Gaspar~
Warlord
I can play, though I'm also happy to wait another day and let Ilios play first.
Appreciate the concern, btw.
Appreciate the concern, btw.
[FFH] - Miss Mahala and the Uncultured Boors
- Thread starter Mardoc
- Start date
Gaspar~
Warlord
Pre-turn:
Ok, I think we're just playing way too slow. The AI is indeed less inept here than in base FFH, so eventually these guys are going to tech past us if we don't kill them. Only Mardoc can play Doviello as a builder Civ.
But yeah, not precisely sure what's going on here. I guess we're building a bunch of forges so we can grow. I'm not sure our stack is impressive enough to really hurt anyone. But okay, I do a little tile micro, veto no builds and upgrade a few units. We'll attack the Lanun in 2t and see what happens. And we're off...
T131: Moving units in position. Wish the Shaman's were grouped with the units a bit better. *grumble grumble gripe* I must be the most annoying person to have play after you. Also, note this - Rhoanna's about to snipe an ex-dwarven city spot from us.
T132: Math in for Gambling Houses I never build because I can't help running binary all the time. What do you want - I'm a BTS player/FFH dilettante, not the other way around.
Anyway, I set research tentatively to Engineering but saving gold, since I'd like to get some 3 move roads raiders action.
I also settle Mardoc's settler on goto that I just notice (site's fine, but goto units...) at the Sheep - call it NAPs.
T133: We get the Volcano event at Glass. And I decide that Falamar's head would look good on the end of a pole. It would too, handsome fella.
Battle of Aylsebury:
Battlemaster v. Drown @ 96%: WIN
Battlemaster v. Drown @ 96%: WIN
Battlemaster v. Swordsman @ 97%: WIN
(Fascinating, no?) Results in this:
Might want to move that x south so we can grab that pirate port.
T134: And much like an illustrious teammate here, I forgot pretty boy can cast Raging Seas. Lost a lot of tile improvements back home, so the workers are retreating from more far flung locales.
Staging at Kingsport and Innsmouth. Should have one fight next turn, one turn after.
Battle of Paradera:
Battlemaster vs. Drown @99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior @99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior @81.7%: WIN
T135:
Battle of Kingsport:
Battlemaster vs. Drown @82.7%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @97.6%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @74.3%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @92.3%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @90.8%: WIN
It occurs to me with all this razing, we might want to get ourself a Life Adept out there sometime. (This is foreshadowing.) Also Regenerate or even a lousy Thane would really help.
This pillaging stuff is pretty awesome.
T136:
Explored a lair by the intended new city - landed Supplies. Sure, why not?
In honor of my good friend rego, found Win Conditions in former Dwarven Lands
Battle of Innsmouth:
Let's set the scene - this is by far the best defended Fally-wally has been yet:
I like our odds.
Decide to toss a couple lower promoted units at the tougher defenders to soften them up rather than losing a highly promoted one...
Battlemaster vs. Drown @29%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Saverous @0.2%: LOSS, but did knock him to 6.8%
Battlemaster vs. Drown @39.6%: WIN!
Battlemaster vs. Drown @82.8%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Saverous @54.5%: LOSS, he's 0.7% now though
Battlemaster vs. Drown @99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior @63.6%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Lunatic @95.7%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Saverous @99%: WIN, and Innsmouth is ours. Won't paste another shot but it was worth 207g.
Burned the Tower of Complacency no less. This pushed the AC to 31, so uh here comes Blight.
T137: Here's what Blight looks like when you have quite literally not prepared for it in any way. Don't try this at home:
Battle of Dunwich:
Battlemaster vs. Drown @82%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @65%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @84%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior@99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Scout @29%: WIN
And that's it for pretty boy, we burned an Academy and picked up another 212g.
Wings founded for the Banana and Pirate Port. Realize we don't have fishing.
Decide to 1t Fishing real quick.
T138: Blight absolutely kicking our ass, I do nothing about it really. Crown founded for double gems and no food, because I'm terrible at Civ and you're all just going to have to deal with it. ICS ftw.
T139: Cardith completes the Bone Palace. I may or may not have been completely exhausted at this point, so there may or may not be some really
builds along with some goto's. Sorry Ilios/Darrell, whomever follows me.
T140: Razed a barb city. We're going to be seeing some serious Horsemen action before this is all said and done. That city founded for the Pirate Port is very dumb as the port has now been pillaged by a Barb galley. We met Amelanchier, who was a prick as usual. Anyway, played about half the turn before realizing this is really the next players turn. Like I said, not my best work, expect lots of weed.
Have fun.
Ok, I think we're just playing way too slow. The AI is indeed less inept here than in base FFH, so eventually these guys are going to tech past us if we don't kill them. Only Mardoc can play Doviello as a builder Civ.
But yeah, not precisely sure what's going on here. I guess we're building a bunch of forges so we can grow. I'm not sure our stack is impressive enough to really hurt anyone. But okay, I do a little tile micro, veto no builds and upgrade a few units. We'll attack the Lanun in 2t and see what happens. And we're off...
T131: Moving units in position. Wish the Shaman's were grouped with the units a bit better. *grumble grumble gripe* I must be the most annoying person to have play after you. Also, note this - Rhoanna's about to snipe an ex-dwarven city spot from us.
T132: Math in for Gambling Houses I never build because I can't help running binary all the time. What do you want - I'm a BTS player/FFH dilettante, not the other way around.
Anyway, I set research tentatively to Engineering but saving gold, since I'd like to get some 3 move roads raiders action.I also settle Mardoc's settler on goto that I just notice (site's fine, but goto units...) at the Sheep - call it NAPs.
T133: We get the Volcano event at Glass. And I decide that Falamar's head would look good on the end of a pole. It would too, handsome fella.
Battle of Aylsebury:
Battlemaster v. Drown @ 96%: WIN
Battlemaster v. Drown @ 96%: WIN
Battlemaster v. Swordsman @ 97%: WIN
(Fascinating, no?)
Results in this:Might want to move that x south so we can grab that pirate port.
T134: And much like an illustrious teammate here, I forgot pretty boy can cast Raging Seas. Lost a lot of tile improvements back home, so the workers are retreating from more far flung locales.
Staging at Kingsport and Innsmouth. Should have one fight next turn, one turn after.
Battle of Paradera:
Battlemaster vs. Drown @99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior @99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior @81.7%: WIN
T135:
Battle of Kingsport:
Battlemaster vs. Drown @82.7%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @97.6%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @74.3%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @92.3%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @90.8%: WIN
It occurs to me with all this razing, we might want to get ourself a Life Adept out there sometime. (This is foreshadowing.)
Also Regenerate or even a lousy Thane would really help.This pillaging stuff is pretty awesome.
T136:
Explored a lair by the intended new city - landed Supplies. Sure, why not?
In honor of my good friend rego, found Win Conditions in former Dwarven Lands
Battle of Innsmouth:
Let's set the scene - this is by far the best defended Fally-wally has been yet:
I like our odds.
Decide to toss a couple lower promoted units at the tougher defenders to soften them up rather than losing a highly promoted one...
Battlemaster vs. Drown @29%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Saverous @0.2%: LOSS, but did knock him to 6.8%
Battlemaster vs. Drown @39.6%: WIN!
Battlemaster vs. Drown @82.8%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Saverous @54.5%: LOSS, he's 0.7% now though
Battlemaster vs. Drown @99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior @63.6%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Lunatic @95.7%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Saverous @99%: WIN, and Innsmouth is ours. Won't paste another shot but it was worth 207g.
Burned the Tower of Complacency no less. This pushed the AC to 31, so uh here comes Blight.
T137: Here's what Blight looks like when you have quite literally not prepared for it in any way. Don't try this at home:
Battle of Dunwich:
Battlemaster vs. Drown @82%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @65%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Drown @84%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Warrior@99%: WIN
Battlemaster vs. Scout @29%: WIN
And that's it for pretty boy, we burned an Academy and picked up another 212g.
Wings founded for the Banana and Pirate Port. Realize we don't have fishing.
Decide to 1t Fishing real quick. T138: Blight absolutely kicking our ass, I do nothing about it really. Crown founded for double gems and no food, because I'm terrible at Civ and you're all just going to have to deal with it. ICS ftw.
T139: Cardith completes the Bone Palace. I may or may not have been completely exhausted at this point, so there may or may not be some really
builds along with some goto's. Sorry Ilios/Darrell, whomever follows me.T140: Razed a barb city. We're going to be seeing some serious Horsemen action before this is all said and done. That city founded for the Pirate Port is very dumb as the port has now been pillaged by a Barb galley. We met Amelanchier, who was a prick as usual. Anyway, played about half the turn before realizing this is really the next players turn. Like I said, not my best work, expect lots of weed.
Have fun.
Gaspar~
Warlord
By the by, I did really no positioning, most of our units are healing in Wings, but I'd definitely kill Rhoanna next, not just because she keep sniping our cities in former Khazad lands. Cardith will have to be overwhelmed with sheer numbers, that's a decent option if someone's up for a challenge. Combination of Raging Seas/Blight probably means a builder turnset is called for, though I think I fixed most of the Raging Seas improvements. It did mean a slower start for the new locales. I really played carelessly since nobody is going to attack us with our power rating. Sorry bout that.
darrelljs
Immortal
One kill per turn continues, and you took out a tough one 
!
Darrell
!Darrell
Mardoc
Warlord
Pre-turn:
Ok, I think we're just playing way too slow. The AI is indeed less inept here than in base FFH, so eventually these guys are going to tech past us if we don't kill them. Only Mardoc can play Doviello as a builder Civ.
But yeah, not precisely sure what's going on here. I guess we're building a bunch of forges so we can grow.
Um, er, basically my reasoning went like this:
Hmm, Forges are good. And look how long it'll take! I won't have to think about this city again for a while
.Plus a bit of belief that our army was big enough to accomplish its goals at the moment, so not much point in building more of it. I think you've proved that true
Mardoc
Warlord
Ichabod, I'm pretty sure you're up. Doesn't look likely that Ilios has a chance to step in.
Ichabod
Gaucho
Ok, I'll get to it later tonight.
darrelljs
Immortal
Mardoc
Warlord
darrell said:
How will that affect you over here? We can rearrange the order if need be to make sure you get a turnset before you go (assuming you're not busy with preparations, that is).
darrelljs
Immortal
I leave in about 16 hours, and will not be able to squeeze a set in.
Darrell
Darrell
Mardoc
Warlord
So...should we skip you, then? Assuming Ichabod plays tonight, you'd normally be up next.
darrelljs
Immortal
Hmm...if he plays tonight then I can probably squeeze a turn in the morning.
Darrell
Darrell
Ichabod
Gaucho
Turns 140-150 Report: Starvation...
Oh man, blight hit us hard. It's time to do some damage control and prepare the future invasion of the Hippus.
Turn 140:
First, let me give a gameplay hint. I think our turnplayers now this already, but maybe it'll help some of the lurkers.
When your cities are about to starve (lose a pop point) and you can't do anything about it, don't worry about working food tiles. If you starve with a -3 or a -30 food deficit, the effects will be the same. But doing it with a -30 deficit lets you get some pretty nice benefits.
Here's an example with our capital city of Hearts. This is the max food we can get, which isn't enough to avoid starvation (most likely what the governor would do):
And here's what you can do when you don't mind about starving:
4 more beakers, 15 more hammers. A nice bonus! You could be even more ruthless if you were, for example, trying to get a GP. But I prioritized commerce and hammers, while working cottages that need to grow.
I did this with every city that was going to starve. In the end, here's what our economy was looking like:
Of course, I didn't take a screenshot of the before, so you can't really compare it to anything. This is kind of a useless screenshot, but whatever...
Turn 141:
Of course, you need to remember to fix your city tiles after using the trick above (to avoid further starvation). As you can see, Hearts could be saved in turn 141:
We had cities that couldn't help but starve in turn 141, so I kept squeezing them for more hammers + beakers.
Ah, interesting thing: we have a hunter, but no hunting lodges...? I guess it was destroyed in a fishing accident (read Lanun WS). Anyway, I built another one in the capital, only to remember later that we can't build hawks yet! Damn!
We also settled the city of "Everything" in this turn, in a cow/horse location near the Hippus. You see that tile 1SW of this city? That useless non-riverside grassland? It was the tile responsible for our biggest economy boost in this turn! Why? Because once I roaded it, we got trade routes with the Hippus and the (recently met) Elohim. We probably gained like ~20 commerce per turn with this!
The name is a homage to Bob Dylan and his hit "Everything is Broken".
And just so I can
one of my partners, here you can see that while Gaspar rebuilt all the mines, cottages and farms destroyed by the Lanun WS, he forgot to improve our Iron Mine!!!
Finally, I made a trade with Amelanchier. What the heck about this guy AI? Look at this:
That + fur is what he wanted for fish. I gave in, since it's all duplicates, but damn, that's expensive... No wonder the guy is doing bad in the game... IMPORTANT! NEXT PLAYER, CANCEL THIS TRADE!!
Turn 142-143:
Engineering is ours, finally:
And after that, our economy promptly died, since we couldn't do deficit research anymore.
Seriously. We had a break even rate of 20% (picture is at 0% research), I think. It'd take 7 turns for archery... So, I started doing some things about it. First, I pillaged the ex-Keelyn land with our pillager named unit (next player should keep doing it). We can rebuild the improvements later, when or if we settled those spots (I'll explain later why I didn't do it), we are short on money, not worker turns.
I used all our slaves to rush buildings. All they do is screw up micro and cost maintenance.
Like I said, TRs with Elohim and Hippus was a massive boost. I also microed cities, especially the ones that don't need to grow anymore. In the end, things became a little better, but the unit supply cost from our armies outside our lands (ready to attack the hippus) are costing a lot.
Speaking of the Elohim, we met them this turn:
I sent a horse in his direction in the beggining of my set, since we had the maps. We should have done it way earlier. There's some benefits in meeting the AIs that we were missing.
Turn 145:
As you can see, blight is a double edge sword... Our opponents were also suffering a lot. Size 1 cities, OUCH!
We also settled two cities this turn:
Dawn was an homage to Stephanie Meyer and her great books. Breaking Dawn is really nice!
And the city of broken chains:
So, why this two cities? Well, Chains is a good location in its own right (although it already lost the iron to the Hippus city culture), but why Breaking Dawn, such a crappy book, I mean, city? Well, because we needed the mana nodes for our Tower of Divination plan. Now we have all 4 we need. AND, because now we have the Seven Pines in our land. For some reason, we can't use the damn spell that lowers the AC... I guess because we are not at war? Anyway, if the AC rises a little more, declare war on the Amurites and promptly use the spell, so the AC lowers. Better to do it before the Hippus war, I think.
Turn 148:
Here's a bit of what we are going to face in the hippus war... Not bad, I'd say. Gotta be careful!
Turn 150:
I began an effort to spread RoK to our lands. So there's a city on Thane duty.
This thane is already on the city that I think it'll be better if we spread it. It can be done next turn.
And a picture of our current economy:
General notes about my turnset:
*We finished Engineering and went archery -> Divination. We'll need Bowyers for Machinery and Archery gives lumbermills, which are nice. Divination us for the tower.
*I built some Siege Workshops in some of the cities. We can start pumping some catapults for the Kurio wars soon. I think we have enough cities with Siege Workshops now, though.
*Backs is working on the National Epic and is getting us a second GP for a golden age soon.
Next player info:
*We can build Windmills and Lumbermills now.
*We have an adept on top of a node in the north and one adept being produced in a city to the south. When divination comes in, build the needed nodes for the tower!
*We have 3 armies, none of them is fortified in the save. They are positioned in different parts of the Hippus territory, so you can launch an assault in various places. I'm not sure if the units are enough, though. BE VERY CAREFUL OF THE STACK IN THE CITY SOUTHWEST OF CHAINS!
*Rememeber the Seven Pines!!
*Building the Heroic Epic is probably a good idea.... Oh ! I just remembered we can build National Wonders due to the variant... ARGH! I'm stupid! Please, next player, cancel the National Epic in Backs...
Oh man, blight hit us hard. It's time to do some damage control and prepare the future invasion of the Hippus.
Turn 140:
First, let me give a gameplay hint. I think our turnplayers now this already, but maybe it'll help some of the lurkers.
When your cities are about to starve (lose a pop point) and you can't do anything about it, don't worry about working food tiles. If you starve with a -3 or a -30 food deficit, the effects will be the same. But doing it with a -30 deficit lets you get some pretty nice benefits.
Here's an example with our capital city of Hearts. This is the max food we can get, which isn't enough to avoid starvation (most likely what the governor would do):
Spoiler :
And here's what you can do when you don't mind about starving:
Spoiler :
4 more beakers, 15 more hammers. A nice bonus! You could be even more ruthless if you were, for example, trying to get a GP. But I prioritized commerce and hammers, while working cottages that need to grow.
I did this with every city that was going to starve. In the end, here's what our economy was looking like:
Spoiler :
Of course, I didn't take a screenshot of the before, so you can't really compare it to anything. This is kind of a useless screenshot, but whatever...
Turn 141:
Of course, you need to remember to fix your city tiles after using the trick above (to avoid further starvation). As you can see, Hearts could be saved in turn 141:
Spoiler :
We had cities that couldn't help but starve in turn 141, so I kept squeezing them for more hammers + beakers.
Ah, interesting thing: we have a hunter, but no hunting lodges...? I guess it was destroyed in a fishing accident (read Lanun WS). Anyway, I built another one in the capital, only to remember later that we can't build hawks yet! Damn!
We also settled the city of "Everything" in this turn, in a cow/horse location near the Hippus. You see that tile 1SW of this city? That useless non-riverside grassland? It was the tile responsible for our biggest economy boost in this turn! Why? Because once I roaded it, we got trade routes with the Hippus and the (recently met) Elohim. We probably gained like ~20 commerce per turn with this!
Spoiler :
The name is a homage to Bob Dylan and his hit "Everything is Broken".
And just so I can
one of my partners, here you can see that while Gaspar rebuilt all the mines, cottages and farms destroyed by the Lanun WS, he forgot to improve our Iron Mine!!! Spoiler :
Finally, I made a trade with Amelanchier. What the heck about this guy AI? Look at this:
Spoiler :
That + fur is what he wanted for fish. I gave in, since it's all duplicates, but damn, that's expensive... No wonder the guy is doing bad in the game... IMPORTANT! NEXT PLAYER, CANCEL THIS TRADE!!
Turn 142-143:
Engineering is ours, finally:
Spoiler :
And after that, our economy promptly died, since we couldn't do deficit research anymore.
Spoiler :
Seriously. We had a break even rate of 20% (picture is at 0% research), I think. It'd take 7 turns for archery... So, I started doing some things about it. First, I pillaged the ex-Keelyn land with our pillager named unit (next player should keep doing it). We can rebuild the improvements later, when or if we settled those spots (I'll explain later why I didn't do it), we are short on money, not worker turns.
I used all our slaves to rush buildings. All they do is screw up micro and cost maintenance.
Like I said, TRs with Elohim and Hippus was a massive boost. I also microed cities, especially the ones that don't need to grow anymore. In the end, things became a little better, but the unit supply cost from our armies outside our lands (ready to attack the hippus) are costing a lot.
Speaking of the Elohim, we met them this turn:
Spoiler :
I sent a horse in his direction in the beggining of my set, since we had the maps. We should have done it way earlier. There's some benefits in meeting the AIs that we were missing.
Turn 145:
As you can see, blight is a double edge sword... Our opponents were also suffering a lot. Size 1 cities, OUCH!
Spoiler :
We also settled two cities this turn:
Spoiler :
Dawn was an homage to Stephanie Meyer and her great books. Breaking Dawn is really nice!
Spoiler :
And the city of broken chains:
Spoiler :
So, why this two cities? Well, Chains is a good location in its own right (although it already lost the iron to the Hippus city culture), but why Breaking Dawn, such a crappy book, I mean, city? Well, because we needed the mana nodes for our Tower of Divination plan. Now we have all 4 we need. AND, because now we have the Seven Pines in our land. For some reason, we can't use the damn spell that lowers the AC... I guess because we are not at war? Anyway, if the AC rises a little more, declare war on the Amurites and promptly use the spell, so the AC lowers. Better to do it before the Hippus war, I think.
Turn 148:
Here's a bit of what we are going to face in the hippus war... Not bad, I'd say. Gotta be careful!
Spoiler :
Turn 150:
I began an effort to spread RoK to our lands. So there's a city on Thane duty.
Spoiler :
This thane is already on the city that I think it'll be better if we spread it. It can be done next turn.
And a picture of our current economy:
Spoiler :
General notes about my turnset:
*We finished Engineering and went archery -> Divination. We'll need Bowyers for Machinery and Archery gives lumbermills, which are nice. Divination us for the tower.
*I built some Siege Workshops in some of the cities. We can start pumping some catapults for the Kurio wars soon. I think we have enough cities with Siege Workshops now, though.
*Backs is working on the National Epic and is getting us a second GP for a golden age soon.
Next player info:
*We can build Windmills and Lumbermills now.
*We have an adept on top of a node in the north and one adept being produced in a city to the south. When divination comes in, build the needed nodes for the tower!
*We have 3 armies, none of them is fortified in the save. They are positioned in different parts of the Hippus territory, so you can launch an assault in various places. I'm not sure if the units are enough, though. BE VERY CAREFUL OF THE STACK IN THE CITY SOUTHWEST OF CHAINS!
*Rememeber the Seven Pines!!
*Building the Heroic Epic is probably a good idea.... Oh ! I just remembered we can build National Wonders due to the variant... ARGH! I'm stupid! Please, next player, cancel the National Epic in Backs...
Gaspar~
Warlord
Sorry - I know I left you a bit of a mess. Should have anticipated Blight a bit better.
Ichabod
Gaucho
Well, there wasn't really much thing to do. By the way, we have settled the Seven Pines location, but it seems the spell is not avaiable (the one who cuts half the AC). Maybe we need to be at war for it to show? Or was it used yet by the Khazad?
It's a good way to avoid the horsemen.
Ichabod
Gaucho
Report is up!
Mardoc
Warlord
Looks like this didn't happen. So - back to Ilios. Let's see if we can't end this thing before Darrell's back.
Reading Ichabod's report nowish, I may have thoughts in a bit.
Gaspar~
Warlord
Good set, Ichabod - just what we needed. I confess I basically ignored responding properly to Blight as you did because I was very tired and wanted to finish off the Lanun before passing the save on. So nice work on the recovery. I did see that trade option with Amelanchier but rejected on principle, even if as you correctly surmised we probably needed the fish more than we needed duplicates of all the other resources.
I was convinced you were trolling me with "Dawn" before I read the spoiler. Turns out I was right. Well played, sir.
I think the next player has to attack the Hippus whether it looks great or not. At some point our early lead is going to fully dissipate and having Iron Champs alone as a military force won't cut it. So I think we need to kill as many opponents as humanly possible before they catch us on tech. Hopefully the war machine will carry us through the last few.
I was convinced you were trolling me with "Dawn" before I read the spoiler. Turns out I was right. Well played, sir.
I think the next player has to attack the Hippus whether it looks great or not. At some point our early lead is going to fully dissipate and having Iron Champs alone as a military force won't cut it. So I think we need to kill as many opponents as humanly possible before they catch us on tech. Hopefully the war machine will carry us through the last few.
Mardoc
Warlord
Nice turnset, Ichabod. Looks like we're mostly over the blight, ready to go cause more mayhem!
If we can't handle the Hippus, we can get another significant GNP boost by knocking out the little guys - go raze the Clan and Amurites (and Kurios?) and pillage every tile, and that'll be another couple thousand gold. I think we're actually pretty competitive on GNP because of all our Raider income.
Also - we might consider researching Alteration, getting a Life Shaman, and sanctifying all the ruins we can, if Seven Pines is non-functional for whatever reason. Or maybe just trading with the elves for Life.
I think the next player has to attack the Hippus whether it looks great or not. At some point our early lead is going to fully dissipate and having Iron Champs alone as a military force won't cut it. So I think we need to kill as many opponents as humanly possible before they catch us on tech. Hopefully the war machine will carry us through the last few.
If we can't handle the Hippus, we can get another significant GNP boost by knocking out the little guys - go raze the Clan and Amurites (and Kurios?) and pillage every tile, and that'll be another couple thousand gold. I think we're actually pretty competitive on GNP because of all our Raider income.
Also - we might consider researching Alteration, getting a Life Shaman, and sanctifying all the ruins we can, if Seven Pines is non-functional for whatever reason. Or maybe just trading with the elves for Life.
Ichabod
Gaucho
If he wanted all those resources for a fish, imagine what he'll ask for his mana?
I considered the same possibility, Mardoc. I thought the Kurios would have a double life mana with the Tomb of Sucellus, but I was mistaken about their palace mana. Alteration would also give enchantment, which is pretty useful. It's certainly a possibility, if the economy holds.
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