FFH -- We don't betray or kill all of our allies

I think we should wait with the golden age. Until we have some forest and cottages on the rest of our continent.

Yes, units are just units, once we have 100% strength bonus I find that taking drill is the strongest option. It works against almost all units. It scales multiplicative with the strength bonus.

If we want to build a fleet of privateers we should probably go for iron working first since we need iron.

An option I'm consider is trying to get order to make Garrim Gyr like us better. I think we will soon have no problem keeping our power ratio up against him. But better might to just kill him instead.

I agree with getting a second religion since OO is started it is the best option. Divination next sound correct.

Why would we need iron for privateers?

Also, I don't think we should touch Garrim. Let's hope he can hold a while against the Ljosies. They will declare on us sooner or later anyway. Let him be a buffer as long as he lasts. Also, if we're not at war with him we can sell him techs and get his gold via resource trades, just as I did (don't forget to cancel the gold gifts )

I think planting privateers outside the city the ljosalfar captured should work. Probably they will send fleets there to reinforce their attack.

You are right about privateers. I guess I was fooled by cooper being listed last.

Folket said:

I think planting privateers outside the city the ljosalfar captured should work. Probably they will send fleets there to reinforce their attack.

You are right about privateers. I guess I was fooled by cooper being listed last.

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Yes, that's a good idea We should also send out a small fleet to pillage the Ljosies and blockade their cities, although they'll probably have arcane barges now too...

I'm not certain. That would require a fire mana. From their invasion force it did not look like they had fire. But perhaps Amelchair has fire mana.

I will try to write a PPP now.

PPP for 10 turns.

Kill Illian. Should be able to do it next turn with our hero.

I will try to send our hawk to the Ljosalfar land to scout. I found their border to the southwest.

Get 4 privateers to move to the city they captured from Luchiurp to intercept any transports.

Build a couple of settlers to settle the coast. With GLH they pay for themself fast.

Tech message of the deep, then divination. After divination it looks like a lot of techs are interesting. If I get there I will start trade with 0% research.

Will upgrade one hunter to assassin. Is he going to get Aeron choosen at once then?

Will sell message of the deep to Garrim to try to fight FoL influence. I will but our OO guy in the highest production city without FoL and start a temple. I will probably not start spamming disciples yet. If FoL influence goes up I will start building disciples and put them in FoL cities to dilute the influence.

Folket said:

PPP for 10 turns.

Kill Illian. Should be able to do it next turn with our hero.

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Yep, let's rid the world of this nuisance

Folket said:

I will try to send our hawk to the Ljosalfar land to scout. I found their border to the southwest.

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If that works that'd be great I couldn't move either of the hawks, so I had to rebase one to a hunter.

Folket said:

Get 4 privateers to move to the city they captured from Luchiurp to intercept any transports.

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Cool. If there's time we will need a few more privateers to get to the Ljosies and pillage and blockade. Nice money to have there.

Folket said:

Build a couple of settlers to settle the coast. With GLH they pay for themself fast.

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Could be even more than a couple. We want to settle (at least the coast) as soon as we can. The Ljosies will not drop a city in the middle of our land.

Folket said:

Tech message of the deep, then divination. After divination it looks like a lot of techs are interesting. If I get there I will start trade with 0% research.

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Got some adepts ready on mana nodes waiting to improve them. I think trade is fine.

Folket said:

Will upgrade one hunter to assassin. Is he going to get Aeron choosen at once then?

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That's fine. I didn't have time to get either of them to a hunting lodge. I suppose the event should trigger the turn after the upgrade, shouldn't it?

Folket said:

Will sell message of the deep to Garrim to try to fight FoL influence. I will but our OO guy in the highest production city without FoL and start a temple. I will probably not start spamming disciples yet. If FoL influence goes up I will start building disciples and put them in FoL cities to dilute the influence.

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I think we may also want to switch to OO for 5 turns during a golden age and by then we want a few OO temples ready to build 1-2 cultists in all of them. How many would we need? (I'd say at least 4, possibly more if we want to split stacks.) If the Ljosies have as many coastal cities as we do, cultists are OP. (Shame that we don't have Fanatism yet ) So I'd probably spread OO first in Nameless Tower, build a temple immediately and build maybe 2 disciples to spread it to two more good hammer cities which can then build the temples too. I'd like to fire that GA as soon as possible, I think the Ljosies are going to target us soon and by then we want to be ready for them.

EDIT: If you finish three libraries on your TS don't forget to start TGL if it's still available (btw. it's be great if you could post at least the TS log after you played. Since you're not recording happenings in the world I have no idea which wonders are still to be had, I don't know whether Acheron's still alive or not, etc. The TS log in spoilers would be fine.) Long term TGL would probably be best in our Prophecy of Ragnarok city, but that spot needs Construction and Sanitation to be really effective so I guess Thariss will do fine.

It seems like we are agreeing. Yes, Cultists should be very strong.

I guess I'm good to go?

Folket said:

It seems like we are agreeing. Yes, Cultists should be very strong.

I guess I'm good to go?

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Good luck

T278
Guild of hammers built somewhere.
Illians destroyed.

T282
Garrim demanded gold from us.
Celestial compass was built somewhere.

T283
Our assassin becomes Aerons chosen.

T284
3 transports come from the west. I choose to upgrade one trimene and move our small army there to see if they plan to land. Amelchair has 80 units in Dirage on the other side of the ocean.

T285
Ljosalfar declared on us and landed 16 units next to Stratus.

T287
Killed of the last of Amelchair invasion force. My privateer sank all three boats after they had unloaded. My looses were 1 priest and 1 warrior.

We are four turns away from the great library. No idea how they manage to let go of that one.

Trade will probably improve our economy by 30 something. And our cities in the south have started to grow so our economy will be growing now.

I think we should get deception. The Nox Noctis building is very nice and will help massively with money. Especially if we find room for mathematics. But we have other options as well. Sorcery would be very nice.

This is a got it.

I had a hunch the Ljosies would declare (a picture of the stack would have been helpful). I noticed this behaviour in other games and it's again bad design. The AI should not declare war while it's at war with other civs IMO. (Btw both Amelanchier and Arendel were pleased with us ever since we met them and they shouldn't be able to declare at Pleased, but apparently we're overruling the xml values here )

Are you building TGL in Namelss Tower for failgold? It should go either to Thariss or Lakis. Nameless Tower is a pure production site and will never spawn a GP. (Nameless Tower should have built a temple of the Overlords by now plus a disciple!!! Why did you spread OO to Dunwich??? (I actually wrote all that down prior to you starting to play and you agreed on them?)

I'd be against Nox Noctis for now. Spreading CoE costs 30 gp / city which means it will pay back in 60 turns. The prophet could fire a GA instead which will give us tons of commerce and hammers. Plus we want to switch to OO briefly to build some Cultists. We better do that during a GA as we'd be wasting 4 turns switching back and forth (we also have to switch civics).

The adept should have finished the Sun node by now (you can build a turn into the node, haste the adept and then build for another turn). Our adepts could be scorching all of Auric's land by now. The law node OTOH isn't important right now IMO, as we don't need Loyalty (and I'm assuming we don't want to use the ToD on Sorcery or something, rather Strength of Will or Pass through the Ether?)

You didn't cancel the gold gifts to Garrim (I even bolded that in my TS report). That cost us 24 gold last turn.

As for tech path I'd suggest after Trade Elementalism --> Col --> Currency --> Taxation --> Sorcery (or if the Ljosies get tougher then Sorcery right after Elementalism and then the rest).

Cities to recover from war. Adepts to scorch every ice tile in our FCs starting with the high pop cities. Priests to bloom. Will try and take out the Ljosies with the navy before they actually land. Otherwise defend as needed. Dunwich to build a disciple to spread OO to Nameless Tower and Idris which should then begin on the temples to be ready for the switch. Fire GA as soon as they're done.

I wanted to avoid the 10% chance of OO failing. Nameless tower was busy with the settler as long as Dunwich was and Dunwich had ok production.

I'm very suprised the AI has not been able to produce the the great library so I choose the fastest site I could find.

I do not think about hasting the adepts. That seems like a bug to me.

It seems like I do not have the rutine yet to play succession games accuretly. I need to learn what I should discuss and what I can make my own choices about.

Folket said:

I wanted to avoid the 10% chance of OO failing. Nameless tower was busy with the settler as long as Dunwich was and Dunwich had ok production.

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It's not the end of the world but the disciple could have got to Nameless Tower while the settler was in build and the city could have built a temple and a disciple by now due to its higher production.

Folket said:

I'm very suprised the AI has not been able to produce the the great library so I choose the fastest site I could find.

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So far I've finished ~50 games with this mod and the AI never built TGL in a sigle one of them. The Ljosies could have finished it eons ago. I'm sure it's a bug but why not capitalize on it? So far we've only faced bugs that were disadvantagious for us in this game.

Folket said:

I do not think about hasting the adepts. That seems like a bug to me.

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No, this works as designed. You can always haste a stack after it made its move.

Folket said:

It seems like I do not have the rutine yet to play succession games accuretly. I need to learn what I should discuss and what I can make my own choices about.

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The problem is, you keep forgetting to do what we discussed and agreed on. I always play in windowed mode and have this thread open while playing my turns, plus I make notes about stuff I want to tell you about in the TS report.

When did you find time for 50 games? If that is the case I guess a little fail gold is not that bad to have.

I think we should let our southern cities grow a little before the golden age. We should also build a summer palace, perhaps in the without units city?

Folket said:

When did you find time for 50 games? If that is the case I guess a little fail gold is not that bad to have.

I think we should let our southern cities grow a little before the golden age. We should also build a summer palace, perhaps in the without units city?

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I played about 35 FfH games without Tholal's mod before we started this game and about 15 afterwards. Tholal didn't change TGL behaviour as far as I could tell.
If we want to delay the GA we should tech up to Taxation asap. Our economy needs it badly.
Besides, we could then switch to Caste during the GA. (I however feel it'd be better to fire the GA as soon as possible to get Taxation faster. Plus having cultists will give us good defense against the Ljosies and a good attack force later. They have tons of coastal cities.)

As for his stack. It was 33 tigers, 30 priest, 10 mages and some rangers/champions.

I think I have played 3 single player games, 1 MP and a few scenarios with Tholals patch. And a couple of them before we started.

I have tried to get the Erebus in the Balance mod but I can only find it on modDB and it says the files does not exist anymore.

Folket said:

As for his stack. It was 33 tigers, 30 priest, 10 mages and some rangers/champions.

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I thought you said it he landed 16 units?

The EitB file does exist on mod DB but I think you need to register to download it. I had some trouble getting the file too, but now I finally have it (will assist in an EitB MP game over at RealmsBeyond, so it was absolutely necessary ) The newest version is v9. (The link I originally posted seems to work for me, it does start the download on EitBv9.) Anyway, if you have trouble downloading it, I could upload the file somewhere (it's a huge installer as it contains the base FfH mod as well).

I thought you asked for the ones standing in Dirage.

The units he landed was
2 ranger
4 tigers
4 priests
1 hunter
1 mage
2 champions

Seems like I have forgotten the last two. Was it one more tiger and a champion?

The champions had strengh 6.

I should have an autosave at home.

He did manage to schock me when running his commando, upgrades roads guys past my guys into our land on his second turn.