Barbarians & Animals

I tried something new instead of my usual Huge map with raging barbs. I kept the Fantasy Realm map with 9 AI civs and chose to play Sheelba with the BAR trait. Actually, I wanted to try out the Nature's Revolt ritual, but, sadly, never got that far.

Things started off great. I got four Worg Riders when my goblins landed on Wolves. I got a couple of free Spearmen too. Also, lots of experience and gold as I sent the Riders and Spearmen out to explore the map and seize all the goodie huts. I had over 1,000 in gold with the map about 80% explored.

I was watching my score closely so as to avoid going 50% in pts over the next AI civ. I was firmly in the middle of the pack.

Then, disaster struck.

Incredibly, in two turns, my guys popped loose three free Technologies for goodie huts. This caused my score to go up to 105.

The next civ, Von Gosam, had, you guessed it, 70.

Well, all hell broke out as my troops still in the field, and unable to make it back to defend my cities were quickly killed. My cities were protected each by a lone Spearman with only Combat 1 and after the swarming barbs did u-turns to come after me, my cities were destroyed in short order.

I went from being in good shape, to getting those 3 free techs (usually a great thing!), to losing the game.

Just another reason why it is so much fun playing this mod!!!

chocmushroom said:

I've just had a Worg-Rider attack my settlement, it's turn 76.
I think this is very early for a normal speed game, I only had access to strenght 2 units, I was very lucky they attacked my city & didn't go destroying my lands.

Click to expand...

Personally, I love this sort of thing. You never know when a lowly barbarian goblin will form that sacred union with a lowly wolf to make a worg rider

Keeps ya on yer toes!

- Niilo

Sarisin said:

Then, disaster struck.

Incredibly, in two turns, my guys popped loose three free Technologies for goodie huts. This caused my score to go up to 105.

The next civ, Von Gosam, had, you guessed it, 70.

Well, all hell broke out as my troops still in the field, and unable to make it back to defend my cities were quickly killed. My cities were protected each by a lone Spearman with only Combat 1 and after the swarming barbs did u-turns to come after me, my cities were destroyed in short order.

I went from being in good shape, to getting those 3 free techs (usually a great thing!), to losing the game.

Just another reason why it is so much fun playing this mod!!!

Click to expand...

That's what autosave is for!

One thing I really like about FFh is that every game brings new and unexpected things during play - especially with the raging barbs.

In my current game with Grigori, I had the gift of two amazing stacks of barbs. The first was 15 goblins. All goblins. The second was a stack of 17 Lizardmen. All Lizardmen. I have had bigger stacks come at me (30 is my record), but this was the first time I saw stacks with just one type of unit in them.

The Lizardmen were problematic as I lost a good defender - I really wish I could choose my defender as I had less powerful units in the city with full health, but the AI selected the same defender (A Hunter upgraded from an Adventurer) until he was killed.

The goblins, the entire stack, were dispatched by ONE hunter.

PS. What happened to the Combat 1 promotion the Hill Giants had?

Sarisin said:

One thing I really like about FFh is that every game brings new and unexpected things during play - especially with the raging barbs.

In my current game with Grigori, I had the gift of two amazing stacks of barbs. The first was 15 goblins. All goblins. The second was a stack of 17 Lizardmen. All Lizardmen. I have had bigger stacks come at me (30 is my record), but this was the first time I saw stacks with just one type of unit in them.

The Lizardmen were problematic as I lost a good defender - I really wish I could choose my defender as I had less powerful units in the city with full health, but the AI selected the same defender (A Hunter upgraded from an Adventurer) until he was killed.

The goblins, the entire stack, were dispatched by ONE hunter.

PS. What happened to the Combat 1 promotion the Hill Giants had?

Click to expand...

If you mean the Combat I on the giants created with Pact of the Nilhorn it removed it when I gave them their pillage and bombard ability.

I am presently playing my first game of FFH2 on Chiefton level and have a question regarding barbarians being too powerful. The game started out much like most of my games in FFH1 but at about turn 500 or so the difficulty dramatically increased. Since turn 600 I am fighting shadows, heavy crossbowmen, rangers and the like. I am also fighting, from time to time, goblins and orcs. I am having no real difficulty fending them off but the other civilizations are disappearing quickly as they seem to have warriors and archers only. The Malakim were down to one city until I came to their aid. Is this balance between civ's and barbarians correct; if left alone I would win by default.

Ankhman said:

I am presently playing my first game of FFH2 on Chiefton level and have a question regarding barbarians being too powerful. The game started out much like most of my games in FFH1 but at about turn 500 or so the difficulty dramatically increased. Since turn 600 I am fighting shadows, heavy crossbowmen, rangers and the like. I am also fighting, from time to time, goblins and orcs. I am having no real difficulty fending them off but the other civilizations are disappearing quickly as they seem to have warriors and archers only. The Malakim were down to one city until I came to their aid. Is this balance between civ's and barbarians correct; if left alone I would win by default.

Click to expand...

Are you playing with raging barbarians?

I clicked "no" because I always play with Ragers, and always |= usually.

(Just being a smartass...I picked yes.)

No I wasn't playing raging barbarians, I don't belive. It was a custom game. I will check but am 95% sure it was without raging barbarians.

I have checked the game and I was not playing with Raging Barbarians. Could the answer be tied to the fact that I was way ahead of any of the other civilizations because I was playing an easy level. Just thought it seemed strange that the barbarians were so powerful.

Wow, I never saw Tier 4 barbs in yr 600.

What game setting are you using (Epic, Marathon, etc.) and what difficulty level (Prince, Noble, etc.)?

I agree that with raging barbs often the AI just cannot handle it. Their first goal is to expand their civ and, of course, their expanded civ is easy pickins for the raging barbs - especially when the chariots (fixed now hurray!), mercenaries, and lizardmen rangers appear.

The Tier 4 barbs just clean house if any AI civs remain - except for those with the dratted BAR trait.

OK, Chalid's AI tweaking drove me down from Prince to Noble setting. I've been feeling more and more confident lately and decided to 'jump' back up with the big boys and play again at Prince ... with, of course, raging barbs and aggressive AI.

Well, the game itself and the raging barbs were not much of a difference, but I found the Exploring Phase to be a real quantum leap

I would really like to know how those who play at settings higher than Prince do it. Two points:

1. I lost three Scouts and two Warriors - mostly to those damn spiders. But, really, it seemed like the huge map, at least the places I explored was teeming with the more powerful animals. Not many wolves and lions, but loads of bears, tigers, skeletons, hill giants and those freakin' arachnids! I kid you not, I once hit a sentry post that revealed 8 animals in the area.

2. The payout of the goodie huts takes a severe drop from Noble to Prince too IMO. Even with losing the five units (and this hurt when the real bad guys started comin') I managed to hit nine goodie huts. But was it worth it? Here's what I got:

3 Maps (I hate those almost as much as the next one)
1 Hostile Explosion of Barbs (this took out one Warrior)
3 Gold (the amounts were 19, 29 and 54 - whooppeeeeee!)
1 Experience
1 Scout

ZERO, I said ZERO, free Techs. This is the main reason I go exploring, but this game I was shut out. Is it the difficulty level again?

OK, the Early Game of Exploration is a lot of the fun, but at Prince it is less fun battling spiders for little chance of payback.

Comments by those who play at the higher levels are appreciated.

Well, I play Monarch/Emperor, and exploration is, well... very short usually.

I do get free techs occasionally, and scouts seem never to trigger hostile reactions. On the other hand, I never see a free settler or free city.
And my scouts simply do not survive. Ever. The first one gets to explore a decent area, the later ones often die before they even reach unexplored territory.

In fact, I mostly don't explore beyond enough area to place my first three to five cities. I have better thing to do with my production that throwing it away

I think free settlers/workers won't appear when playing at least Prince (maybe even noble).

During the expansion phase, you have to be very careful if you don't want to suffer from many losses. Use scouts (hunters asap) to detect spiders instead of jumping into them, try not to let them end their move in "unsafe" tiles (this includes jumping into a forest or hill tile without knowing what's on the other side, hopefully you should be able to jump from hill to hill so that you can check most of the time that you won't end your move right in front of a Hill Giant). At the same time, try to keep moving to forest + hill tiles. Yes, that's pretty acrobatic At any rate, explore enough to locate the closest sexy city sites, pop whatever huts are nearby, but don't overdo it: consider that any unit that goes to far from your capitol won't ever be able to come back to your borders.

(wasn't there already a thread about that ? Now that I'm actually replying, I think all this has already been mentionned at some point...)

Wow, this forum grows quickly. The previous thread that discussed this is now on the third forum page. Basically, to keep your scouts, don't use your last movement point to move to a square that isn't 100% safe, and get Mobility promotions.

As for goodie huts, if you want to see what they give you (and with what frequency) you can look in the FfH editor (in the root of the FfH II Mod folders). Select the Handicap tab. Prince, for instance, gives you these:

GOODY_HIGH_GOLD
GOODY_LOW_GOLD
GOODY_LOW_GOLD
GOODY_LOW_GOLD
GOODY_MAP
GOODY_WARRIOR
GOODY_WARRIOR
GOODY_SCOUT
GOODY_EXPERIENCE
GOODY_EXPERIENCE
GOODY_EXPERIENCE
GOODY_EXPERIENCE
GOODY_HEALING
GOODY_TECH
GOODY_TECH
GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK
GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK
GOODY_BARBARIANS_WEAK
GOODY_BARBARIANS_STRONG

I don't know at the moment how the result is determined, but I'm assuming that it is a random number, giving all equal weight (except when using a scout).

- Niilo

Some interesting ideas in these posts...

Looking at that list, it really doesn't make as much sense at Prince level to go looking for the goodie huts anymore. Yes, there are other reasons for exploration too.

I wonder if the amount/difficulty of the critters themselves increases with the level of play?

Comments?

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that I find myself saving the bulk of the exploration for when I have Hunters vs. the Scouts/Warriors as they can handle the animals and roving barbs. Interesting that then the goodie huts are protected by barb units.

huts are still very important, even on Deity, because those techs can really make a difference and the rest are useful (i like the gold so i can do some nice upgrades early on)

There's a modifier that animals get when fighting player units. This modifier changes based on difficulty. On settler, you have a real nice chance of taking out lions in a straight fight between them and a scout, but on higher difficulty levels, that bonus goes away. I believe it's completely gone by the time you reach Monarch, and it may even begin slanting the odds toward the animals as you go up further than that. Any confirmation on this last point?

not sure, on deity i think my odds are 50% with a scout versus a lion, but not sure

Animal Bonus
SETTLER -30
CHIEFTAIN -20
WARLORD -10
NOBLE 0
PRINCE 0
MONARCH 0
EMPEROR 0
IMMORTAL 0
DEITY 0

Barbarian Bonus
SETTLER -40
CHIEFTAIN -30
WARLORD -20
NOBLE -10
PRINCE -5
MONARCH 0
EMPEROR 0
IMMORTAL 0
DEITY 0