This forum unfortunately lacks a "Newbie Tips" thread, and so I've decided to just suck it up and admit, "Hello, I'm a newbie, help!" I posted previously in regards to the Infernals, but this thread is more of a "General help" request.

Basically, after finally completing my first successful game on Warlord, I've been trying to make the move to Prince. For the most part I've been playing a bit hit and miss, using different Civs, different maps and different strategies, but for the most part, I find them slipping out in the middle of the game. Either I'm falling behind in techs and so forth or my strategy has gone astray in the long term. Generally, I've decided to simply ask for general ideas on how to play the game effectively.

In making this thread, I looked through the sticky first to read some of what had been posted. May as well learn before asking :mischief:

The two I read thoroughly:

Analysis: The Opening Game Unraveled (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=182240) (Unser's Slightly out of date opening game analysis)
Getting Started, or, How to Cook for 10,000 Unexpected Houseguests (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=180324) (How to Survive raging barbarians in general)

After reading them, a couple of quick questions arose from me.

In "Analysis: The Opening Game Unraveled", there's a large obsession with cottages. Within the sticky thread it is called "slightly out of date", so I wished to check, should cottages be my top priority throughout the first 100 or so turns? And how much of a priority?

There was also a lot of mentions of cottages upon resources. Is this a wise course of action? Placing cottages instead of building the appropriate improvement to gain the resource benefits?

In "Getting Started, or, How to Cook for 10,000 Unexpected Houseguests", it emphasizes the importance of ignoring Workers in favour of Warriors, since you'll be unable to defend improvements. Does this hold true when playing with normal Barbs?

With those two out of the way, general question time.

Starting

Firstly, I'm having difficulty getting off to good starts. With this, I would like to ask some people's early starting strategies. Presently, my strategy has been like so:

1) Set up a city in turn one, built in a way that I'll get the best tiles possible of those visible within it's cross.
2) Set the Scout and Warrior off exploring.
3) Build a Warrior first.
3) As far as research priority goes, I've usually been aiming for Agriculture-Ancient Chants-Mysticism-Education, with the next set of research going to technologies related to my nearby resources.
4) Once the first Warrior pops, fortify it in the city and build another.
5) Once I have two Warriors, depending on the surrounding situation and technology progression, I either make a Scout, Settler or Elder Council (assuming I've reached Mysticism).
6) If I didn't go straight for a Settler, once whatever pops, my next priority is a Settler.
7) If I haven't got the Elder Council yet, I got for that and once it's done, make a Sage specilist. I usually run pacifism as well in an attempt to get a Great Sage ASAP, that science boosting building is delicious.
7) Send it off with one of the Warriors to my next city destination.
8-9-10) Lots of stuff in between, I've usually been keeping a system of two warriors per city and try to get Obelisks early in my 2nd city for quick expansion. I usually have a second worker as well. Normally I try to cottage by rivers, connect my cities together and link up resources.
11) With two warriors on stand-by, set off for my 3rd city.

From here, the route is varied. Normally I shoot straight for my preferred religion and then afterwards focus on Hunting-Archery.

Now, I'm sure this general early build set-up is flawed. A major thing I've noticed is problems with Barbs. My lone warrior guarding my settler doesn't always work, sometimes a wild animal will pick it off (damn those bears :mad: ) and occasionally, the barbs will have an evil lizardman. If I lose my early settler as well as its guarding warrior, I'm highly crippled in my opinion. As it stands, I'm figuring I should make an extra Warrior for escorting purposes.

Now, my main questions. Priorities:

Should I really try to get my city up in turn one? Would it be wiser to scout with my settler the first couple of turns for a better starting position if I don’t have on I consider ideal?

How much of a priority should Mysticism and God King be? ASAP? After Education and a Worker?

How much of a priority should Hunting and Archery be? I personally leave them for a while, because of the fact I need to make an extra building to pop the units related to them. However, I’ve been starting to notice that I need more powerful units, and I’m starting to think maybe this should be a larger priority.

Military questions? How many Warriors per city? Extra Warriors? Should I go exploring around my borders with my Warriors to pick up some cheap upgrades from the wolves and lions?

Elder Council and Sage? Am I making this too much or a priority. Should I be making it a priority at all? I like it personally, I lose one population worth of productivity but I find the +50% from the science building really helpful and like to get it ASAP, but if it's an inefficient idea, it can easily be dropped.

Cottages? I asked it earlier but I’ll mention it again. Should I go nuts cottage spamming ASAP?

Cities

Now, this is where I have real problems. Nine times out of ten, once I get my third city up, that’s it. I have no more optimal city plots left to fill, so my future cities are either in “meh” positions or need to be taken from a neighbour (and I’m not too good at early warmongering). How should I prioritise my city spreading? Should I be doing it slow and precise, or should I rush for the best positions early, regardless of the nasty maintenance costs?

Now, assuming I don’t pick up the spots if want, should I go for an early warmonger? I dislike doing this unless I have an aggressive civ. To me, it seems like all I’m doing is helping all the other civs. If I succeed in taking their city, it costs me a lot of warriors. If I don’t, well, that’s a lot of wasted hammers. Personally, I prefer to let it wait slightly, at least until I have access to Axemen and preferably when I have a Hero. Still, I’d like to hear other people’s opinions on how important early warmongering is.

Wonders

Should I bother? I’ve noticed the AI always seems to snatch up the “Free Life Mana” wonder very quickly, so I was wondering if Wonders should be a priority at all? I personally don’t go for them, I usually don’t have the time, but again, I want to hear other people’s opinions.

Dealing with Barbarians?

What if Skeletons start streaming in my direction, or Orthus decides he feels like visiting *note: pillaging* my towns. How do I handle this? Obviously, I usually start spamming as many warriors as possible, but other things I should be doing? Should I hide all my warriors in my city or should I slot them on top of my resources? Should I try and attack or just let them run their course? (I have better combat odds defending but I lose more turns waiting for them to attack and risk losing my worker improvements, as well as turns I could‘ve spent making improvements).

Now, although I do have some problems with middle-game, I feel questions related to that would be civ-specific, so I’ll leave them out of it. Personally, I feel I have more problems starting than handling the middle.

Whether it helps or not, I generally like to play Small or Standard maps with the default amount of civs + 2. The map I choose is usually Oasis, Great Plains, Highlands or Pangaea. My play style is more of a builder. Normally, I aim to make a solid economy before shooting for an army, so my army mostly consists of 3-4 units defending my cities and maybe one or two others. I like going for Fire Mages prior to invasions, I find Fire Balls and Meteors priceless when it comes to invasion.

I apologise for the essay-ish length of this, but I appreciate feedback. As well as critiquing how I start things, I’d like to see some “step-by-step” ideas of how you guys start. Ultimately, I hope to move from being stuck on Prince mode and off higher, preferably to one day being able to respectably play in Multiplayer.

[I’ll also be on holiday until Sunday, so if it seems like I’m ignoring the posts, I’m not. When I get back, I will be reading the replies with interest and appreciation. Hopefully, when I get back I can fire up a game and finally win a game on Prince :lol: ]

A few thoughts of mine. First off I would change your starting strategy Slightly.

1. Found your city
2. Send your Scout out to explore, Leave your Warrior at home.
3. make a Warrior

Now, depending on the game is what you research. If I don't have Agriculture from my civ, then yes I would usually research it unless for some reason my city wouldn't benefit from it much.

If you are the Hippus or Kuriorates, after Agriculture, I would generally go for Horseback Riding. If not, then I would immediately go for some other way of getting a 2nd tier unit (that is, a unit better than warrior). That could be by going Ancient Chants- mysticism - Runes, Leaves, or Octopi

Yes, mysticism is very good and imporant. It is very very rare when you would want something besides God King. Very Rare. This game is all about Agriculture, God King, and Priests. Really, no matter who you are, you will want this. It's that good!

Don't worry about Cottages, they're not that great except in certain cases.

Also, unless your map is really big and your enemy is far away from you, it's generally best just to take a city from the AI. Go for a Tier 2 unit (such as hunters, the Drown, Pyre Zombies, ect.) make a bunch of them, and take over your enemy. The AI is still incredibly stupid. After some practice you should have no problem owning it.

1. most wonders are unimportant, don't worry about them unless they're really really good.

2. Yes, Academies are good, don't feel guilty about making those as long as the +50% bonus will be bigger than the +6 Science Great Sages give

3. Always have at least 2 defenders for a city no matter what. In barbarian heavy games, I tend to produce all the way up to a 3rd possible warrior but then switching to something else. If things get hectic, I'll have some backup.

4. If you don't consider you're starting location ideal, then feel free to search a little. But, not too much. I generally do not want to found a city later than the 2nd or 3rd turn. Sometimes it's better to just deal with it.

5. You make a worker when it'd be beneficial for you to have one. For example, sometimes it's ideal to time your worker so that it appears just as soon as you get Agriculture. Other times, you may be in a Flood Plains area full of 3 :food: and you'd rather make other stuff, and once you've maxed out your population, then make a worker to make a farm so that you can move more of your citizens toward production.

6. Archery and Hunting are important that they are tier 2 units. You need to aim for a tier 2 unit especially at the beginning. Other tier 2 units are fine as well.

7. Early warring is usually the way to go. The AI is dumb as I said before and if you have superior units or have the right promotions and xp, you can usually relatively easily capture their cities. I usually try warring when I have a tier 2 unit (axemen in your case). Yes, aggressive civs are good at this, and in fact they have a great advantage in my mind.

8. If Orthus plays your City a visit, you should build an extra warrior if you have time left and hide your warriors in your city. Let him pillage; he'll likely attack the city soon.

For the most part I've been playing a bit hit and miss, using different Civs, different maps and different strategies, but for the most part, I find them slipping out in the middle of the game. Either I'm falling behind in techs and so forth or my strategy has gone astray in the long term. Generally, I've decided to simply ask for general ideas on how to play the game effectively.
It would probably be best if you worked on one civ for a while and improved with them before going on, but do whatever you enjoy. That said, if you're falling behind in the middle of the game, you need to improve how you set up your empire... (Keep in mind that there are many different playing styles even for the early game. Some people expand more aggressively and risk losing settlers, while others leave nothing to chance. I lean towards aggressive expansion with an eye on domination victory.)

The Early Game: Cottages vs. Farms
With Agriculture as it stands, you can get by just fine on research with farms and sage specialists with only a few cottages (more if you have fewer resources with high commerce bonuses). But, that requires more micromanagement and the next patch will make Agriculture less useful. If you do use specialists, you need to expand fast. More cities allow more elder councils and therefore more sages for research. 5 beakers just isn't enough, but 5 per city with minimal effort is great!

Even if you don't go for cottage spamming, you'll still want Education fast for City States, which is just as good as God King when used appropriately. How do you use City States? Expand. Expand. Expand. Now do it faster. You should use Agriculture and farms to pump out settlers quickly, or to build more workers for more farms.

For reference, my recent build orders have been warrior, worker, warrior, settler, and then branching off depending on what I have and need. I still keep a high priority on settlers and at least 1 worker per every 2 cities (towards the end of my expansion that often becomes inadequate, so I like to steal a few). This is probably not the best order for someone still learning the game.

Financing your Empire
Basically, there are three reliable ways to keep your empire going. 1) Buildings (RoK temple, markets, courthouses, others for specialists), 2) Religion (RoK, shrines), and 3) Civics. If you're struggling with this, I would definitely go for RoK. Otherwise found another early religion for the shrine, don't overlook Festivals for markets (and carnivals for happiness), and use the appropriate government civic. While your empire is small, use God King combined with buildings, religion, and specialists. You may also want to build cottages around your capital and put some commerce into taxes. Eventually, your empire will be better off without God King (assuming you continue to expand). That's when you switch to City States, which does a good job of nearly eliminating city upkeep.

Barbarians and Defending your Empire
If you have Raging Barbs off, and you're playing on low difficulty, you should have no problem with a minimal defense. I do fine on Emperor/Immortal, normal barbs with 1-3 warriors per city. 1 will defend a city until it can build another. 2 will defend most cities that are close together once one of them gets a few promotions. 3 helps out your cities with several improvements or that border more wilderness. Obviously, if you're up against Barrows, Ruins, or the Dirge, you'll want more warriors, and you should use roads to help double up on defense.

Dealing with Skeletons/Lizardmen: They can't pillage, so stay on defensive terrain and defend. Orthus: You can take him out by attacking but you need experienced warriors (combat I, shock I, orc slaying I works great for low XP). If you don't have a few of those (and preferably a combat III, shock II to finish him off), stack your units in a city and let him attack first. I've never had issues stopping Orthus with warriors even though I keep a small military early on, so you should be fine with this.

For your initial warrior, I have mine spend a few turns scouting the local terrain and then returning to the capital, which always builds a warrior first. Unless I'm playing the Khazad or going for several animal captures, I don't build any scouts.

Eventually, you'll want to research Bronzeworking and make those warriors much better if you have copper. With copper, don't build axemen unless you have (serious) issues with unit maintenance. This is how I like to set up (most of) my empires, but based on free techs and your civ, you may want to go for Horseback Riding or Hunting instead. You will need T2 units relatively soon on higher difficulty levels or else you will be hurting when (not if) the AI attacks. On easier settings, this might not be as crucial, but early wars (after T2 units and there's no more good city sites nearby) can be really helpful if you're careful which cities you keep or raze.

Looking Ahead
If you've been doing something similar to this, you should have several cities and a fair military. You may have taken a few cities from a neighbor, but that's not crucial. Regardless, your next step if you want to pursue conquest/domination is to cover any remaining "basic" techs that you need (don't research Calendars if you have no corresponding resources), and then beeline a T3 unit and a fairly strong hero. You should be able to improve your empire significantly before the AI catches up (they may have more techs, but not as advanced) and even then your veteran units and hero(es) should still push on. From there, get a few more important economic techs and then go for T4 units and (if you can) another hero.

This also works well for an Altar victory if you get (a few of) Religious Discipline, Law III, Sacrifice the Weak, and then use several priests in several cities for faster GPs. Religious, Time, and ToM victories are generally much easier if you have a larger empire, so that works great too.

Tech Priorities
Agriculture then Mysticism is a solid basic strategy, but not the only strategy. After Agriculture for food and growth, you need to consider commerce (sages vs. cottages), happiness (religion, carnivals), production (how are your forests vs. open hills?), and military. What you need to research for that depends on what your surroundings. I would just add that don't research too many improvement techs if your workers have too much to do, but neither should you let them sit idly.

It's hard to say when you need military units, but I tend to grab them after I found an early religion. For RoK, Bronze Working is a quick jump, FoL gives you Hunters on the way (and you really shouldn't need archers unless you want them), and OO let's you drown your warriors (warning: The Drown do not provide military happiness).

Wonders
Don't stress over losing wonders. Here's a list of my favorite wonders: all of the religious wonders (not the shrines), Form of Titan (for Amurites or warmongering), Tower of Divination (free tech), Shrine of Sirona (if you have Spirit mana, you might as well), the Crown, and the Altar. Some others look great but I just haven't tried them out enough, so experiment if you can spare a city.

For build orders, here is a tip I STRONGLY recommend;
If you got agriculture, or will get agriculture before you finish building a worker, start with a worker.

You WONT get a worker faster in any other way, and the farms will compensate for not growing in the beginning. I know it can be hard to believe, but its true.

Switch to Agricultural during the time the worker is BUILDING the first farm, NOT after, and NOT before, this will save you one turn. If you are spiritual, time it so you don't spoil any other switches with the 10 turns.

Thanks for the tips. From the sounds of it, Tier 2 units are of great importance, so I'll give them a bit more focus (although it relieves me to know that early warmongering isn't a large necessity). When I get back, I'll give a go at putting together these strategies. In particular, the one Grey Fox mentioned in regards to Worker-Agriculture intrigues me. Thanks for the in-depth replies.

Don't overlook the value of City States which in my opinion is significantly better than God King in the early game. The hammer bonus is negligible when you are working a bunch of farms, and the gold bonus is not even close to comparable to the upkeep reduction that you will achieve with City States. If you use the power of Agriculture to rapidly expand (priority on irrigated land, especially riverside), the upkeep will quickly become very difficult to manage. A switch to City States will turn a ruined economy into a stable economy.

The tech that in turn changes that stable economy into a booming one is Code of Laws. Once you have enough farms in place, switch to Aristocracy and watch your tech rate zoom. Monarchy and Horses enables the Royal Guardsmen, who can cast a spell that gives +4 culture and 1 happy a turn allowing you to have mobile border poppers and are nice mobile defensive units to boot (3/6 IIRC).

Until the shadow change to Agriculture, I don't see why you would choose cottages over farms ever. Aristocracy, Agriculture, and Sanitation makes farms into a +3F,-1H,+2C tile improvement. Cottages cannot compete with that, even DaveMcW (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5637616#post5637616) would agree. The nice thing about Sanitation as a relatively early tech is that Catapults are on the way to it and I find it very difficult to war without them in this game.

Unless there is no farmable land in my fat cross, I always start worker first while researching Agriculture.

One other minor tip: All the disciple units that can do mini-culture bombs are a fantastic part of a war stack to immediately end revolt periods of newly captured cities. In addition they can be quite powerful for helping you grab tiles peacefully if you read this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=225927).

This forum unfortunately lacks a "Newbie Tips" thread, and so I've decided to just suck it up and admit, "Hello, I'm a newbie, help!" I posted previously in regards to the Infernals, but this thread is more of a "General help" request.


Welcome! There's a short newbie section in the wiki, but that's down right now (and frankly, for much of the items you're asking about, isn't very detailed). I guess I should note that I usually win at Emperor in single-player. I haven't played multiplayer.


Basically, after finally completing my first successful game on Warlord, I've been trying to make the move to Prince. For the most part I've been playing a bit hit and miss, using different Civs, different maps and different strategies, but for the most part, I find them slipping out in the middle of the game. Either I'm falling behind in techs and so forth or my strategy has gone astray in the long term. Generally, I've decided to simply ask for general ideas on how to play the game effectively.

In making this thread, I looked through the sticky first to read some of what had been posted. May as well learn before asking :mischief:

The two I read thoroughly:

Analysis: The Opening Game Unraveled (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=182240) (Unser's Slightly out of date opening game analysis)
Getting Started, or, How to Cook for 10,000 Unexpected Houseguests (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=180324) (How to Survive raging barbarians in general)

After reading them, a couple of quick questions arose from me.

In "Analysis: The Opening Game Unraveled", there's a large obsession with cottages. Within the sticky thread it is called "slightly out of date", so I wished to check, should cottages be my top priority throughout the first 100 or so turns? And how much of a priority?

Since that was written, Agriculture went from a minor weak civic to one of the most powerful civics. It has made Farms far more viable; for that matter, around mid-game, one can argue that Cottages no longer have any purpose. I still think that they're very useful in the early game, even if I plan to get rid of them later.

In addition, the tech tree has changed a bit- Cottages used to not require Agriculture as a pre-requisite.

There was also a lot of mentions of cottages upon resources. Is this a wise course of action? Placing cottages instead of building the appropriate improvement to gain the resource benefits?

Until you can benefit from the resource directly, placing a Farm or Cottage on it is wise. Personally, I rarely do, simply because I later forget to replace it.

In "Getting Started, or, How to Cook for 10,000 Unexpected Houseguests", it emphasizes the importance of ignoring Workers in favour of Warriors, since you'll be unable to defend improvements. Does this hold true when playing with normal Barbs?

Much less so.


With those two out of the way, general question time.

Starting

Firstly, I'm having difficulty getting off to good starts. With this, I would like to ask some people's early starting strategies. Presently, my strategy has been like so:

1) Set up a city in turn one, built in a way that I'll get the best tiles possible of those visible within it's cross.
2) Set the Scout and Warrior off exploring.
3) Build a Warrior first.
3) As far as research priority goes, I've usually been aiming for Agriculture-Ancient Chants-Mysticism-Education, with the next set of research going to technologies related to my nearby resources.
4) Once the first Warrior pops, fortify it in the city and build another.
5) Once I have two Warriors, depending on the surrounding situation and technology progression, I either make a Scout, Settler or Elder Council (assuming I've reached Mysticism).
6) If I didn't go straight for a Settler, once whatever pops, my next priority is a Settler.
7) If I haven't got the Elder Council yet, I got for that and once it's done, make a Sage specilist. I usually run pacifism as well in an attempt to get a Great Sage ASAP, that science boosting building is delicious.
7) Send it off with one of the Warriors to my next city destination.
8-9-10) Lots of stuff in between, I've usually been keeping a system of two warriors per city and try to get Obelisks early in my 2nd city for quick expansion. I usually have a second worker as well. Normally I try to cottage by rivers, connect my cities together and link up resources.
11) With two warriors on stand-by, set off for my 3rd city.

From here, the route is varied. Normally I shoot straight for my preferred religion and then afterwards focus on Hunting-Archery.

Now, I'm sure this general early build set-up is flawed. A major thing I've noticed is problems with Barbs. My lone warrior guarding my settler doesn't always work, sometimes a wild animal will pick it off (damn those bears :mad: ) and occasionally, the barbs will have an evil lizardman. If I lose my early settler as well as its guarding warrior, I'm highly crippled in my opinion. As it stands, I'm figuring I should make an extra Warrior for escorting purposes.

My present, most typical one:
1) Set up my city on turn 1 if it isn't a bad spot. If it is bad (largely when surrounded mostly by water), take my initial Settler on a hike until I find a good spot.
2) Send the Scout (if there is one) exploring. Have the Warrior attack any Barrows or Ruins immediately visable (unless a Skeleton or Lizardman appears prior to the Warrior getting there). Otherwise, fortify the Warrior in the inital city.
3) Build a Scout. The earlier you start serious exploring, the better. Tribal Villages tend to go quickly, and Barbarians and Aniamals start to ramp up as well.
4) I go for Mysticism, then Education. After that, I either go for a Tier II unit (usually Hunting), or a pre-requisite for some of the more important resources. I then pick up a religion (or sometimes multiple religions). I then work towards some tier III unit (usually picking up a tier II on the way) while working on keeping my finances viable. Macemen are the most common Tier III unit I'll go after, but there are plenty of other options.
5) I next build Warriors until I get Mysticism. Once I have Agriculture, I start to have interest in a Worker; I usually get an Elder Council first. When I have a small number of cities, I'm very careful about the happy cap; going over for any extended period of time is a waste.
6) I usually build 2 warriors per Settler, and send them out in that 2:1 ratio.
7) Worker Strategy: Grasslands with a Water Source: Farm. Otherwise: Cottage. In any case, have a few Cottages. Roads for resources and linking up cities. Note that with Agriculture (civic) and a couple Farms, it's pretty easy to maintain a Sage.
8) My next 3 cities (I typically have around 4 total cities prior to running into expansion problems) typically build Warriors until they have at least 2 (in case some died on the way), and Elder Council. Unless there's direct cultural pressure against one, I ignore Obelisk, and wait for my religion to expand cultural boundaries. Note that if one of my secondary cities is food-plentiful, I'll often start building Settlers out of it instead of my primary city (and often use my primary city as a source of Warriors.
9) I typically pause expansion once I'm down to a 60-70% tech rate. At that point, I want to look at starting a war (which can easily over-fund your civilization), or concentrating more on my economy.



Now, my main questions. Priorities:

Should I really try to get my city up in turn one? Would it be wiser to scout with my settler the first couple of turns for a better starting position if I don’t have on I consider ideal?

Usually, yes. Starting locations are typically very resource-rich (they are deliberately seeded to be good). However, if it doesn't fit with your strategy, or it's a lousy spot, move the settler. A few turns moving are nothing in comparison to a lousy start.


How much of a priority should Mysticism and God King be? ASAP? After Education and a Worker?

At minimum, I'd either go for Mysticism or Education. I like both, and find that they complement each other pretty well.


How much of a priority should Hunting and Archery be? I personally leave them for a while, because of the fact I need to make an extra building to pop the units related to them. However, I’ve been starting to notice that I need more powerful units, and I’m starting to think maybe this should be a larger priority.

I don't think that Archery has much use, unless you're planning to go down the Archery tree later (for, say, the Amurites' Firebows or the Ljosalfar Archery units). Hunting depends on your situation - if you're under pressure, consider getting it earlier. If you can barely find your opponents, and your scouts are thriving, you may decide to never get it.


Military questions? How many Warriors per city? Extra Warriors? Should I go exploring around my borders with my Warriors to pick up some cheap upgrades from the wolves and lions?

2; more if you're on Raging Barbarians, at war, etc. I often leave only 1 in my initial city, but that's a calculated risk. Sending Warriors out to get promotions is a great idea- follow that up with taking out a civilization with those promoted warriors (I rarely do this, but it's quite possible).


Elder Council and Sage? Am I making this too much or a priority. Should I be making it a priority at all? I like it personally, I lose one population worth of productivity but I find the +50% from the science building really helpful and like to get it ASAP, but if it's an inefficient idea, it can easily be dropped.

I like it, particularly with Agriculture and a couple Farms. I typically drop the Sage once I'm happy with the number of Great Sages I've created.


Cottages? I asked it earlier but I’ll mention it again. Should I go nuts cottage spamming ASAP?

I like Cottages, but Farms with Agriculture are very powerful. By Mid-game, they'll likely be stronger than Cottages, particularly on Grasslands.


Cities

Now, this is where I have real problems. Nine times out of ten, once I get my third city up, that’s it. I have no more optimal city plots left to fill, so my future cities are either in “meh” positions or need to be taken from a neighbour (and I’m not too good at early warmongering). How should I prioritise my city spreading? Should I be doing it slow and precise, or should I rush for the best positions early, regardless of the nasty maintenance costs?

I like lots of cities, so I'll usually take "meh" positions when the really good ones are taken up. Note that converting to City States can help a lot with Maintenance, should you try for early high expansion. I usually aim for 70% science, which gives me a good idea of what my priorities should be(below = economy; above = spread).


Now, assuming I don’t pick up the spots if want, should I go for an early warmonger? I dislike doing this unless I have an aggressive civ. To me, it seems like all I’m doing is helping all the other civs. If I succeed in taking their city, it costs me a lot of warriors. If I don’t, well, that’s a lot of wasted hammers. Personally, I prefer to let it wait slightly, at least until I have access to Axemen and preferably when I have a Hero. Still, I’d like to hear other people’s opinions on how important early warmongering is.

I rarely warmonger early on, but it apparently can be a very effective strategy. The main trick is to use Barbarians and/or Animals to level up several Warriors so that your opponents will offer little real opposition to them. Also note that Warriors (particularly with Copper and a Forge for Bronze Weapons) are extremely production efficient (and pretty maintenance inefficient).


Wonders

Should I bother? I’ve noticed the AI always seems to snatch up the “Free Life Mana” wonder very quickly, so I was wondering if Wonders should be a priority at all? I personally don’t go for them, I usually don’t have the time, but again, I want to hear other people’s opinions.

It depends on the Wonder. Pact of the Nilhorn is one of the few early wonders that I'll occasionally go out of my way to obtain. Most of the others are nice; if I have the Technology and the production available without cutting into my other goals much, I build them. Otherwise, I don't.


Dealing with Barbarians?

What if Skeletons start streaming in my direction, or Orthus decides he feels like visiting *note: pillaging* my towns. How do I handle this? Obviously, I usually start spamming as many warriors as possible, but other things I should be doing? Should I hide all my warriors in my city or should I slot them on top of my resources? Should I try and attack or just let them run their course? (I have better combat odds defending but I lose more turns waiting for them to attack and risk losing my worker improvements, as well as turns I could‘ve spent making improvements).

Skeletons: 2 Warriors in a City or Fortified in a Forest/Jungle will take them out pretty nicely.

Orthus: Small stack of Warriors. In this case, I'll happily remove all my defending units from cities to rush towards him - it takes 3-5 Warriors, typically, but the payoff (Orthus's Axe + lots of XP) is awesome. A warrior with that alone can often take out a civilization with support.


Now, although I do have some problems with middle-game, I feel questions related to that would be civ-specific, so I’ll leave them out of it. Personally, I feel I have more problems starting than handling the middle.

Whether it helps or not, I generally like to play Small or Standard maps with the default amount of civs + 2. The map I choose is usually Oasis, Great Plains, Highlands or Pangaea. My play style is more of a builder. Normally, I aim to make a solid economy before shooting for an army, so my army mostly consists of 3-4 units defending my cities and maybe one or two others. I like going for Fire Mages prior to invasions, I find Fire Balls and Meteors priceless when it comes to invasion.

Note that if you want to wipe the AI from the map, use any map that needs a navy. The AI can't use a navy well at all, and it's even harder to do in FfH II than Vanilla.

I like Fireball, too, but I'll note that it usually isn't essential. I often can get combat odds high enough (or use enough expendable units) that the city defense doesn't matter much. Also, Catapults and Pact of Nilhorn are also useful for taking down City Defenses, as are Firebows (for the Amurites).

Finally, note that a large army can also be a deterrent to being attacked, should that be an issue.

I apologise for the essay-ish length of this, but I appreciate feedback. As well as critiquing how I start things, I’d like to see some “step-by-step” ideas of how you guys start. Ultimately, I hope to move from being stuck on Prince mode and off higher, preferably to one day being able to respectably play in Multiplayer.

[I’ll also be on holiday until Sunday, so if it seems like I’m ignoring the posts, I’m not. When I get back, I will be reading the replies with interest and appreciation. Hopefully, when I get back I can fire up a game and finally win a game on Prince :lol: ]

Until the shadow change to Agriculture, I don't see why you would choose cottages over farms ever. Aristocracy, Agriculture, and Sanitation makes farms into a +3F,-1H,+2C tile improvement. Cottages cannot compete with that, even DaveMcW (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5637616#post5637616) would agree. The nice thing about Sanitation as a relatively early tech is that Catapults are on the way to it and I find it very difficult to war without them in this game.

I'd tend to agree with all of this except for your first sentence. Until you have
Aristocracy (Civic), Agriculture (Civic), and Sanitation (Technology), or if, for some reason, you choose not to go for the Aristocracy or Agriculture civics, (or, in particular, if the plot isn't irrigated) Cottages look better (or at least less bad). Note, however, that even with neither of the civics, Farms still look pretty good with Sanitation, Scholarship (Civic) and Caste System (Civic) (+1 Food/Tile, +2 Science and +2 Culture per specialist); these also lessen the value of Aristocracy if you can keep the additional people happy. Personally, I almost always go for Agriculture; Aristocracy is far less common.

Later in the game when Scholarship is available, running a bunch of scientists is indeed attractive and it is a good idea to drop Aristocracy then, but Code of Laws is a tech that can be achieved very early to give you something to do with your huge excesses of food. An early specialist economy is hard to get going since there just aren't enough buildings that enable specialists. Even pre-sanitation, an Aristocracy and Agriculture powered plains farm is producing 3 food and 2 commerce (3 if financial or riverside, 4 if both), which is pretty nice. I like a switch to Aristocracy as soon as reasonable even before Sanitation.

Early city placements have to be prioritized for fresh water because of the power of farms. Workers that can't build farms in one city should be considering moving to another city to build farms there, working on connecting up the trade network, building roads to potential city cites or victims. Cottages I believe are low on the list of priorities there.

Another plus about Sanitation for more food that I forgot to mention is that farms spreading irrigation is on the way with Catapults (Construction) and clearing jungles is enabled with Sanitation itself.

let me make this suggestion....

1 - pick a civ that you like the flavor of and learn alot of the nuances.

2 - ask about civ specific tactics and strats.

the reason i say this , there is not a single solid strat for any stage of the game that applies to all of the civs or even to many of the starts that are offered to you.

also , many civs have multiple different trait lines that they can choose to excell at. example
khazad are seen as the highly militant group and thier mellee line is solid. however the best strats that i use never touch the mellee line and stick to recon and financial.

gl and talk to ya again soon , i hope

I appreciate the replies, and I think I have an idea set in my mind on how I'm going to approach my next game. It seems that it's agreed upon that I should start to pick a civilisation to specialise in, so I think I'll stick with the Calabim. Flauros gives me a "builder-ish" leader option whilst Alexis gives me more of an offensive option, and I quite like Vampirism. They also seem nicely suited to farms, which seem to be highly supported here :)

Hopefully I'll come back with up-beat news.

Edit: Shame, they don't get the Elder Council >.<

Yeah you have to get a Library for your first sage(s), with calabim.

Well, got off to a start (Flauros-Calabim), although what I felt was a somewhat unsatisfactory start. My early scout got mauled by a Bear and the one that followed was mauled by a hill giant. Fortunately, I had explored most of my surrounding area and I had Cardith Lorda as my nearest neighbour. I made an early burst to steal the good spots between me and him, which I did successfully. As far as techs are concerned, I picked up a couple of freebies (Agri and Craft) and went Mining > Chants > Education > Mystism > Bronze Working > Mason > Constr and on my way to Sanitation now. After that I'll shoot for Aristocracy.

The main back point was when Orthus came and stole one of my cities, taking out my 4 Bloodpet garrison (he got a promotion on my 3rd Bloodpet which pretty much guarantied me losing Nubia). I'm not sure how to approach this now. Should I put up a military force of Moroi-Bloodpets to take back my city or should I let it sit?

I have an early source of copper outside my borders (going off to colonise it now with my next settler), so, with some Moroi and Bloodpets I have a shot (I think). Over all, I'm going to go for an attack on him, so by the time answers come it'll be a bit too late, but it can be some hindsight learning for me at least.

Edit: Well, got my city back but Orthus did a runner. Quite frustrating, after losing 4 Bloodpets and several production turns I at least wanted his Axe and XP for consolation :(

Edit2: urgh. "Orthus Axe has changed hands". I think one of Cardith Lorda's guys nabbed it as well. (Further Edit) Went to war with the Axe taker and stole it off him.

Edit3: One problem I'm noticing with all these farms is that I have real happiness and health problems. I start with Law Mana so when Vampirism comes along I'll hopefully be able to get a few Law Mages in place to help sort Happiness, but Health is a real problem (further increased by Breeding Pits and Public Baths). I've founded OO and got up a Tower of Complacency at my fastest expanding city (which will become my future Feasting city) but RoK is widespread in my game, so I'll be doing my best to spread it. I can already see it affecting my diplomatic relations. (Further Edit) Damn. All my Open Borders agreements got shutdown. I've also had my first war declaration, although he's far away enough for me to feel comfortable enough to handle it. But everyone except for me follows RoK.

For your calabim game, I would start beelining to aristocracy (i think that's for vampires). Once you have vampires, you should be running the agricultural civic and have alot of farms. You actually shouldn't be very worried about health and happiness in your cities, mainly becuase you'll eat the complainers eventually. Basically an army of vampires is almost unbeatable (even more deadly if you have a ton of cheap bloodpets to come along).

With vampires there isn't a single civ that can stand up against you. All you really need are about 6 vampires. Feast them to as many xp as you can (getting them to about level 11 is good, ~100xp). Then each of these vampires should have death I, and promote 1 or 2 with death II. Every one should have Combat V. Make 1 or 2 with CRIII. Add one vampire in ther with body II is helpful (regeneration). Depending on who you're fighting (elf, dwarf, etc.) select the appropriate promotion as well. Basically you have a stack of units that have 2 movement (haste spell) and can easily have 180% of attack bonuses with as much as 300%. Even the use of 50% empowered skeletons make good (free) fodder to weaken a cities units. Using the contagion spell can weaken units defending a city as well. The use of bloodpets in the stack cannot be looked down upon either, basically giving your vampires as many attacks as you can per turn is a help to bring down cities with large amounts of defenders.

typically with calabim you have 2 initial choices, well, kinds 3.

1 - flauros - with flauros rush for aristocracy.then head for vampires.

2 - alexis - a bit more complicated. you need to decide which religion your going to shoot for since it has a very major impact on what your doing and how.
2a - OO , here your putting all your bread into 1 basket. but its a damn good basket. rush for OO making as many blood pets as you can on the way. then as soon as you get OO build drown and severous. decide on your super city where the only requirement is insane amounts of food. then head for either vampires or losha (i prefer losha ... followed by brujah). the sub part of this is deciding which great peopel your pushing for, your going to want to join all of them to your super city (i have found merchants to be best). then ... well ...
2b , ashen veil - this is where you learn what true power really can be. everyone says the OO for calabim , they are mistaken. rush for KOTE , and pop a great prophet or 2 for philosophy and way of the wicked. then learn veil. pop another prophet for priesthood and learn the tech for losha. then double back and create hyborem. with the lowered food requirement and the bonus research its strong. ritualist become insane when given vamparism. staying purely divine you will have losha , 3 high priests , 3 inquistors , and iirc 3 eidolons. force hyborem into wars with you and lay waste to everything. then as the counter grows make your beast.

they key early game is MASSIVE amounts of blood pets. whatever lives will get eaten later.

the key mid game is diseased corpses

they key end game is highpriests.

IIRC , and this could have changed ... when a bloodpet (and only a bloodpet) is eaten it removes the casted promotion.

IIRC , and this could have changed ... when a bloodpet (and only a bloodpet) is eaten it removes the casted promotion.

I'm not sure that is in. But eating a bloodpet allows you to continue attacking, and you can attack as many times as you eat bloodpets. Which can be crucial to taking a city with good infrastructure.

Well, so far I've started massing together Vampires. I've also picked up Losha and Hemah and have Saveros.

Early war caused some problems. I lost my "Feast" city temporarily, regained it fairly quickly thankfully. Lost several workers to Hunters and a lot of improvements were dropped by pillaging, but once I got some Royal Guards together and popped Saveros, I got things under control.

So far I'm starting to have some second thoughts about the Calabim. Being so Vampire reliant is kind of annoying me, I kind of like mixing it up as far as my units are concerned. Right now I've just pumped out a few Vampires, Saveros and Losha, a few Mobility I Bloodpets for food, Catapults and a few Stygian Guards to protect them. Just focusing so strongly on Vampires alone just seems a little...depressing. I dunno, I'll see how it goes. Maybe once I see their power I'll fall in love with them or something.

** Prepares to make Cardith Lorda pay for his earlier betrayal, grr :mad: **

Keep in mind the gift vampirism ability. You can get some pretty potent priests or spellcasters with it. You can also give it to your religious heros.

as to the above about the casted promo ... i tested, your correct it does nto work that way

simple thoughts you may have forgotten

- you can gift vampirism to ANY unit level 6 or higher

- you can gift vamparism to any MOROI (sp) 4 or higher

- losha gains teh IMMORTAL promotion after killing a living unit in battle

- if you ahve losha you are probably 1-2 techs away from the dreaded BRUJAH

- since you have hemah you should by now have him in the water with a stack of water walking stygian gaurds and be casting tsunami on any costal city.

- if hemah has law 3 , you can have a 2nd super city

- if hemah has ..... anything at 3 ... change your tactics accordingly , he is a damn god.

- you have made him a vampire right?

- if you build the soulforge you can pop vampires to instantly finish any wonder you want

- with 2 techs for high priests you can summon kraken or make flesh golems ... think of all the fun

- exploitation of the soul forge , losha , and flesh golems is entirely up to your imagination.

The big thing about the calibam is the gift vamparism ability. After any living unit gets to level 6, you should be able to get that unit to level 10 the next turn. Basically in my game, I only had about 15 units doing all my fighting.

In my current game, I figured I would use 1 Brujah to fight a few a few cities (trying to get the ai to waste production and time). I didn't think my level 11 Brujah was that strong, but he single handedly conquered 2 cities (each with 2-3 longbowmen and 1 crossbowmen).

As was mentioned daliadinn, you should spend the entire early game building bloodpets, if I would have done that I could have conquered my neighbours in less than half the time.

I found in my Calabim game that you are pretty weak in the beginning. If you can hold on long enough to get Losha, or vampires, you are going to become almost unstoppable. Even using SoFW, I couldn't produce enough people to feed my inquisitors, archmages, conjurrers and high priests. Since they will be at level 6 when they upgrade, they will be given vampirism and then upgrade to as high a level as possible.

As I think about it, you could easily conquer an entire civ with just Losha and a bunch of blood pets.

Gift Vampirism is nice, I'm working on getting that spread, but I still feel somewhat "limited". As for Hemah, atm I'm working on supering him up. He's at Body 3 already for Stoneskin and Water 3 for Tsunami. I haven't picked up Brujahs yet though.

Remember, you don't Need to eat population just cause you granted vampirism to a Moroi for example. He will still get the strength increase and regeneration increase from the promotion. So when you are in a war, notice when your moroi gets to lvl 4 and give them vampirism immediately to empower them a bit.

dont forget bout the possibility of making a vampire lord into a lich. its a immoral sorcery summoning vampire caster. that is a lot of fun.

Well so far, I think I've learnt a bit of general stuff from this game. Diplomacy is a big issue, everyone but me was RoK and as a result, no one wanted to trade with me and each war that gave me "You declared war on my friend" effects. I'm a bit behind in techs because of it, since no one wants to trade those with me. So, heading into my next game, I'll know to work on my diplomatic relations early (and try to found a religion early enough to spread it to my neighbours).

As far as Calabim are concerned, I’m finding myself disliking them. I like Vampires, they’re very powerful, but they’re hard to replace. You feed them a city, turn them into superheroes, wage war, but once they die, it takes a chunk of a city to try and make a new one. It’s kind of frustrating and disappointing when you see a Vampire die (and yeah, I was kind of slow getting to Vampire Lords >.<). I’m kind of finding it not to my taste, when I go to war, I quite like to have my main units be expendable and replaceable, heh. Vampires + Slaves from OO are quite handy though: Kill > Slave > Eat > Kill. Shame it’s only 25%, but I suppose it’d be monstrous if there was anything higher.

I don’t think I made enough Blood pets early on either, but one thing I’ve noticed about them is they slow me down. They don’t have Commando and some don’t have mobility, which is kind of annoying when going to war. I like Losha though, with Orthus Axe she’s proven to be a dominating figure in my army (and her voice is awesome).

Over all, I don’t think I quite have a taste for Calabim. I think I had more fun the last time I played them (maybe because everything went so smoothly or maybe because I could play around with the toys some more). It was a decent learning experience though, especially in regards to diplomacy and getting myself early allies.

Anyway, going to run this game out. I’m certain I will lose. 3rd place in points and an enemy has nearly completed the Altar. I certainly won’t be able to shoot for a domination or conquest either, their empires are too big and mature to take down (much like my own). Oh well, win some lose some :)

Either way, in my next game, I don't think I'll run as the Calabim. Maybe as the Elves, although the impression I've gotten is that people consider them imbalanced? Maybe as the Balseraphs, if only because I find Keelyn too adorable a character to pass-up (and Summoning could be fun).

I’m kind of finding it not to my taste, when I go to war, I quite like to have my main units be expendable and replaceable, heh
Try Luchirp or Sheaim for that.

Try Luchirp or Sheaim for that.
Ah, Luchirp are the Golem Dwarves right? I thought the Sheaim would be a bit more tentative about their units (except for Zombie and Summons) though?

Ah, Luchirp are the Golem Dwarves right? I thought the Sheaim would be a bit more tentative about their units (except for Zombie and Summons) though?

Well thats the point, Sheaim are great summoners. Just like Amurites are great mages. And sheaim get free units from their planar gates at times.

Khazad can produce great armies with their production bonuses, and both their leaders have traits which makes them able to afford them easier. Especially if you run a Great merchant strategy with them. Settling the merchants in capital, and running god king, with a Bazaar of Mammon, equals insane income even at 100% research. Especially with the 6 merchant specialists you can use with the bazaar + the buildings you should have by then.

Combine that with RoK religion, build Trebuchets, and Assassins, and protect them with Bambur, you got an army of units that have a low chance of dying; Trebuchets have an 80% chance of survival every turn when attacking, and Assassins always target the easiest kill in the stack. +Dwarven assassins use explosives, and has a small collateral effect targeting damaging 2 other units with collateral damage. And Bambur can repair the Trebs when they are damaged.

Hmm, you're making Khazad sound quite interesting to me now. But don't they have a bit of a rough time at the start because of the Dwarven Vault thing? But you've made them sound quite intriguing. I've only given them a go once before but I remembered they were amusing on Highlands, I quit early though because I started to figure out how the vault worked (a bit too late).

Hmm, you're making Khazad sound quite interesting to me now. But don't they have a bit of a rough time at the start because of the Dwarven Vault thing? But you've made them sound quite intriguing. I've only given them a go once before but I remembered they were amusing on Highlands, I quit early though because I started to figure out how the vault worked (a bit too late).

The things to remember about Khazad is;

They dont get Longbows, Marksmen or Flurries
They dont get any arcane units beyond Adepts
Instead they only get Slingers and Crossbows and Heavy Crossbows
Settling on rivers is a good idea, cause Breweries give all dwarven units +2 experience (not siege units though).
Their Assassins and Shadows get collateral damage
Their Trebuchets are 5/3 str with 80% Withdrawal, making them excellent at surviving, and damaging stacks when attacking.
You want Runes of Kilmorph, preferably the holy city, and preferably in your capital.
Your Vaults are great, but the disadvantage is; The cost increases per city.
Both leaders have the Ingenuity trait, making all their upgrades half price! Make sure to abuse that fact.
Even without the Philosophy trait they get a nice amount of GPP from the Vaults and if you are RoK, Arate.I love the Khazad cause their style of combat and builder flavor suits me. They are slow expanders, relying on few great cities instead of many. They get great production bonuses and both their leaders have good trait combinations.

You want an Academy in your capital, but other than that, you'd want all Great Merchants, or Great Commanders. (With maybe some Great Engineers)

Here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=226592&highlight=Dwarven+Vault) is a nice table if you have a problem with the amount of gold you need for the Vaults.


My strategy so far, has been to use one city till I found RoK, which I go for pretty early. I get a Great Sage from Writing, or I get my first Great Sage from a specialist. Then I get a market, and try to get a Great Merchant as soon as possible. When I get it, I settle it in the capital. And in combination with a merchant specialist, the market, and RoK bonus, you will get a nice gold per turn even at 100% research. And you will now soon be able to afford 2, or even 3 cities at overflowing amounts. With more merchants, and great merchants it should be easy to afford a bigger nation.

Since the map is probably getting crowded while you stayed with one city, you will probably not be able to settle more than just 1 other city or maybe 2.

This is when you build up for war. Be picky about what cities to keep, where to resettle a city and what cities to raze.

Once you get the Bazaar of Mammon you will be able to afford a new city every 3-5 turns with 500 gold saved up for each city for overflowing. Minus any spending you are doing on infrastructure.

But this is only if you care about having your cities at overflowing level. You could always settle more cities, or conquer more cities and care about the vault level later.

I thought the Sheaim would be a bit more tentative about their units (except for Zombie and Summons) though?The Sheaim have really two groups of units that they really need to protect, their connjurers/summoners and their priests (ritualists, really). Both of these types of units will likely never initiate combat, and thus all their attacking will be with disposible units--either summons or gated creatures, which can both be freely replaced.

Thanks for that post Khazad, you have me quite intrigued to try them next now. I'm tempted to give Raging Barbs a go as well, so their one city style would probably benefit from that as well.

As for the Sheaim, I've always had my eyes on them but they usually turn out buggy for me (I crash a lot when they're on the map, my guess is it's a bug relating to Planar Gates). Still, Summoning Hordes of disposable demons interests me a lot.

But I think I'll try my next game as Khazad then, Ingenuity is cool (I hate the cost of upgrading). They seem fun and you (Grey Fox) have laid out early goals rather nicely.

ya, Grey has managed to dominate with Khazad even in our multiplayer Survival games, where usually its all about just surviving the longest, since the AI eventually wins (tons of Deity AIs on a team with Always War), but using those catas and assassins its amazing lol

Hmm, intriguing. Well, I hopped up a Highlands game with them, popped my second city but when I got RoK it went to my 2nd city. For future reference, any tips on getting the Holy City in my capital (aside from simply not making any other cities until it's researched)?

in multiplayer team games you can trade your other cities to an ally when you found it

afaik, and unchanged from vanilla, it is very unlikely to found a religion in your capital if you have any other cities.

The tip is simply not making any cities before getting RoK.

That's what I do, and as I explained above. This can be harsh for your expansion, so to expand, you might need to switch to warfare.

But it also makes you able to concentrate on getting your city up in size, if you get a Great Merchant early, or just a market and a Merchant, you can get those 500 gold needed for overflowing quite early. If you want to speed it up, lower research a bit for a while.

But getting RoK in the capital can be key, unless you intend to move the capital to your second city.


You could also rapidly expand, get as many cities as you can and worry about the vaults later. But as my playing style fits with a more well thought out, slow expansion, I try to stay at overflowing before I build a new city or capture one.

And building an army to take over your neighbor isn't very hard with one city. Especially not as Khazad with +40% from Overflowing vault, +50% from God King, +10% from Nationhood (-10% from apprenticeship however). Especially not as Kandros Fir with his aggressive trait. And with their cheap upgrades, you can mass a giant army easily. Just lower research so you got enough cash to upgrade for instance a warrior to a soldier everytime they are produced. It might take as many turns to finish it, cause upgrading takes a turn, but if you make 1 every turn instead of every 2 turns, after 20 turns you'd have 20 soldiers instead of 10.


In my current game I'm playing as Arturus Thorne however, and with his organized trait I plan to conquer a large nation. Being able to build command posts is just a sweet bonus that really helps, and since I'm focusing on Assassins and Trebs, I don't miss the Aggressive bonus from Kandros. (However in my first war, I could have needed it)

Interesting. I have noticed that war wasn't too hard on my current game (although I quit, dissatisfied with Highlands map). Getting some nicely promoted troops isn't hard with the Brewery providing some extra XP, a quick wander with a Medic and March and I'd picked myself up to City Raider 3 with four guys quite quickly, made taking Jubilee pretty easy early on. I quite like Kandros Fir for that Aggressive Trait, if expansions means war it's kinda helpful, but I forgot that Organised brings Command Posts (and the units you mentioned won't benefit from Agg).

But I think I'll start over as you advised and make sure my Capital is the RoK Holy City. I'm starting to get a feel for these guys at least.

Yeah Kandros Fir sure is a nice leader. And the one I've played the most (atleast in Multi-Player), but I really like Arturus Thorne as well. Although, the only use I've gotten from his Industrious trait is building the Mines of Gal-Dur so far. Kinda hard to beat the AI to the wonder techs on Immortal. :P

Cheap Forges are a nice bonus tho. But I wish industrious had another bonus, maybe faster workers. But I guess it's a stronger trait on the easier difficulties.

At least Firaxis seemed to make sure to never mix Philosophical with Industrious which would a powerful combo.

When you're playing the Khazad, don't be afraid to lower or even stopping your research for a few turns to upgrade your vaults. Consider it researching a Khazad-only tech. The first time you might consider doing this is with God King, and a market (and merchant) or RoK (hoy city helps). If your first city isn't great or you don't like delaying expansion, once you get four cities you can move your palace (build it in the desired city). Finally, even if you're going down the recon line, you'll still probably want construction and smelting for trebuchets and the Dwarven Smithy, which gives +10% production +10% per metal for a total of +40% with bronze, iron, and mithril.

Yeah and those techs lead to additional heroes as well, as does Medicine.

Well, I think this is probably the civ for me. Quite pleased with them throughout this game. For the first batch I was God King with a single Capitol (and in hindsight, I wish I went for a more Production based Cross than a Commerce based one, but live and learn), 90% Science gradually raised my gold which was handy. I founded RoK early and spread it to Cardith Lorda, who is now in my back pocket diplomatic. Coincidentally, myself and Cassiel shared the same enemy so me and him are also buddy-buddy.

I took my first city off of the Dark Elves, Trebs are quite nice and those cheap upgrades are really helpful. I also took my second and third from them as well. Currently, those are my only four cities. I'm still at God King and making a lot of Gold even at 100% science. It's fairly late on in the game and I can't help but feel that I should've expanded more early on.

As it stands, it's Year 360, I'm in third place in the scores (and the two ahead of me are my allies). I'm 2nd in Techs behind Cassiel. I have four large and rather productive cities and a reasonable sized army. I've got 7040 Gold and earning 84 gold a turn at 100% science. As it stands, my only shot at victory, at least IMO, is to go for the Altar, which I'm currently working on. I'm tempted to raid my Dark Elf neighbours or Peppy the Clown King for some additional cities (and fun) but I'd prefer to be a bit more reserved. My empire is fairly spread and my army is too slow to catch up with pillaging invaders, and I don't want to risk crippling my economy.

Problems I have at the moment are mainly health. All of my cities are unhealthy, altohugh this may be caused by the widespread floodplains. The lost health from Forges and so-forth aren't helpful though when it comes to health.

In hindsight, I also wish my capital was better placed for Production than Commerce. At least early on I did. Would I be right in assuming that would be the preferred route? Early expansion for me required war, so I wish I could've pumped my army out a bit faster, heh.

But yeah, I definitely like these guys. I fancy trying out the Boar riders to; it's a shame I didn't get to give them a go (no nearby pigs). Are they worth the effort? They seem like they could be interesting.

Yeah production is definitely a great Idea over commerce with the Khazad. Especially plenty of hills for mines, and with the Arate bonus they can get an awesome bonus.

Couple that with producing Wealth or Research instead of units, you can get a huge increase in science or gold.

Yeah, I'm mostly playing on immortal these days (with raging barbs and aggressive AI) and usually I find that I only get to settle one or 2 cities before the space runs out. And generally someone usually declares war on me before then.

I've never tried the Boar riders, but I can really see their potential, with them being 4 strength. Especially with Kandros Fir, as he is aggressive.

For it to be successful however, I think you need to go for Horseback Riding before you go for RoK, or at least directly after. Depending on difficulty level.

Expanding like normal, as long as you stay at or over 50 gold per city, might be a good idea if you feel like you need more cities earlier. Also, being more aggressive about war from the get go can work.

But so far, having few cities have worked well for me. In my current game I got into war very early (elohim started it, even tho they were my best friends) followed by Kuriotates the next turn, both of the civs I had the best standing with and the only civs I had open borders with. Alexis later joined in, but I managed. And now I got peace with them all, but now Thessa attacked me. By now however I have like 10+ highly experienced soldiers with Iron weapons and a Bambur, all waiting for revenge on my previous enemies. And soon I will have trebuchets, and after that I will go for Assassins. In the meantime, Thessa's hunters will be nice experience for my soldiers.

Hmm, Boar Riders before RoK? I may have to try that one of these days heh. Well, assuming I can see some nearby pigs. But I'll take that into my next game, Production > Commerce for the Capital.

Would it be more beneficial to have the RoK Holy City in more of a commerce focused place however? Just curious.

The more I think about it, the more I have to say no. Consider it, a plains hill = 5 hammers under arete, 6 with Gunpowder tech (or whatever its called, never gotten to it)

With Godking, the 40% from Vault + the 40% from dwarven smithy, that is starting to become way more than the 5, 6 or 7 gold from a town under Wealth or Research, or when turned into a unit. It would be nice with a complete analyze of the value of it under the best circumstances.

I would say Food + Production with their capital. Food for specialists (merchants prefarably) and supporting the farms.

The more I think about it, the more I have to say no. Consider it, a plains hill = 5 hammers under arete, 6 with Gunpowder tech (or whatever its called, never gotten to it)

With Godking, the 40% from Vault + the 40% from dwarven smithy, that is starting to become way more than the 5, 6 or 7 gold from a town under Wealth or Research, or when turned into a unit. It would be nice with a complete analyze of the value of it under the best circumstances.

I would say Food + Production with their capital. Food for specialists (merchants prefarably) and supporting the farms.
Hmm, so Production Capital it is. But is that a yes to RoK Holy City being moved to a more Commerce heavy zone? =/

The more I think about it, the more I have to say no. Consider it, a plains hill = 5 hammers under arete, 6 with Gunpowder tech (or whatever its called, never gotten to it)

With Godking, the 40% from Vault + the 40% from dwarven smithy, that is starting to become way more than the 5, 6 or 7 gold from a town under Wealth or Research, or when turned into a unit. It would be nice with a complete analyze of the value of it under the best circumstances.

I would say Food + Production with their capital. Food for specialists (merchants prefarably) and supporting the farms.
I think building wealth, research, or culture uses the base production only, so the bonus production doesn't help.

Ideally you have some gold on a river to keep your early research going, otherwise techs will be coming very slowly.

Well, I won :) Altar Victory, even though I was 3rd place in the scores. One thing I noticed towards the end of the game was that my two allies were REALLY stingy about trading their techs.

I think I might play smaller maps next time, standard maps are a bit frustrating. The size makes a conquest victory nearly impossible. By the end of the game there were LOADS of cities all over the place, hence why I turned to the Altar =/

But I think I'll try a different approach next time, maybe a bit more ambitious on my expansion (and military expansion). Being such a tiny nation is kind of frustrating. Cassiel and Cardith must've been 2x bigger than me if not 3x.

Edit: Although I'm not dead-set on using them, Khazad are definitely up on my list. I think I might toy around with a couple of other civs first before coming to a conclusion (Balseraphs and Keelyn, Sheaim and Tebryn, Lurchuirp and the Elves mainly).

A couple of 'curiosity' questions though.

1) How come Diseased Corpses get a significant +2 Strength over comparable religion units (The Drown, Archer of the Leaves, and co.)? [Edit: Found out, the Disease status negatively affects their strength]
2) Are the Elves considered imbalanced/overpowered?

This seems like a good place to ask this. I am playing the Kuriotates on a Large map, so I expected a four square city radius with the corners left out. What I have is a three square radius with tiers of 7-5-3. My cultural borders go way beyond that. Why don't I get the fourth tier? The city display shows a radius of 3 (49 squares total) plus part of another row at the bottom.

Sprawling trait means you get to work the 3rd ring, and that your cultural borders are larger. Large map sizes only means you get more real cities available (before they start becoming settlements).

Any chance anyone's got some good tips for the Sheaim. I've been trying to get off well with them but to no avail. Early allies are limited since CotS takes a while to reach and I usually find that my early expansion and early army are both fairly 'crappy'. The fact that my army is unable to take neighbouring cities hurts a bit and I've been finding that whilst I can put out maybe 1 or 2 well defended cities, my neighbours will have 4-6.

They strike me as bit of a civ that booms in the late-game, which means I'd need to get off to a good start to take full advantage. At least that's the impression I've gotten. Any tips? :/ Asking for help worked well with the khazad, so maybe it’ll work here, heh.

Rush towards Veil, Priesthood and Summoning.

Use sage bulbing if possible, even if you are not philosophical. Try to get Tar Demons for defense. For that you need a temple of Veil and those portals. Mobios Witches require a mage guild and portal to appear.

You will get more free units the higher the AV is.

Just build adepts, portals, and those things that raise the AV. Build the Prophecy and bring up the counter even more.

Use summons for war, either with conjurers, Ritualists or both. I find Spectres to be a good choice, if you can get enough Death mana.

Rush towards Veil, Priesthood and Summoning.

Use sage bulbing if possible, even if you are not philosophical. Try to get Tar Demons for defense. For that you need a temple of Veil and those portals. Mobios Witches require a mage guild and portal to appear.

You will get more free units the higher the AV is.

Just build adepts, portals, and those things that raise the AV. Build the Prophecy and bring up the counter even more.

Use summons for war, either with conjurers, Ritualists or both. I find Spectres to be a good choice, if you can get enough Death mana.
Hmm, okay, seems simple enough. What about city expansion though, try to rush out early? :confused: And yeah, I love the Tar Demons (awesome creature design), it's kind of frustrating to pop them when you have a Mage Guild as well ><.

Yeah, expand like you would normally do. No point holding of on expansion unless you feel you got enough cities, or it's getting too expensive.

I gotta say, even attempting to go "as I normally would", I'm finding it impossible to keep up with the AI expansion. In my game with the Dwarves it wasn't too bad since the Vault helped my capital and I could muster a military force to steal from my neighbours, but raging barbs and weak military seem to be making this round impossible. In my last game I was easily outnumbered and this time around it's the same (and I'm only at half the points that my neighbours are at).

I think I’ll try and stick them out a bit longer, since I’d love to go summoning hordes of demons, but I don’t think I have the capabilities to get to that stage. This game rewards early expansion well in the long term and as of yet, I haven’t quite got that down (especially on Raging Barbs).

Edit: Wow, glad I stuck it out. 3 conjurers, 3 ritualists and a high priest are wreaking havoc with ease. Taken down two cities (and yoinked the RoK Mines and Holy City, yay for 3 Iron and free Earth Mana). Still wish I'd gotten off to a better start though, but stealing my neighbours cities is starting to make up for it. It's one aspect I missed with the Dwarves though, lacking good magic kinda hurts =/

micky,

now that you have teh high priest , get hyborem into the game ASAP. make sure the high priest has teh patriach promotion so you can control the direction that hyborem is pointed.

also , make your way to your summoners .... then cackle wildly as you realize that 1 summoner is greater then your whole army.

also , make sure you build the festivals (err iirc thats the one with chaos mauraders) its cheap and easy to get to

micky,

now that you have teh high priest , get hyborem into the game ASAP. make sure the high priest has teh patriach promotion so you can control the direction that hyborem is pointed.

also , make your way to your summoners .... then cackle wildly as you realize that 1 summoner is greater then your whole army.

also , make sure you build the festivals (err iirc thats the one with chaos mauraders) its cheap and easy to get to
Noted. And yeah, I have Summoners already, working on getting to the Eaters. And I forgot about Hyborem, heh, better bring him along soon.

Edit: Hmm, gonna start over with 0.23 installed, since I can't load the old game, heh. But yeah, fresh start over. Starting to like the look of Keelyn after this, since the Summoner trait is gun and Creative seems like it should make early starts a bit easier (at the very least, saves making Obelisks). Think I might try her again. Her character is adorable and I have a soft spot for her since she was the first civ I played in FFH2 :)

Edit: Well, she gave me a really good early start (or maybe I just played my opening better) but I quit bcause I got tired of the map. I dislike water maps and that's what fractal gave me :( Just gonna try the Elves now and then the Lurchuirp and then try the Khazad again. See which Civ I'll try and specilise towards.

Edit2: Wow, things go SOO smoothly as the elves. Playing as Amelanchier currently and things have just gone sweetly. Homeland saves me an extra Warrior in my city defenses and picking up Hunting on the way to FoL is too sweet. I think these guys may just be "my civ", that's the most comfortable starting experience yet. Early Hunters, picking up XP off of Barbs gave me some sweetly experienced guys. They went and captured some Elephants (4 early and a 5th later), saving me on making more defensive units.

Looking for strategy correction though. I didn't bee-line to FoL, I took several detours before hand:

Chants > Myst, followed by Agri > Edu > Writing (Free Sage), followed by Hunting > Animal Handling and finally went for FoL.

I wanted the free sage early, saved me making an Elder Council and spending a pop point on a Sage Specialist, but is this a wise strategy to go for? It costs three techs (admittedly helpful techs though). I also went for Animal Handling for the capturing promotion. Again, is that a good idea or not?

Over all things are going comfortably. Nicely expanded, plenty of (cottaged) Ancient Forests, an ally who's a devout follower of FoL and my nearest neighbour is boxed in and weak (and I stole a city from her to :mischief: ).

[Further Edit]

Well, got a relatively nice little empire going and I'm doing well on the score boards. Shooting for the Altar for my victory though. One thing I've noticed is how slow city capture is without siege equipment. I guess everything needs to have a downside, heh.

Edit3: I won comfortably (top of the score charts) but needed to rely on the Altar yet again. One thing I noticed about the Elves is how much harder war is without Siege equipment. I had no Reagents (and the one who had them hated me) so I couldn't get Archmages, and Fire Balls take a while to knock down city defences. Early expansion with them was comfortable though. Elves are nice for their large empires, Khazad not so nice for their smaller empires. Gonna try the Lurchuirp, Balserpahs and Sheaim once again before making a final decision but it looks more in favour of the Khazad for me personally, but that Altar has become a bit of a crutch for me =/

Edit3: I won comfortably (top of the score charts) but needed to rely on the Altar yet again. One thing I noticed about the Elves is how much harder war is without Siege equipment.

Oh my yes. I just got through a grueling (but successful) early war with Keelyn in my second Ljosalfar game. I'm trying out the Grey Fox-endorsed Archers w/ Drill promotions military (with Amelanicher), and at about 180 years in on Quick, Gilden is level 18 and borderline-unstoppable. I'm contemplating declaring on Sabathiel just to score myself Orthus' axe and really go nuts. None of my stuff below about level 6 has a remote chance of taking down anything in a non-bombarded town, though, so I'm planning to research Elementalism and attempt to steal some reagents from Cardith before he wrecks me completely.

Curiously, I think your best bet with the elves as far as supplementary heroes for conquest/domination might be to go OO for Hemah - dude is a wrecking machine with Fire 3 or a support caster who can bombard when he's not buffing. Another option, which probably won't hurt since your map ought to be moderately valuable, is to see if you can score Pact of the Nilhorn early; Larry, Moe and Curly make a solid bombardment team, and if you can get them mobility they can generally trash someone's walls the turn you reach them.

As a general suggestion from another guy who's still feeling out the mod, play with Altar turned off and aggressive AI on if you really want to see a game where you won't win that way. I scored my first religious victory the other day while theoretically going for Domination.

As far as the Sheaim go, Chaos Marauders (build carnivals or go Chaos II conjurors) and Chariots tend to be the best substitute for the infantry you lack, in my experience. If you can keep a pyre zombie or two alive long enough to get cannibalize, that doesn't hurt either. The military end of things with them doesn't get really good until ritualists and Mardero, but as anyone who's played them has seen, it gets ugly for everyone else once you get there.

Nice that you picked up my ideas from other threads. :p

Anyways, I really like Amelanchier too. As Micky up there with Keelyn, it was my the first civ I tried with FfH 2, and Elves feel more complete than many civs.

I have waged wars with them plenty, but I need to practice on waging war without siege weaponry. And since I don't like their arcane leader, I need to try and force myself to get Adepts even tho they might take a while to become mages. Also need to get a fire node, even tho Nature nodes are a perfect fit with Yvain and Druids (right?).
Either that, or your excellent suggestion of getting the Pact of Nilhorn. In my next game as Amelanchier I will probably try and rush that wonder.

Getting Gilden early really helps if you plan for an early war as well. But you need to hurry to take advantage of him. If your enemy still has warriors it's kidsplay. Don't forget to build an Ljosalfar Archery Range before you train Gilden. Ignore Combat promotions till you have maxed out the Drill line. As long as the enemy is an easy target, like scouts, warriors and on occasion hunters this will make you win flawlessly almost every time. Which will give you the momentum you need to capture the cities they got quickly.

Build Archers of Leaves for stronger attackers as they become 5/4 with Dexterous, and bring one or two archers for defense and additional attack (4/5). Try to build or bring a new archer for each city you capture. Take the Drill line with your attacker archers till it's complete, then take the combat promotions and/or specialization promotions.

Before they get Horsemen, you need to get Formation on Gilden, and preferably on an archer or two as well. You don't want to lose him to a couple of Horsemen (trust me, it can happen).

Once they get archers, Gilden should still be able to kill one every turn. At least if he has Heroic Str II and Cover. Try not to waste your maxed out Drill archers on suicide attacks. Try for some decent odds at least and keep them till you can upgrade them to Longbowmen.


That is an interesting idea to go for Hemah. It is a strong hero indeed and without siege weaponry it could be a nice option. At this point you hopefully have longbowmen (upgraded from your nice archers) which are 6/6 with dexterous without metals. 7/7 with copper and 8/8 with iron (10/10 with mithril, but that is way late game).


Another idea which I've been trying to rush to but has been unsuccessful so far, is Fyrdwells which require Deer instead of Horses. Use these in combination with your archers, take the Flanking line of promotions and you'll have 75% withdrawal at Flanking II, 85% with Flanking III (this also adds immunity to first strikes, but this unit already has that). You can start by using Horsemen earlier together with the Archers, but then I'm not sure if they upgrade to Fyrdwells but I guess they do, and these do not start with immunity to first strikes so here Flanking III is more worth it. (Tho, Fyrdwells start with 10% more withdrawal rate than Horsemen to begin with)
Use these Flanking horsemen/fyrdwells to weaken the enemy stack before you attack with your archers.

Can also complement your archery/horsemen troops with recon units, especially if you have a priest of leaves for the Poison Blade promotion.
And Assassins are always nice.

Ok, time to end this essay :P

Those are actually some interesting strategies. I think I've probably underrated the Drill Line a bit, sounds interesting (especially with Horseys to weaken the defences). The downside though is getting all of that together properly in time to take advantage though I guess, but I suppose they're techs I'd naturally go for anyway.

I never thought of OO and Hemah to be honest, FoL just seems so tailor made for the elves, but I suppose skipping a religion could work. The main downside I see though is one Hero vs Health and Happiness bonuses from FoL is pretty steep? :S

You could switch to OO once your happiness can be managed from other means, and once all your necessary forests have become Ancient.

IF OO manages to spread to your lands somehow that is. (or you found it yourself, or capture a city with it)

You could switch to OO once your happiness can be managed from other means, and once all your necessary forests have become Ancient.

IF OO manages to spread to your lands somehow that is. (or you found it yourself, or capture a city with it)
I guess, but still, it's a lot to give up.

Heh, you guys bashing Keelyn! Keelyn is possibly my favorite Leader to play as, I sometimes feel as if I'm exploiting because the AI isn't smart enough to declare war on me while I merrily destory every city they try to plant down with Loki, even better if they place it where I would have placed mine, let them settle the land for me :goodjob: It's probably a good thing the AI had no clue how to use their own units or players would have no choice but to stay at war with the Balseraphs for the entire game or until they wipe them out. When I play Keelyn I essentially force any target civ to stay indefinately in their settler growth state until I've claimed all the bits of land I want, sometimes at they build my cities for me if they plonked down a city where I woudl have built it. Loki downright owns and is completely over powered. Shame he can't gain xp but I guess if he could he would be something out of your worst nightmare, and you won't see an earlier Great Bard than with the Balseraph's, which is one of the half dozen reasons why FoL is such a great fit for the Phoule's. Although, I'll usally go for RoK, start on the Altar and then try to aquire FoL without actually adopting it so I can build some tier 1 FoL disciple units in my altar city as upgrade bait to Harlequins (usually non-elven ones are used to spread FoL; while the elven born ones are reserved for Harlequin upgrades), then switch to the Order after I get my druids out. Mainly for the military production benefits and hopefully the Law Mana from the Holy City so I can get my city improvement casters going full tilt, I usually only convert so I can spread it fast with the free acolytes, then mass produce Confessors to build out my temples before finally switching to FoL to start supporting HUGE cities. Meanwhile my insane druids start pwning civs left and right while I backfill their now conquered cities with their defenders while I go on a building spree. Of course my druids have already won the game by now and I'm just toying with doing nifty tricks, I try to keep my druids together though in case Domination backfires, so I can get my druid back with another domination, I truely fear the day I get 2 backfires in a row and suddenly I myself am besieged by my own machinations, this does slow down conquests quite a bit more than I like, but on the upside I never have to build any defensive units to hold the cities! Note*** this is not a tactic to try against magic resistant civs!!!!!

I love and hate going FoL, I hate the fact you can't build lumbermills in Ancient Forests, because I'm a production freak and like to push production more than anything else. But I love it's early food benefits. IMO, production is military might, science and commerce are only there to support production and teching to the units you plan on using for military conquests. The only problem I see with OO is it will turn you evil unless you're good to begin with then the shift is only to neutral, this shift to evil is a bad thing unless you actually want to be evil, but being evil doesn't seem to have much if any upside. Of course you could just found OO and spread it without actually adopting it but then you can't grab Hemah who an awesome caster. In short if you want to play elves with OO and particularly Hemah, Arendel should be your Leader of choice, of course Arendel is by far the best choice of their leaders anyways imo...spiritual and creative are dream traits when combined for strong starts: no anarchy, half price temples and carnivals, without a need to waste precious hammers AND 1gpt on obelisks, at least until you want to start applying some serious cultural pressure on your neighbors ;p

I didn't see any Keelyn bashing? Micky said she was his favorite leader I think, but other than that I dunno what was said?

I haven't played much with Balseraph but the guy I play most of my MP sessions with do. And I've tried them a couple of times myself in SP. I won my first cultural game with Perpentach on a small game without any wars. It wasn't perfect, I hardly got any animals, and I started with decent traits but they switched at turn 7. I did get good traits later in the game however, overall fairly good actually.

I tried a game on noble where I wanted to to apply cultural pressure with Keelyn and they really are the cultural powerhouse with their easy Bards and Loki + Gypsy Wagons. But I felt like they could have needed even more cultural oomph.

For Ljosalfar, Cultural and Spiritual sure are nice traits. But I love Amelanchiers combo, there is no better defender in the game than him. And on immortal, or a deity survival game, there is noone who can defend like him. And Raider is just the ultimate tool for a war of attrition, as well as a speedy invasion since you can use their roads.

It was a bit of a mouthful but it seems a bit much on the "Religion swapping" end of things. I've never been one to hop from side to side much, heh. But Loki does seem like fun, I tried as Peppy before and found it highly amusing. I think I need to Keelyn another try, if only because she's my favourite character. I was actually surprised at how well the AI used her, which intrigued me, they just summoned units non stop, so any invasion attempt got thwarted by hordes of disposable demons.

My bad, I misread the comments about Keelyn! I thogh yall yer bashing her as being annoying, which in the hands of a player she is!

I'll admit I don't play at that level. And while I do appreciate the value of raiders, as Tasunke is probably the only leader I've ever played and won deity with thanks to raiders and the Raider trait, I prefer the value of spiritual and cultural.

The thing with Balseraphs is you have to go RoK to even think about starting the altar earliesh in the game, as it converts you to Neutral. The Order change is very brief, just long enough to pump out enough confessors to speedily build as many Order Temples as you want for your main cities and spread the Order via the chance for free acolytes when founding the religion in one of your cities, the final switch to FoL is to return to neutrality to try and get back your good standing with civs you're not a war with, at least until it's their turn to fall. Come to think of it, I wish Keelyn was Creative/Spiritual instead of Creative/Summoner.

A very interesting thread indeed
Even if I do not consider myself as a newby; there are so many strategies you can't try them all
I learn a lot especially on the effect for the various promotions: I am more the builder type than a warrior

Im having trouble with barbarians, and since I play as Noble without raging barbs, that would make me a newbie. :blush:

The game usually starts with some rapid expansion and terrain development, but when I have 3-4 cities, Im getting swamped by barbarians. It seems that a total of 4-5 Orc spearmens, 2 goblin scouts and 1-2 skeletons attack or are moving in to attack one or two of my cities every turn. I can keep them out of my cities, but I cant venture outside my territory or improve my empire. It feels like any game progress has stopped with purely defensive barbarian-survival being the only option.
What to do?

Defend from the area around your city with mobile stacks of 2 or 3 warriors.

Combat 1 and Shock 1 helps a lot against the barbarians.

Build a couple scouts early on and set them on hills near your cities to keep the fog of war away. This will limit barbarian spawning. If there are any sentry towers, keep a unit there.
Remember that you get more XP attacking than defending. Take a risk or two early on and you may end up with a unit that is near invincible for awhile.

Combat 1 and Shock 1 helps a lot against the barbarians.

Don't forget the Orc slaying promotion. Although it might limit your useful promotions for your next invasion by taking it.

And the key to a succesful defense is to defend in the field, Never let them pillage unless you have to.

The others have pretty much covered it, but one other thing: refrain from trying to string settlements outwards. Keeping a tight nucleus of towns will tend to expand the area within which you're safe. Try to settle up against an edge of the map or a continent with at least one town, if not with your capitol.

Grabbing a Creative leader makes all this a little easier and can work as a sort of reverse handicap until you get dealing with raging barbs down.

For myself, I find that a stack of two or three warriors in each town rotating in and out of garrison duty to heal gives me the ability to go get in the way of barbarians with one of them at any given time. Sometimes you can get away with less, particularly if you manage to get to a point where you can build cavalry, but about 3 will usually do the job.

Defend from the area around your city with mobile stacks of 2 or 3 warriors.
Combat 1 & Shock 1
Build a couple scouts early on and set them on hills
Tight town placement


About the city placement, how tight should it be? Cultural "fat crosses" (2nd level) touching each other?

About the city placement, how tight should it be? Cultural "fat crosses" (2nd level) touching each other?

As tight as you can stand while the towns are still useful; fat-cross touching is a good guideline, but so long as they clear up fog and/or give the barbs multiple places to go to (thus spreading the trouble from the swarm) while being reinforceable you're fine.

About the city placement, how tight should it be? Cultural "fat crosses" (2nd level) touching each other?
If you're struggling with barbs, I would keep them close enough so that at least their lines of sight touch. Culture allows you to see one square beyond the borders, so there shouldn't be more than two squares between your fat crosses. Interlocking city radii is best, but sometimes good city locations don't line up so nicely.

If Lizardmen are causing you problems, take Orc Slaying instead of Shock.

Thanks for these tips, I played a few hundred turns in two different games, and the barbarians got a taste of vengeance :king:

Question 1:
I come to FFH mod because I discovered it through the scenario "Age of Ice".

I noticed in Age of Ice that (some types of) archers were able to reduce my stack health without directly attacking. A bit like would do a siege weapon but without the risk to be destroyed in the attack.

I try to find how to replicate this in the mod FFH (patch k)

I currently play as elfe, and trained an archer: I see nothing (classic attack). I also trained the elfes' hero (an archer), and it can not attack without loosing health (whilst range attack should not).

Do any one knows if there are any promotion / unit in the archery class authorizing this "remote" siege attack without direct contact?


Question 2: (Found the answer, see at bottom)
I can not find in the wiki or in the "Strategy & Tips " thread any information concerning Mana and why accumulating mana resources...
The excellent mini-guide made by Nikis-Knight (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=230759) is civ/leader oriented and does not has this kind of info.

Actually, in the wiki (http://civ4wiki.com/wiki/index.php/FfH_Magic_%28Feature%29) I saw: "Further, if you have more than one mana of most types when an adept is trained, it will gain corresponding spell sphere promotion."
But I am unable to find any table or idea of how much, and doing what.

What is the effect of cumulating, say, 2 or 3 Nature mana?
(do you know any thread, site, explaining the effects of accumulating mana resources?)

EDITED BY ME (I let the question 2 for reference):
Found in the FAQ (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=190988):
1 node: Your units can learn spells of that sphere.
2 nodes: Your adepts start with Rank I of that sphere for free.
3 nodes: Your units start with Rank I and Rank II of that sphere for free.
Question 1 remains

Question 1:

no, there isn't. Ranged attacks in FfH 2 cone only in the form of magic. There has been some discussion of adding this AoI mechanic, but Kael is opposed to the idea.

Ok.
kael has certainly his reasons, and he is the lead designer: his reasons can be linked to future projects he does not want to speak about yet..
At least I do not waste my time searching for something that does not exist and it is what I wanted to know.
Thank you (again) MagisterCultuum