FfHotM 2 Spoiler thread

Nikis-Knight

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From the second Fall from Heaven Game of the Month, here. No rush if you haven't gotten far yet, the thread's not going anywhere. :)

Spoilers throughout, of course. Best not to read if you haven't explored the whole map.






So how's everyone doing? I played through half-way twice (wanted to make sure map was somewhat balanced.) I'm curious who of the AI's are doing well. Elves are leading mine, with Elohim also doing well, and dwarves and Balseraph in last.

Did you notice the 'wilderness' areas, death valley and monster island?

In my current game, Acheron never spawned, despite a nice starting Barbarian city. (It was conquered by the elves pretty quick.)
 
I finished, a religious victory in 510. The lanun and elves did the best, the balseraphs might have kept up but they had an accident. The gregori and khazad never got very far and the elohim had one too many wars and fell behind despite having a decent amount of terrain under their control. Didn't see death valley, just a couple dwarf settlements, but I saw the island before falamar killed them off and settled it.

I rushed the cavalry line, built the ride of the nine kings in my capital placed right of the upper sheep, and built magnadine with a 100% withdrawal rate. Acheron had spawned below the balseraphs, who I'd gone to war with as soon as possible to avoid diplomacy modifiers, he was still there and I captured him, game over. They were squished in short order and I decided to go AV and summon hyborem since things were so friendly. I got defensive pacts from falamar and amelanchier, switched religions, summoned hyborem, and the gregori built the gate the same turn, they too met a very messy ending. By this time I was in second place behind falamar.

For some reason the suicidal khazad and hyborem declared war on me about the time I finished him off, which was problematic since both the elohim and ljosalfar were building altars up. Fortunately I bribed my trusty allies to help kill the khazad and elohim. Falamar even dropped a couple cities himself. Hyborem was a little less irritating, I killed his avatar with mardero twice and he shut up and left me alone.

I had built a ritualist a little earlier thinking to bring falamar in against amelanchier with a patriarch, but the bastard flipped him to leaves a few turns before I had one. I was sure I could kill him off, but my defenses consisted of single crossbows. I decided to get the nexus to simplify things, starting to see why I took so long yet?

It worked out fairly well all things considered, I don't know how long I had left but it was down to the wire, he'd already researched the tech and had built the sixth level earlier. Fortunately I had 9 national cavalry units with 85 and 95% withdrawal and my godlike magnadine and acheron, who could attack five and four times a turn at 100%. I didn't even use my patriarch for most of the city drops, just hit them with my invincible cavalry and acheron scaring the crap out of the counter attackers. I lost about fourty units the entire game, workers and hawks included. The only summons I used was acherons meteor as a defense dropper aside from a few fire elementals as guards towards the end. They aren't damage casters, but c5/blitz knights with 95% withdrawal are awfully damn close.

I knocked him down to an island city, which had the good fortune of having AV, flipped him to my side, made peace between the warring sides, dropped the khazad capital I'd saved for later, and then decided to go for a religious victory instead of killing my game long ally. I then spent the next 80ish turns running around getting rid of religious with a single inquisitor, I got to use the project to clean my own cities, but I had to do a bit of whack-a-mole on falamar because the bastard refused to switch to theocracy and I had all of the religious foundings upgraded to spread them. It took so long I killed the elves by culture flipping the island city.

I think the worst part was having to use 3 speed mobility 1 rangers to protect my 100+ xp national units and my 400+ xp magnadine from all those damned marksmen, shadows and assassins that amelanchier was building in swarms. I managed to avoid losing anything but hawks to them the entire time but it would have been preferable to move at four speed instead.

It was a fun map, but a little easy. I probably should have killed acheron instead of capturing him, he was damned unfair.
 
I have a log at home so I will edit this post later.
All I want to say for now is that I started not bad, I did well to not settle where Vulcans wanted, I would have also lost horses ( :p ). I'm at war with Balseraph and winning pretty easily since I took Animal Husbandry + Horseback Riding from huts and I got a coupla Spiders (early game still). Yeah I know, I was extremely lucky, too bad I deleted FFH2 023.
 
Heya, first post here. I love the GotM idea, just never got into it before. And I may be biased since this is my first, but I think this is a really awesome map, Nikis. :)

I normally just play on Prince, and occasionally lose games even on that difficulty. So Monarch was a step up for me, and I came into this expecting to die a horrible death at the hands of a madman.

And I did. But it was my own stupid mistake that caused it. Things actually went really well for me for the most part, and I had good luck with huts as well.

I went for writing first, then Trade. Through my trades, I found myself able to research OO before anyone else, and I took a gamble on it and won. So I founded OO and sent it out to Falamar and Einen Logos.

Acheron spawned in the central barbarian city (Straatus I think), and I used him to block off any possible invasion into my nation from the NW, while my second city was placed near the mountains to the West to block off any invasion from the SE.

I decided to attack Perpentech around the time I finished Stirrups as he was around 2nd on the list and I don't trust him, even though he adopted OO. Plus, with my West blocked off easily and Falamar friendly to the north, his lands would be easy to hold. I sent in about 8-10 horsemen, planning to use my Horse Archers as backup and a second wave, and easily took the first city. I got careless attacking the second, however, and my army was decimated. I was also unable to bring Falamar or Einen Logos into the war, as Falamar was friends with Perpentech and Einen didn't even know who he was! I should've checked first, eh? Then Perpentech entered my borders, and my Horse Archers couldn't keep him at bay.

I might actually have pulled through this, but it would've been tedious and likely have been a big waste of my resources to do so, making me plummet in the rankings and opening me up to attack from the Elves (who at this point disliked me greatly, after attacking their friend and adopting OO.) It was a fun map, though, and I did make saves in case this happened, so I reloaded from about 10 turns before the war.

For the purposes of the GotM, I lost. But I'll post a summary of what's happened after the reload, though, without giving away anything like mithril spawns, etc.




After my reload, I waited and attacked with more units, kicking Perpentech out of the south, then made peace. Next I attacked Falamar because he was #1 in the rankings and had some resources I wanted, but a small military. I took 5 cities and then finished off Perpentech by taking his two cities in the north.

At the end of this war the Dwarfs took Acheron's city and attacked me, but I fought them off and took Acheron's city from them, then made peace. I made defensive pacts with Falamar and Einen Logos, mostly for the reputation bonuses, but then Amelenchier declared war on Einen Logos so now I'm at war with the Elves.

I launched a sea invasion on his west border and a land invasion on his east, but both are going poorly. I've already lost my hero and two highly promoted war chariots, and his assassins have killed off all my mages, catapults and cultists. I guess they target weaker units in a stack first? I didn't know about that. I can still win the war because of my massive production, but it'll be tougher than I hoped for, and if the Dwarfs decide to attack again I may be in trouble.

Current rankings are:
3821 (me)
2281 (Einen)
2148 (Cassiel)
2030 (Amelenchier)
1654 (Falamar)
1280 (Kandros)--the low score can fool you, he has approximately 8 billion Trebuchets
 
I had big plans to take screen shots of important moments but when I was actually playing I completely forgot to do so.

So here is a rough summary of how things played out for me.

I started the game up using the advice given in the pre-game thread. I focused on my capital far longer than normal for me and really worked on slow but steady growth.

I worked my way down the mounted tech line which caused me to miss out on founding any religion. The elves of course got leaves and the dwarves of course got runes. At this point I was decent friends with lanun, gregori and Khazad. I had deliberately not done much with elohim or Perpentach trying to focus on keeping good relations with the neutrals.

Perpentach founded OO, elohim founded the Order, and runes was spread to lanun. This left only me and gregori without a religion. I had the choice of going for OO, runes, or leaves. I decided at the time it would be far easier to go for runes and focus on taking out PPP.

During this time I had built up an army of Horse Archers but I had little else in the way of a military. After I switched to runes I was able to build B before anyone else. Using him and my army of horses I started a war with Perpentach. Unfortunately for me my initial estimates of how strong my army was were way off.

I managed to take a single city but lost most of my horses in the process. So I sent the rest on to pillaging and killing any units that left the safety of a city. A few turns later I was able to sue for peace.

I spent the next few years building up to War Chariots. As soon as I had three, I went back and destroyed Perpentach.

During this time lanun and the dwarves had declared war on elohim and had totally destroyed them. So at this point in the game only the neutrals were left, and despite the two religions, everyone basically had excellent relations with everyone else. I could not get anyone to declare war on anyone else no matter the offer.

Right about then I received the notice that the elves had build the level 6 Altar. I did not even have a level 1. I decided at that point to try something fun and see if I could beat them to level 7. So I built up farms in every square of my capital, switch all my civics around, and focused on pumping out as many prophets as I could as fast as I could.

The rest of my cities started to build nothing but soldiers of kilmorph which I would stockpile for the rush to the final altar. I was ahead of the elves in research and so I had some time. By the time I was able to research omniscience I had been able to rush out the 6 prophets needed. In that time I had built enough soldiers to instantly build almost half of altar 7. I then switched everyone over to building gold, dropped my science to 0, and then just waited until I was able to buy the shrine for around 10k gold.

First game in FFH I have won at this difficulty. I had a blast, though I really think games are more fun without the shrine clock.

Looking forward to the next game with .25
 
Call me crazy but it looks like i am one of the few culture guys. I build enough units to defend myself then build all possible wonders, culture buildings and begin taking over in that method. Of course i eventually get mages and have some fun , but if i have the time for a long game i love to do this.
 
Culture and the Altar are IMHO the easiest ways to win.

I am going to try hard next game to try a different path to victory. So far I have never been able to pull off a tower win (SOOO much harder than an Altar win), we will see.
 
I'm still a bit early in my game. I'm training up some of my early horsemen. I've got a spider and bear that also have CR5, Movement 2 supplementing my horsemen. I've got decent relations with the elves and wiped out perpentarch and thus have a decent swath of land that I can settle now. Unfortunately Archeron has spawned in a barbarian city just south of perpentarch's capitol, and I have yet to deal with him. I'm trying to wipe out the elohim, but they've got hunters guarding their capital on the hill, and thus I'm not able to bust through that at all. Will sue for peace after razing his territory, so that he's got to spend his time recouping and use my spider and bear to keep his workers at home. I really hate Hunters guarding cities. It really does seem quite wrong.

I have won the tower victory as the kurios in a game where I founded the Runes. I had alot of territory claimed thanks to an army of 6 Giant Spiders.
 
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