farms down on every irrigated tile, mines on hills, and lumber mill the rest once I get Archery? Choosing good city locations is something I've never gotten the hang of in Civ, and the Lanun spoiled me with their easy city location decisions.

Start position:

I'd comment, but i can't see the screenshot.

Nor me, I get a 403

Fuckin' Dropbox, how does it work?

Imageshacked instead.

Works now. I don't know anything about the faction you're playing, but it looks like you won't be able to get much production from your first city, with that start. Money and food should not be a problem though.

The lack of forests in the middle won't be a problem because you can get units that cast a spell to build a forest.   I just raze the existing improvements, cast the forest and rebuild when it's available.

As far as "good" city locations, I always just matrix them as close as I can.  When spamming settlers I start out by counting 3 up/down and 3 over from the previous city center to allow maximized production squares then adjust to avoid mountains/ deserts/ etc.   More cities is better than a few high quality cities, imo.

Wouldn't 3 up/3 over cause overlap with the outer work ring of a city?

D'oh, yes.  It's actually 3 over 4 up/down.  (Or 6 straight across if building in a line)  Just use the settler's outline  to determine the actual placement and  extend everything one square out.  I've forgotten how to count, apparently.

I've, um, "Founded the Undercouncil". What does this actually do? I can apparently adopt it as a religion, and my Nightwatch guys can spread it to other cities through gold. Can it be used for anything else?

What do the Great Generals do/how do i use them?

How does the Infernal Codex (or whatever that thing is, the casts random spells) work?

A Tower of Necromancy raises my Skeleton summoning max to five. How many could i summon before? How can i tell?

Am i limited to one hero in play at a time? I have the techs for a whole bunch, but i can't build any. Is it because i already have Rosario Dawson in play?

It's kind of like the UN (so is the Overcouncil).  Every few turns you vote for a president who can table motions.  I have no idea what half of them do ("Fund Dissidents" for example) but "Establish Slave Trade" lets you buy slaves, I think, and "Enlist the Nightwatch" lets you manufacture Nightwatch units.  The Nightwatch guys are generally Council of Esus religion, which is different from the Undercouncil, which is a civic (Anyone who's researched it can join the Undercouncil, doesn't have to have Esus as their official religion).  Esus is weird in that it has no churches and no priests, any unit which follows Esus can spread the religion to a city they're in, but it costs 25g to try.

EDIT: You're generally not limited to one hero at a time, but they are limited to one per "world" so if someone else has built the Fellowship of Leaves hero, you can't build another one of him, for example.

Ah, so they are Unique per game. If i kill one they have, can i rebuild it?

Some units have their strength listed as x/y. What does this mean? Also, some units have the caveat "will abandon civilizations that don't maintain civic or religious requirements". How do i tell what those are? Figured this part out.

Generally, dead heroes are lost for good (hence my foaming in the Civ 5 thread about losing battles with 95% odds).  The level 3 life spell "Resurrect" can bring them back, but they come back at level 1, and it only works on Civ specific heroes, not religious heroes, as far as I know.

Strengths listed as x/y means that the unit is treated as a strength x unit if it attacks, and a strength y unit if another unit attacks it.  Archers, for example, are something like 3/5, so they make better defensive units than offensive ones.

Heroes with civic or religious requirements are usually tied to a specific religion.  If you're not sure which, you can check the Civilopedia under "Heroes."  If it's a religious hero, it'll say that the religion is required.  For example, Rosier is tied to the Ashen Veil religion, so his "Required" box has both "Corruption of the Spirit" (the tech that gives you Ashen Veil) and "Ashen Vale".  Another way to keep it straight is to remember that your civ has only one or two civ specific heroes, generally, and any others are going to be tied to whatever religion you're practicing when they start being produced.  For the Sheaim, I think their hero is the Black Dragon, so other heroes are generally going to be tied to their religion.

Despite how much the game changes, there's still some basics that you need to keep in mind when building up:
1.Don't try to build everything in the city - specialize.

2.If it's a city at the back which hardly gets attacked, turn it into commerce producer with cottages & structures in favor of hammers / forges. Coastal cities are hardly under threat since the naval AI sucks dick.

3.Front line cities need defensive structures and majority of garrisons should be seasoned vets. Build them next to a river. The AI sometimes kamikaze across rivers (-50%), making it easy to defend. Same deal with production facilities, don't build stables/siege engines everywhere, only build what you need.

4. If you have a city with lots of farmland, designate it as worker/settler producer.

5. Just popped a new town? Trying to build an obelisk for culture pop? Why bother? Grab a disciple unit and sacrifice it to spread culture. Tadaa, instant border pop. Also, removes disorders from hostile takeovers / unhappiness INSTANTLY.

I don't think it affects the max # of summons, but it does give you a death mana (and grants the strong promotion to your summoned undead +1str). Did you build another adept? Total number of skeletons is based on the total number of arcane units with death magic (death I is summon skeleton). That doesn't mean each arcane unit can only summon one, if you have five adepts with death magic, you could have a single adept summon five skeletons if you wanted.
Also pay attention to your city summary screen to see where to build wonders, you can order the list by production. Order it by food to see where to build settlers, money to build economics, beakers to build research, etc.

Yep. Always do that when you have a Great Scientist to build an Academy. Check which city has the most research produced - and plop it there.

I think I expanded a wee bit too far a wee bit too fast before getting Aristocracy. I just plopped my fifth city down before I noticed that - oh shit - I'm down to 5 gold and I'm losing 7 per turn.

Economy's finally back on the upswing, but it almost bit me there for a minute.

I just had a long snoozefest over a Noble Difficulty, Clan of embers game. I founded Rune of Kilmorph and pumped Soldiers of Kilmorph. Wonder-blitzed to everything. I've only got 5 cities, but fuck, it's hard to justify conquering when everyone's too scared of pissing you off, and it's more productive to wonder rush.

Unchallenged so far 600 turns in - even the barbarians didn't break peace.

The Orcs unique building, Warrens, doubles land unit production as in, build one and get one free. Double settlers, double workers, and double army! I think I might just expand peacefully to break the monotony. But let me just finish building Aqua Sucellus and Wonder Theatre in my Orcish cities.

Just finished off a really tough Khazad/Basium opponent with Calabim. I fucking love the Calabim Feast animation. I do it just to see the little screamy face, forget the promotions.

Also a huge stack of Spectres is kind of scary to listen to when you summon them.

It always bugs me, because it's a global sound effect... the same global sound effect that accompanies losing a city.  "Oh, hell, what did I lose now, dammit dammit dammit..." "Sorry, that was me, feasting again."  Still, less crazy than the "drowining" sound byte, at least.

Speaking of which, anyone having much luck with this game in multiplayer?  I'm getting a lot of OOS errors in vanilla FFH, and so many in Orbis that it's basically unplayable (every combat has about a 20% chance to throw the game OOS it seems).  Anyone know what's causing it, or how to work around it, aside from save-exit-restart-reload every time it happens?

One thing that was really interesting in my Calabim game was taking Council of Esus as a religion, which I hadn't done before, and using the special power of the Esus hero to take over another civilization.

I eventually used it to try and finally break down Basium's resistance, since he's really tough to pin down and finally wipe out given how fast he can pop out Heralds and Angels of Death and Seraphs and strike at your cities way behind your defensive perimeter with the Angels of Death. At the time, I had been in a cease fire with Khazad/Basium for about nine turns and had several stacks-of-doom poised at the borders to the remaining Basium cities which were to the south of my territory, squeezed in between me and my subjugated allies even further south. I was in a classic aristograrian setup with the map covered in farms, most of my cities had at least two longbowmen defending, and along the defensive perimeter, around four in most cities. Quite a few worker stacks on the board, most a long ways from the frontier.

So I pop the special ability from the hero who is hidden in a Basium city. I didn't know that you'd actually switch completely to the enemy civ and lose control of your own to the AI for a few turns. I notice that the AI *immediately* switches the Calabim civics to Republic and Military State and sigh, because that's going to be bad when I get back in control. I also notice that you can't delete units in the civ you've taken control of, which seems like a good idea, otherwise that hero would be a total "I win" button. I just evacuate all his cities of all units, sending them way south. After a turn of that, I send one of his units to cross the border of one of the Calabim allies and bing! we have a war. The AI obligingly sends my armies to capture the empty Basium cities, but can't get to the ones furthest south before I lose control of Basium again and revert to Calabim.

So I take stock and--well, the AI has done so much damage to my empire through mismanagement that it *almost* wasn't worth it to trigger the special ability. I'm bleeding money now because my territorial development is entirely cued to aristograrian, the AI has totally bizarrely decided to make every...single...city in my empire produce a Worker, it has split up my doom stacks and sent them off in weird little clumps all over the place (taking a huge stack of attrition-killing skeletons and sending them one skeleton at a time to cities as defenders. In the end, the whole gambit helped me kill Basium a bit faster than if I'd ground him down, but the mess the AI left took a lot of cleaning up.

That's actually quite hilarious. Reminds me of a card in the L5R ccg.

Kail - a mate and i have been playing ffh2 over Direct IP through Hamachi just fine. Crashed once the first time we ran it, but i suspect that was my system acting up (i was tabbing through approximately 15 million windows at the time).

Also, after having played for a while i've come to the conclusion that apparently, fireballs > everything. Seriously, what the hell.

I made another game in Earth Map. Started as Bannor in Russia. I think I made a mistake in making epic-length for production & discovery. The AI can't seem to cope. Once I grabbed Bronze Working and churned out Axeman, they had nothing but warriors to cover their cities. By the time they adapted, my elite axeman is already well equipped to tackle fellow Axeman at 40% bonus vs melee.

All went well. Rune of Kilmorph time for peaceful wonder rushes. Until Berri Bawl the dwarves wouldn't shut up about being bullied by those evil summoning race. I took a peek and found dozens of pyre zombies marching around their cities. After losing all but two cities, Berri finally bawled and asked to be taken in as Vassal State. Accepting meant war vs Zombies- Good thing I researched horse archers and Arthendain the medical hero. Fucking awesome. Destroy Undead spamming + superior mobility. Totally dominated them until they capitulated. GG. Starting war with Lanuns for their Octopus Overlords religion. No way we gonna lose this!

There really should be some defense against fireballs that's meaningful, yeah. Something that really compels you to go another route not just for flavor or fun. Like if the Iliians are strong, or something.

Is it just me or is Doviello really seriously fouled up when the AI runs it? In every single game I've done, when they show up, they're always the big joke of the AI-run civs.

Also: my least favorite thing in the whole game?

Fucking tiger spamming by Leaves civilizations. Not because it wins for them but godDAMN it can get boring.

Yeah that gets old fast. One of the biggest flaws of the game is the fucked up summoning mechanics the AI abuses.  *starts fight* *half an hour later tigers are still attacking my city*  :why_so_serious:

They did go ridiculously overboard with some of the AI cheese.


When do we win?
When they run out of tigers.
When will that be?
They are still summoning them, go to bed.

Speaking of the Leaves, I stepped away from my Ljosalfar game for a while, but I'm considering picking it back up. One question though: With a heavily-mage army, how do I conquer places? Train up a bunch of Priests of Leaves and tiger spam after Maelstroming cities over and over, or build a ton of longbowmen, or what?

Fireball is some solid elf cheese if you have enough fire nodes.

Satyrs are cool too. bit of a pain to level tho


I don't remember if I asked this question already but has anyone tried taking a religion just to make a couple of priests then go to the one you really want? It doesn't sound practical, but every time I subvert a priest from another religion (specifically Ashen Veil) I always wish I had it 50+ turns earlier.

It's not possible to keep priests because when u switch religions, you lose 'em. HOWEVER. I did convert a few Ashen Priests before and converted them to Paladins, capable of casting Rings of Fire.  :awesome_for_real:

What do you guys think is the most handicapped civilisation to start with?

I thought Kuriotates would be crap but after two horrible starts I managed to barely hang in there long enough to get their dragon hero Eurabatres and once I got him he pretty much oneshotted all the more advanced civs.
I captured Acheron, who's rather crap compared to Eurabatres - mostly because he is so slow, and I kept the Sheaim around as last civ hoping they would spawn their dragon hero Abashi because I intended to capture him and strut my three dragon army but alas they got wind of my plan and no matter how long I waited they just chilled and refused to create him. Bastards.

Doviello. Not a doubt.
A weak starting hero and at best, a hopeful wolf zerg world spell early on to take 1-2 cities.....After that, good luck dealing with your barbaric disadvantages, considering Clan of embers has DOUBLE military production....you got tundra strength bonus. Yayyyyyy?

Unfortunately, the stand-alone Fall from Heaven game was cancelled.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=361727

FUCK YEAH. Glad to have Civ 5 sitting on my pc right now.

(also, shitty it got cancelled - talk about the perfect title for mount&blade/minecraft style funding)

Do barbarian units randomly join with Clan of Embers?  It sure would explain some things I've seen while playing them, not to mention a couple of units I didn't think they could produce.  (Example is one of the mage units that Acheron builds, or summons, or whatever.)

Clan of Embers get a national spell, "For the Horde!", which gives them 50% of the barbarians on the map.

Yeah but that was the least of their greatness. Let's see what makes them tick:

- No wars with barbarians. Allowing you to expand freely and ridiculously fast with Jonas 50% off settler production....add in Warrens double 1 for 1 it adds up to 25% cost for 1 Settler. And that's not counting civics military production bonuses, hence, ~~ BULLSHIT! Workers too. Feel free to leave your cities with level 1 basic warriors until you meet rival civs. There's no need for guards at all for your workers or your wonders as you expand like orcish rabbits on viagra.

-1 for 1 works with Soldiers of Kilmorph. What do they do? They pump hammers to production when sacrificed in cities. Fuck Industrious trait, this shit wonder / any building rushes like nobody's business. Imagine plopping Granary , Smokehouse in less than 4 turns in a new flood plain cities....COTTAGED for sweet, sweet gold.

-With all the above bonuses there's such a strong incentive to stay peaceful and expand like mad...but when war knocks on your doorstep, you can just spawn cheap catapults for stack killing damage while your stronger guards mop up the rest.  Just remember , MaSONRY ABOVE ALL ELSE!

man I was genuinely looking forward to that

Cross-posting here and in the Elemental thread, because people will be interested.

Good Old Games is releasing all three Age of Wonders games. (http://www.gog.com/en/search/sort/search/age%20of%20wonders)

Was anything besides Shadow Magic any good?

I got a great deal of enjoyment out of the first one.

I dl'd Wild Mana awhile back. I like it but it crashes all the time. Sometimes when it crashes, I get an error saying something like "unable to allocate video memory". Anyone else getting constant crashes?

Ok, I read the FfH forum, typed in some dos command, and went from huge to normal/large maps, and I no longer have a problem. I hate anything smaller than huge tho :(.

I know you guys are playing Civ 5 right now (and I will after Kael makes it playable  :awesome_for_real:) but I have a problem with Wild Mana on warlord level. For some reason, right around turn 120 or so, my research crashes. I'm building councils and libraries. The only thing I can think of is that I have a lot of unhappiness, but I'm using all the resources in the area. I guess I should use more Scientists or something. What's odd though is that I don't have this problem with regular FfH.

Anyone else have the same problem?

I wasn't ignoring you, I don't play wild mana (or even orbis!).

np ;) . Sometimes I think I should  just go out and buy Civ V, but I've bought like 5 games in the past 2 weeks or so and I still just play some form of FfH. I haven't even opened Starcraft yet. I think I'm horribly broken.  :grin:

Looks like Kael has been hired by Stardock. (http://gamasutra.com/view/news/30933/Stardock_Hires_Fall_From_Heaven_Creator_After_Challenging_Elemental_Launch.php)

Edit:  See it has already been mentioned in the Elemental thread.

Fuck yes.

I am ambivalent about this news.  Obviously I'm glad he's got a paying gig.

So he used to be a project manager at Novell? A real software company?

hehehe, I wish I could witness his shock as he tries to come to terms with how laughable project management is in his new industry. It will be like a cartoon double take in slow motion drawn out over his first month of employment.

He could try to change the system from within.

.....

 :awesome_for_real:

That explains why FFH2 was so awesome, I guess.

Really wish Firaxis had been smart enough to grab him, I'm not a big Stardock fan. I think I played 3 games of galciv.

Has anyone tried the More Naval AI (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=357824) mod? It seems to have a ton of tweaks and fixes in it.

I've never tried it, but it sounds interesting. Let us know if it works  :awesome_for_real:

There's a new FFH mod (yes, mod of a mod) out called Master of Mana (http://www.masterofmana.com/). It's derived from the WildMana mod but now is a self-contained mod.

I point this out because:

* Its stated objective is to be closer to Master of Magic (thus the name)
* The magic system has been *radically* redone. Gone are Priests of Leaves spamming 5000 tigers. Because...
* Accumulatable resources are in. More mundane resources such as stone and wood make you build things faster. Holy mana is used for priest summons and rituals. Regular Mana is used for mage summons and rituals. Many of these rituals are global in nature. Summons are EXPENSIVE. No more spamming.
* Magic schools are researched independently of technology, and are not player selectable, but researched based on the alignment of the civ. Which makes picking a "goody two shoes" civ far more interesting, because light magic gets some real powerhouse early rituals that help cities grow like crazy.
* The AI is better than in FFH, both tactically and strategically. If you block an enemy civ from expanding, no matter how friendly they are, if you've choked off their growth, they WILL attack.

Thanks, thats exactly what I needed to reinstall Civ4 and play around with it again after the Civ5 debacle.

I noticed Lum playing Civ IV and wondered if there was a new mod development :)

Also, just deleted Civ V. Until I see an FFH-quality mod, no reason to have it taking up space. That's a first (not having the current Civ on my computer) since my 486.

Like you, I far prefer Civ4 to Civ5 for any number of reasons.

I don't find V horrible, per se.. it's just not Civs.   Thanks for the mod info, I'll have to download and play some this weekend.

Giving a shot.  Will update first page if bodacious.

Kinda waffling around for a daylight game, since I'm playing Amnesia right now and it's just not right playing it any time but night with the lights out and the neighborhood in bed. Started up FFH2 as Amurites, I had made a bunch of starter saves in decent starting locations, one for each race.

I decided to shoot for wizards ASAP (naturally!), but got hunters early on. With hawk overwatch and str4 hunters, I was able to avoid the physical army techs early on. I also wasted a bunch of time and resources locking down the mid-continent bottleneck that my hawks found, because the barbarians were brutal. But I got a city in there, gold and flood plains, lots of culture buildings, lockbox. After that, focused on tech to get better mages, but forgot to build out to my 3 mana nodes, and I like to hold off on building my arcane units until I can get my main magic school for free. I like to spend the level-ups on supporting skills like strength and mobility for my summons (usually death or fire). So I switch over into worker/settler mode to get that done.

Now, the other side of the bottleneck is Lanun and Sheelba, figuring Lanun has my back as we're both neutral and I've been feeding him techs cheap. Infernals drop onto a tiny peninsula in the middle of the bay betwixt the three of us, with the exit to Sheelba's land. I guess after twenty turns of that she got antsy, because she decides to send a giant stack after my bottleneck. Thanks to the hawks, I see her coming and scramble everything I've got to the city in question. Her shamans are ineffective but she had a ton of catapults that did some serious weakening and her mass of archers prevented a counter-attack (since most of my guys are str4 hunters and bronze-age warriors vs 3/5 archers). Thanks to my two wizards (one fire, one death) and one cleric..plus some quick warrior spam and caravels...we managed to juuust eke out the victory.

Of course, near the end of the conflict, one of my warriors paths into the Forbidden Zone around the stupid whatever Pass thing, dropping three str8 gargoyles into the heart of my currently defenseless empire (since I emptied the previously safe area to bolster the bottleneck). Scramble the last trickle of the warrior spam back into the area and manage to kill two of them (losing a few warriors and a hunter), the third decides on the better part of valor and returns to the Pass.

Battered but unbroken...time to send the wizards and priest into orcland for some payback (and mana nodes)! I love this game.

was this a custom or scenario game? 

Custom; I forget the settings, though (since I used a pre-saved game I had set up years ago).

does anyone have a Hamachi Network i could join?

wut.

MAN YOUR BATTLESTATIONS!

I'm building a Hibachi network.

Arrggg, fuck you for bumping this and making me think there had been some sort of big announcement surrounding Fall From Heaven!

On the bright side, I now have the urge to play FFH2.

I have been playing the shit out of Masters of Mana.

Warning- the difficulty compared to FFH is way up until you get the hang of all the new mechanics. 

www.masterofmana.com (http://www.masterofmana.com)

Yeah, it's on my list of things to crack into. I downloaded it a while ago but I was easily confused.

I'm having terrible CTD's with Masters of Mana.  I'm on Win7 64bit with >2Gb of RAM.  I assume these CTD's are because of memory allocation.  Any help?

Anyone have similar problems with FFH2 on Win7? 

No issues here (Win7 64bit).  I have had the occasional issue here and there in the past, but its not super common. 

I installed the dx9? redistr pack and then got rid of Aero.  Not sure which worked.  I also lowered civ to <10 which sux.

well yea i can't seem to find any FFH2 Networks with other people i could play with even by direct Ip but playing by mysekf has been dull

You know, after only 21 YEARS, I think I might be starting to understand all the love the Civ series have been getting  :grin:

I'm finally understanding all the mechanics of Civ IV (BtS) and I think I'm dangerously close to win my first game ever on Chieftain (yeah, well :P) difficulty  :awesome_for_real:

Can't wait to try out Colonization and also the various scenarios and mods (especially this fantasy one).

I guess I'll eventually try out the fifth chapter as well.

Just sayin' .

Yay!

FFH2 is so much better than what Firaxis does, though :)

I need to give Master of Mana a whirl some day, but I like the comfort of knowing the rules to FFH2 already.

As an FFH2 lover, I'm 2 games in on Master of Mana on Warlord difficulty and got my ass handed to me on both of them. There's a lot to learn, but it's fun to have a game that takes me out of my comfort zone.

I was happy turtling with my elves in a Mana game, but when I started exploring the entire planet had turned to fire.  Doh.  They don't mess around with the counter in that mod.

I have gotten back to playing a LOT of Civ IV.  Re-bought the Civ IV mega-pack on Steam.  Haven't gotten around to FFH again yet but I will.  Really been enjoying Final Frontier and Rhys and Fall.  I have much love for RNF, as a history nut I'm in heaven.  But haven't won any games yet, even on easier difficulty.  My China and Carthaginian empires were amazing still!

But FFH is on my list, I really love the civs he put in there and all the lore.