Victory Types By Civ

pragmatic_labs

Chieftain
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Jan 22, 2010
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I've been playing with many of the different civ's in FFH. I've read many of the strategy postings and I notice comments like "this civ wouldn't be good for a cultural victory", etc.

I'd like to get a list of civ's along with the suggested victory conditions. This is especially helpful for newbs like myself. The Research tree is very broad as opposed to the deep trees in vanilla civ. So it's rather confusing (at first) to try to figure what you should do with each one.

I'm proposing something this this:
Civ, Leader, Victory Type, Notes (map types, strategy), etc.

My first win was:
Khazad, Kandros Fir, Conquest, small map, good starting position with lots of hills, filled up my vaults and conquered the world with Werewolves, Druids and Champions. My production was incredible towards the middle/late game.

What I'm curious about is good ways to get culture/tower/alter victories. What races/civs are particularly good for each type.

My thinking is that Ljolsofar/Arendal or Balseraphs/Keelyn would be good for a cultural victory. However, there are so many little details/specific buildings strategies, it would be very helpful (again probably mostly for beginners) to get a good picture of what they can do with each Civ.

The manual has some good info, but with the tweaks, revisions and strategies that players come across, I think it would be a good thing to put together. Much like the top 10 tips for each civ thread was was so helpful to me.
Thanks!
 
In my opinion, all Civs should go for a miltary/conquest/domination style victory. If you don't have a good army you'll lose, if you have a good army you might as well use it. At the moment though you can win in any way you like on some island maps as computer opponents don't build boats. Rather than take of advantage of that I'd suggest playing on Pangea type maps with genuine competition

Any civilization can win with the tower of mastery, the Amurites aren't better suited than any other. An industrial nation might get you there faster.

Any nation can win with the Altar of the Luonnatar. It's hardest with Auric Ulvin probably and I assume it's not in character. It's hard to get great priests with the Grigori but presumably you can reset the great people counter and specialize your national epic to get them all late game. Other than that, spiritual and philosophical leaders might get this done best and the Elohim might get the most benefit along the way since they can produce monks.

Any nation can get a religious victory, although it would be very peculiarly contrived for the agnostic leaders. The spiritual leaders and Malakim have an advantage but the opportunity for a religious win generally comes from how your opponents fail to spread religions as much as anything else.

Any nation can get a cultural victory. The Illians are very poor at this as they can't build temples. The Grigori can offset the loss of temples by using many great bards. Industrious nations can get a lot of culture from wonders. Spiritual leaders can get culture from many temples. The Balseraphs are the nation best suited to a cultural victory though as they have a lot of additional buildings they can construct that provide culture, such as slave pens, and those buildings will tend to generate great bards too.

I think that playing one civ with different religions was intended to provide different games and that applies to victory types as much as anything else.
 
Any nation can win with the Altar of the Luonnatar. It's hardest with Auric Ulvin probably and I assume it's not in character.
The Illians have no way to change to a non-Evil alignment, and so cannot build any Altar stages. An Altar of the Luonnotar victory is impossible for the Illians.
 
In general, the easiest victories to achieve are conquest/domination. Which one you choose is of course dependent upon whether you're the type of player who expands to claim territory, or the type of player who expands to remove others. However, it is the simplest victory type to win with, especially as (as noted above) you're going to have to have a largish military anyways, so you might as well fight smart and use it.

Religion is generally pretty easy to get on small maps (just make sure the elves aren't in the game and grab RoK - or make sure the dwarves aren't and grab FoL, then spread spread spread). On standard size and larger though, its generally impossible - note, that it is MUCH easier to do this with a pangea style map. The key here would be to grab the religion asap, grab cartography for open borders, then spread the religion as fast as you can. If anyone converts to something else, use your army and kill them (generally, its faster if you burn their cities, but if you want you can keep them as well).

Altar of the Lunnotar can be won by anyone except the illians. However, depending upon how you go for it, the Grigori are one of the most difficult to do this with (especially not if you're trying to play according to the lore, as in, no theocracy - this is despite them being them being one of the most likely to complete the altar according to lore).

The tower of Mastery can also be won by anyone, though it is hardest with the Khazid, as they have to follow OO or CoE to be able to have some able to cast dispell (might as well give him nature 3 as well then, as they are also the only guys able to get vitalize for them). Note that this is easiest to do on a largish map, as it then becomes much easier to get mana nodes. Technically, this can be won with 3 mana nodes (if you have the right starting mana collection, and grab the right 4th mana with your religion), and you only need sorcery to win it, making it the "fastest" peaceful victory you could win. However, the shear number of hammers needed to build the towers and the final tower generally means that it is a lategame option. If you have only 3-4 mana nodes, the fastest way to win this victory is to run godking with an industrious leader, station a mage with dispell and several adepts by each mana node, and then dispell/insta-build each new node as soon as the last tower was completed. If you have more mana nodes, usually a better option is to stack death and let specter's conquer the world for you...

Cultural is probably the hardest victory to win in the game. The reason for this is that there are so few buildings that provide culture/bard specialists. To successfully win a cultural victory, there are two options available. The first option is to spam religions (every religious temple provides +20% culture), then work hard and long at getting sources of culture in your cities (generally, wonders are the best way to do this). The most important general buildings here are the OO temple, which provides +3 culture, the FoL temple that provides +1 bard slots, the carnival which provides +20% culture and +1 bard slots, and the theater which provides some culture (i forget exactly how much). Other important things to look at are the animal cages, all of which provide a few culture. The second way is the liberty civic, which allows unlimited bards (note, this is really the only way the grigori can with a cultural victory, as they lack the temples). Liberty can be gotten in one of two ways - the first way, is research Mercantilism (note, this is at the FAR end of the tech tree... no easy way to get there fast). The second is to join the overcouncil and force the adoption of the liberty civic - this can be faster, but also can't be relied upon every game (there needs to be at least 1 other civ in the overcouncil). In either case, the most important leader trait is probably industrious, to allow for faster wonder construction (which translates into more culture earlier, which is very important). Perhaps surprisingly, the easiest to win a cultural victory with is the sidar, as they start with defensive and industrious, and they can wane level 6 units into great bards. The last important trick to remember is that all but the ashen veil acolyte's can create a "great work" for a few culture - but if you have a large empire that can crank them out fast, you can improve the rate at which your cities gain culture.

The last victory is time - and time isn't exactly a victory IMO, so we can just ignore that eh?

-Colin
 
and you only need sorcery to win it, making it the "fastest" peaceful victory you could win. However, the shear number of hammers needed to build the towers and the final tower generally means that it is a lategame option.

The ToM itself requires The Strength Of Will so it's a late game victory regardless of your industrial capacity. It's also an easiest option at marathon speed where slave trade gives you 1:1 :gold: to :hammers: ratio so you can easily buy them.
 
Personally, I think the Grigori are the best for a cultural victory because of the adaptive trait and their awesome world spell.

The trick is to cottage up two of the three cultural cities and the last one be your great person farm. Run the liberty civic and have your cultural slider at 100%. Each town with the financial trait will give 7 culture per square. Add in your other modifiers of liberty, carnivals, republic, and foreign trade, and you'll be good to go (+160%).

Now for the awesome part. Let's say you decide to grow 10 Great Bards then use your world spell. Bam! In less than the same amount of time you can have 20 Great Bards and if each of them culture bombs for 4000 culture, you'll have made 80,000 culture which is almost enough to make 2 cities legendary. If you win the drama race, you'll get another Great Bard.

You can make your GP farm even better if you have the Theater of Dreams + Caste System which will make Bard specialists +10 culture each. But that could be difficult.
 
The way I did a cultural victory was to go Ljosalfar, with Arendal Phaedra. I focused improvements on farms and windmills, with Guardian of Nature, putting my major cities at around 40 population before health prevented growth. This is really dependent on being elven with Guardian of Nature, though.

Since every other civ on the map was evil and I had Last Days turned on, surviving the waves of evil armies, demons and Horsemen was pretty rough (Stephanos showed up around turn 80)! I ended up taking Scholarship to get some military techs just so I could survive, before switching to Liberty. But, with cities at 30-40 population, the specialist economy definitely works.
 
I like to try Altar with philosophical leaders and cultural with creative ones. spiritual ones can try and go for religious. ironically, jonas endain is excellent at religious victory, since he can build double the amount of disciples, all with mobility. another fun thing you can do with him is go for AV, build the Prophecy of Ragnarok in the AV holy city and then the Stigmata, and start popping out AV disciples to spread AV. the AC will skyrocket ( extra fun when last days is turned on ) and you can just sit there enjoying the horsemen harassing your enemies and leaving you alone :lol:
 
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