FfH 2 Manual

Posted 1.94b. Not much has changed as far as the manual is concerned in the last few patches. Mostly bug fixes or Events which are changed around. But there are enough small errors here and there that it was worth a re-release I thought.

Unfortunately I won't be the first manual to make the top 10 list. I just saw that I am 3,000 downloads from making the list, but #10 right now is the base BtS PDF

Even though this thread get a post every few days, it still often drops to the second page of the thread listing. In the sticky thread, on the dead manual, there is a suggestion to sticky this thread and unsticky the dead one.

I assume nobody will object if I PM the moderators about this, but they may check with the authors.

I print out the manual and refer to it, rather than alt-tabbing all the time. As a print manual, I do not think it works very well. The color choices have already been commented upon; darker colors would be more legible in print.

But, a bigger problem is the organization of the chapters such as units or spells. Instead of one alphabetical list, there are three or four. If I see an action button, such as Flaming Arrows, I do not know offhand if it is a World Spell, regular spell, or special command, so I need to flip through three alphabetical lists to find it. Then it says "grants Flaming Arrows promotion", so now I have to go to the promotions chapter and flip through *another* three alphabetical lists.

May I suggest the chapter with spells contain one alphabetical list? Same for the buildings, units, and promotions lists. I can immediately tell in the game if something is a building or unit, but I can not immediately tell if it's buildable or not, or whether it's a world spell, regular spell or special command.

If the document is maintained in Word, or some other easy program, I offer to help modify it.

yeah, that manual was pretty much designed to be read on a pc, and it works really well for that since you can click most things and get linked to what you're looking at. doesn't work out good as a printed one though

Initially I had made the manual in Excel, but I upgraded to Open Office. Sadly I have no clue how to export my page layouts, so I can't provide useful base files to anyone unless I walk them through setting up my customized layouts so it'll display correctly. I've wanted to redo the entire manual to ditch the 2 column thing (instead spread out each entry to be a single row) so that this isn't needed, but that is also a huge piece of work.


Hadn't thought much about print layout wanting one large alphabetical list before. Breaking it up isn't really needed on the computer since you just click the link and there you are. So I'll rearrange things sometime.


For color scheme: Would you prefer it all to be just plain black? Or prefer some items which are currently colored just get a base dark grey, with no color differentiation? Basically it's just bloody hard to find a large assortment of printable colors which don't look almost exactly like one another, but I wanted the colors because there are some things which exist as 1 name for 2 items (generally a spell and Promotion, or a Promotion and Unit). So the colors was a nice way not to have to say Courage (Spell) or Angel (Unit) all the time.


EDIT: Oh, and it's good to finally be stickied

The cyan (technology links), green (building) and orange (I guess links to appendix A?) are the ones which print poorly on white paper. You could use a dark green for buildings. I'm not sure the orange links provide too much value. I can't think of a replacement for cyan; maybe pick the link color which is used least and swap that color with cyan.

Could you zip/upload whatever files you have for the magic chapter? I'm not an excel expert, but if I can get to the data somehow, I can export it and maybe put it in some other kind of table. I would find it worthwhile to spend a few hours investigating, even if nothing useful comes out of it.

I am a new player of FFH and only a moderately experienced player of vanilla. I downloaded FFH when I was a new player of vanilla, and decided against even trying it because of the design goal, "Much more than just a different Unique Unit and Unique Building we want the player to have to adapt to different strategies and play styles to play each civ." It's a great goal but it tells me there is a high time investment to learn.

So far I have only played a couple of the civs and I probably haven't mastered any of them. But for each one, I completely blew the first game, searched the forums for tips, and then got the hang of them. The manual gives some information on initial strategy, but IMHO not quite enough.

Here is proposed new text for Grigori, which gives a little more detail on how to actually use the adventurer. First para is same as yours, second para is almost all new, third para is mostly same.

Strategy: The Grigori are the only civilization that can recruit the powerful Adventurer unit. The Adventurer is a Great Person and Hero that can be upgraded into almost any human unit. The Grigori use these customizable Heroes as elite warriors, and they can grow into some of the best units in the game.

Treasure your Adventurers! They are the units with the most potential in the game. In the early game, your adventurers are too weak to explore safely. Let them sit in a city and gain experience while you save up some gold. Then pay to upgrade them to a warrior or scout, and give them all their their promotions. Your first warrior adventurers can conquer cities single-handedly with Combat III and Shock. Later in the game, you can upgrade new adventurers to mounted units or adepts, depending on which tech branch you choose.

To get the most Adventurers you should avoid early wonders in your Capital - though you can also gamble and trust that the increased amount of GPP will compensate for a lower probability to spawn Adventurers. The Adventurer's Guild will boost your Great People production, which can be further increased by adopting Pacifism. Later on the Grigori Tavern also boosts your Adventurers. The Grigori World Spell, Ardor, resets the Great People counter, making it easy to acquire a large number of Great People very quickly in the later stages of the game.

Click to expand...

Also it may be worthwhile to add a couple of sentences to the introduction, to mention that the Grigori and Bannor are probably the easiest for new players to pick up. Grigori can't get religion and as long as you can get adventurers to work, you can mostly ignore the magic aspects and still win. I haven't mastered Bannor yet but reading the forum, they seem to be recommended for starting players the second most often.

Thanks for the great work!

Let them sit in a city and gain experience while you save up some gold. Then pay to upgrade them to a warrior or scout, and give them all their their promotions.

Click to expand...

In my experience, this is a very bad idea because it can cause you to lose an adventurer.
Adventurers gain experience, so they can be hit with the event that they're torturing people whatver. You get the option to disband them (-2 to AC) or have them lose 1xp and keep them.
If you haven't promoted your adventurer, not given him any experience, then you don't get the second option and just lose the unit. I quit playing after being hit by this event on my adventurer, as I was too disgusted.

you can just load the turn before the one in which it happens, or any other turn before that for that matter, and then, right before hitting "end turn" knowing that the next turn the evil event is gonna happen, you just make the slightiest change in your set-up ( I usually change the science slider by 10% ) , then end turn. voilà, no more evil event

LDiCesare said:

In my experience, this is a very bad idea because it can cause you to lose an adventurer.

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Then what is your strategy?

xienwolf said:

EDIT: Oh, and it's good to finally be stickied

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Yes - congrats! it's a very handy piece of work.

One thing I'd like to suggest is perhaps changing the naming convention to tally with the current version of FFH - so for example the current document would be 2033e1 and an update to pickup patch f would be 2033f1 (the final digit being the version relating to specific patch)

That does sound like a good convention

davidlallen said:

Then what is your strategy?

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Upgrade them immediately. Therefore, pile gold before you get them and upgrade asap so they can use at least one of their xp.

you can just load the turn before the one in which it happens

Click to expand...

I can also use the world editor and put one unit back in or cheat any other way, yes, but that's not very strategic and I don't like it. I reloaded once to get the same result. You need something to actually make a random roll to get different results, which is not always possible without going back in time a bit, so it's not practical.

Thanks for the feedback. How about this small change instead.

Treasure your Adventurers! They are the units with the most potential in the game. In the early game, your adventurers are too weak to explore safely. Save up some gold before the first one appears, so you can immediately upgrade it to a warrior or scout. Then keep promoting it until it has enough useful promotions. Your first warrior adventurers can conquer cities almost single-handedly with Combat III and Shock. Later in the game, you can upgrade new adventurers to mounted units or adepts, depending on which tech branch you choose.

Click to expand...

BTW, is it worth some public effort to recruit experts on each civ to submit a 2-3 paragraph "beginner's advice" writeup? I have read a few of the longer civ strat threads, and as a relative novice, a lot of the discussion goes right over my head. A good *beginner* strategy seems critical for the manual, to keep new players being successful at each new civ.

Hells yes! I have tried to get people to help with writing the strat part because I tend not to play very often anymore, and I always just go with the flow. Strategy is NOT my forte (hence most of the Civs just being individual paragraphs talking about their Unique Units/Buildings).


There are a few which are outdated now as well. I know I haven't mentioned the Tolerant Trait in the Elohim yet for starters.



Overall, I would love to get a good solid page for each Civ (enough to fill the whitespace on the first page, and preferably enough to fill in at least half of a following page).


Would also like people to help write advice for the Concepts section (the orange links), and the Religions and Guilds.


EDIT: Question occurs: I added the alphabetical listing at the start of each section so that someone who doesn't know the difference between units well enough to decide if it is buildable or not could quickly get to the right spot. Now, if I sort everything flat Alpha, that isn't quite as needed. Having all the links in one spot is still quite nice however, so I am planning to keep them in. But thinking in terms of printing the manual, would you prefer that all of them are kept in the front of the manual with the Table of Contents (as follow-up pages), or placed in the back as an Index? Then you could avoid printing a raw list, which does you no good on paper that I can think of.

From the paper standpoint, I agree those lists do no good at all.

From the online standpoint, why wouldn't I just search with ctrl-F? By the time I found that link page and then found what I wanted on it, I could have searched and found the entry directly.

If you feel they are worthwhile, then an index, or appendix, seems like the best choice.

btw, doesn't Falamar get a bonus to relationships with female leaders? I think I've read that somewhere, but last time I looked at the the manual ( 1.94b ) there was no mention of it in the Lanun overview.

CTRL+F is generally best, and what I use myself. So I suppose if nobody speaks up I'll shift them to an Index for now, and possibly axe them in the future.


No bonus for Falamar with the Ladies that I can think of, but he does get special events with them. Not sure if I mention the penalty all men suffer with Os-Gabella either.

Unless something changed, Falamir has a +2 bonus with all female leaders - "You are charming", or something like that. Pimp.

That does sound familiar. Will have to find it in the code and slap it into the manual somwhere appropriate.