Good religion for calambim?

Alright, so I'm playing the calambim as flauros, and I can't decide on a religion so here's my thoughts so far:

AV: Don't want to boost armageddon counter
OO: Decent early unit
Council of Essus: ???
Order/FoL/Empyrean: Out
Rok: Founded already

dont really know why order/FoL/Empy are out, but w/e. Your basically picking between OO and RoK here as there isnt really much you get from Esus that you wouldnt get with OO and Esus in your cities but not as a religion.

In this situation i prefer OO. Flauros doesnt really have any economy problems so the gold from RoK isnt as good for him as for others, also no chance at hte shrine. For heroes Saverous and Bambur are both good early heroes, but i much prefer Hemah to arthendain late in the game. Also towe of complaecancy can be awesome for a super feasting city.

Eagle_eye said:

Alright, so I'm playing the calambim as flauros, and I can't decide on a religion so here's my thoughts so far:

AV: Don't want to boost armageddon counter
OO: Decent early unit
Council of Essus: ???
Order/FoL/Empyrean: Out
Rok: Founded already

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You might do a bunch of things, if you're willing to open up your options:

1. Re-evaluate your stand on AV. Sacrifice the Weak in conjunction with Agrarian and Slavery gives you stupidly large cities with a number of options for outstanding hammer production (Governor's Manor, whip away excess population) and unparalleled feasting options. It's really a top-tier choice for Calabim.

2. Pop through Order / Empyrean / RoK on your way to OO. This will greatly improve your options for diplomacy (by making you neutral) and give you access to Druids, never a bad thing.

3. The Order isn't bad, either. Basilicas help compensate for the maintenance weakness of the Governor's Mansion compared to the Courthouse, and 3 cities with unyielding order > one city with tower of complacency. Plus, if you were worried about AC enough that you wouldn't go AV, Order makes you immune to spreading Hell terrain.

Lorewise, Alexis should probably prefer AV but Flauros hates that faith and the idea of demonic pacts in general. He much prefers CoE.

There aren't really that many advantages to adopting CoE, although having Nox Noctis and using Shadows is quite nice.



Before shadow I liked OO for Flauros, but the Tower fo Complacency negates the bonus from the Governor's Manor or Pillar of Chains.

FoL fits the Calabim well in the game and a "survival of the fittest" version fits their philosophy just fine.


In the unmodded game The Empyrean works pretty well for the Calabim (for one thing, the ability of Radiant Guards to upgrade to unitclass_champion gives you Vampires with Sun II and thus Vampire Lords that can summon Aureales), but in the lore these should not get along at all. In my modmod The Empyrean can cause revolts in Calabim cities and Calabim Empyrean units are prone to rebelling. Alexis and Flauros are blocked from adopting it. I'll probably block the civ from researching Honor in my next release.


The Order works pretty well for them actually. Social Order fits them thematically and can give a lot of happiness while leaving you with the unhappiness your UB needs to work well. Unyielding Order, like The tower of Complacency, can negate one of their strengths.

I thought you had to be good or neutral for those religions.

You can take any religion and they may change your alignment. Order forces you to good and Ashen veil forces you to evil, for example. If you play Order Calabim then you will be good, and so will everyone else and you'll kill them if they won't.

I like AV the most. The 'sacrifice the weak and eat vampires to victory'is just simple and it works.

My second choice (game play only) is order. Their high priests can maintain happiness in cities being eaten for XP's, and it is just a darn powerful relgion. Theri Governor's Manners reduce maintenance less than 'normal' courthouses and the basilicas can help.

Best wishes,

Breunor

I love to spend at least some time in RoK as the vampires, if only to build the Mines of Gal-Dur. That way, I don't need to research smelting or iron working, since the vampire champion comes at Feudalism. Bambur's enchanted weapon spell is really handy for the vampires if you stay in RoK, since it enhances the skeletons and spectres that you'll be summoning in mass quantities.

AV and OO are good because they provide a priest unit that can be hasted and take the mobility promotion and also provide good collateral damage. You need some way to whittle down the AI superstacks, and even with a ton of disposable summons it's easier if the stack starts out at reduced strength. If you only spread AV to a few cities, it won't have a huge impact on the AC, and that's all you need to produce 3-4 priests for each of 2-3 stacks.

I usually play Calabim with Flauros(financial)+aristocratic+agricarian+caste system+scolarship, that makes great specialist cities with 3-commerse farms that are furthur boosted at sanitation. this most importantly are large sized, giving good vampire feeding possibilities, and with all the farms they grow quickly, and rapidly recover from feedings. the end result.... more exp

I like to take advantage of all that food production, getting the advantage of the whip for fast infrastructure.
whip a granary etc, and you soon be turning all that excess food production into hammers. you can then whip in whatever else you need.

a quick visit to OO is great, as previously mentioned the tower of complatency is great for a happy city. even without it, who cares if people are unhappy, they are still productive when unhappy so keep going. you just need enough happy to work the farms. whip in a public baths and you suddenly have a few more farms being worked etc. get resources to be able to work all 20 tiles, beyond that who cares about happyness. I like one super-feeding city with ToC, as i prefer AV instead of Order in the feeding phase due to the increadible advantage of sacrifice the weak.

also if you wish to turn good civs bad; good civs wont accept AV, though may accept OO, making them neautral, and easier to fonvert to AV if you wish.

I'd usually make many science cities, and then some cities designed specifically for feeding purposes. I'll naturally whip in aqueduct etc in these cities so to enable greater sized final cities

After setting up the infrastructure in my cities i then like to switch to AV, enabling sacrifice the weak. 1-food per citizen in these super-sized cities surrounded by farms means MEGA sized cities. even after passing the health limit, you are still only losing 2 food per citizen past the health limit, much less than your farm-cities are producing.


if you've researched all you need (Feaudalism) you can even then switch out of aristocracy to city states, meaning your farms are producing 5 food each. that means on a grassland spot with no natural resources you will be getting 20*5=100 food. with say 32 health (collect all resources, you already whipped in aqueduct, infermary etc in feeding cities) that means your city can be max size of 32+(100-32)/2=66.
That means some MEGA exp feasting on such a large city. of course it grows more slowly as you approach those sizes, so it could be faster to feast on it more regulary at smaller sizes(e.g. 50).

see, that's the increadible power of AV in the hands of calabim, skipping on AV for sake of the AC means you are losing out on the tremendous advantage of Calabim under the rule of sacrafice the weak.

I agree with xAlephx, Breunor, and Angel-Julia about the benefits of AV for the Calabim. Sacrifice the Weak + Agrarianism = monster cities for your vampiric units to feed on and accumulate XP. I almost always go AV when I'm playing the Calabim.

I often go AV with Alexis, but never with Flauros. Generally I prefer FoL for either of them though, as health is more of a limiting factor than food much of the time.

MagisterCultuum said:

I often go AV with Alexis, but never with Flauros. Generally I prefer FoL for either of them though, as health is more of a limiting factor than food much of the time.

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Why the preferences by leader? Aristograrian works fantastic with financial and sac the weak... do you lumbermill the heck out of your ancient forests to make FoL do the heavy lifting? Shouldn't StW allow for much quicker replenishment of modest size cities (20ish)?

Aristogarian farm yields:

Grassland: 4(5*) 2(3**) 2***(2.5) +1.5 specialist

Lumbermill on ancient forest:

Grassland: 3 0(1/2/3/4)**** 2(3/4/5)***** +0.5 specialist

This is for RifE, dunno if the yields were changed much.
River adds 1 to the farm, but 2 to the lumbermill (I believe this isn't true in vanilla FfH, as it only adds one to both).

* 5 with sanitation
** 3 with financial
*** Hammers come from population, this is assuming that the city is below health cap, and all food is used.
**** base is 0, one with river, one with construction, one with optics and one with industry plus one if financial and >1
***** base is 2, one with construction, one with optics and one with industry.

The lumbermill has better yield in general, and worse yield.
It has better commerce yield, but this comes late.

To calculate the extra specialist in: If we say that = (which it doesn't, but close enough to use), the aristogarian farm wins the commerce yield with 5(6) (or 7 with the Great Library), or it can go even with . This gets better with floodplains (0.5 specialist extra and 0.5 ), but worse with plains (same, reversed).

This means that the lumbermill isn't that much of an advantage, however, the extra health is.

AV, however, is wicked (pun intended, sorry).
Grassland aristogarian farm; AV style:
4(5*) 2(3**) 4***(5) +3(4) specialist
This equates to (here Guilds is most likely required):
14(15) /:research: (or 18(19) with the Great Library) 4 (financial) with sanitation using scientist.
2(3) 16 (financial) with sanitation using engineers.
Yes, that is the yield from one tile.
Bonkers, completely bonkers.
This does require a low of health resource and management, but it's extremely powerful. This also makes for a turning point, in were aristocracy isn't needed anymore, as the specialist provides as much or more. God King capital, filled with farms, running merchants, will pay for pretty much anything. Abso-friggin'-lutely insane. There is a reason AV was nerfed in RifE (up to 1.5 per pop).

xAlephx said:

Why the preferences by leader?

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There's no mechanics reason why Flauros shouldn't use AV, nor is he less capable of benefiting from it than is Alexis. MagisterCultuum's preference is based on flavor/lore, not game considerations:

MagisterCultuum said:

Lorewise, Alexis should probably prefer AV but Flauros hates that faith and the idea of demonic pacts in general. He much prefers CoE.

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For base FFH (rife rather significantly changed yields from tiles):

Grassland 2
farm +1 , +1 sanitation, +1 agrarianism
Aristocracy -1 , +2 for farms

Ashen veil Calibam, running Agrarianism and Aristocracy, under health cap
1 grassland farm = 2/3 , 4 , 4 (1 hammer/citizen), output of 3 specialists, (6/9 hammers, or 9/12 hammers (is scholarship part of base FFH? if so, 15 max)), meaning that one tile can produce 4 , and 11-18 (effectively), or 10/13 and 2-3 , or anything in between. The problem of course is that you rarely have that much health or the happiness. Worst case - each tile produces 4 food (2 citizens), 2/3 commerce, giving it 2 and 2/3 .

FoL calibam
1 Ancient forest lumbermill - 3 food, 2 hammers (1 commerce if next to river). This will feed 1.5 citizens, for a total of 3.5 , 4.5-7.5 or 6.5-8 . In this case however, you are virtually guaranteed to have the food and health needed.

As we can see, Ashen veil is MUCH better, if you have the health and happiness needed to make it work. However, FoL can be quite good for a smaller empire with fewer health/happiness resources.

-Colin

Yes, you will very quickly run into the health and/or happy cap.
However, it does bring back the ICS strategy, as every little city will be very productive under Guilds-Sacrifice the Weak.

even beyond the health limit, in AV if you're over health limit a pop only costs --(health)= -2 .
No big deal when your grassland farms are cranking out a massive 5 & 3.

that means that you can go way past the health limit, and still getting 3 more than what that pop is using. so a say who cares about the health cap....
for happyness you can always go for tower of complatency in one city, or resources, and still getting lots of from all those unhappy people. all you care about is the pop for your vampires anyway.

so as an AV vampice you can just say stuff the unhappy starvving people. that's their problem, they are still surving your kingdom well as vampire food even if they are unhappy and hungry.

The Whip and vampire feeding just rocks!

One other thing to add to the above analysis: StW has a fixed opportunity cost of not using Scholarship. For the majority of the game, I find that research is my inflexible priority, and in a specialist economy this means sages. StW has to run Guilds to get unlimited sages, which means a. they miss out on any of the quick production options (whipping pop or buy with gold) and b. they miss out on Caste System for better specialists. FoLlers can run Scholarship/Caste System for a base +2 vials / +2 culture per specialist and a flat 10% research increase across the board, making their sages worth about 75-80% more than a Guild/StW sage (hard to state exactly because it depends on how many other bonuses to research you have), and get the buy with gold option to boot.

If you're comparing getting roughly twice the research per sage under Scholarship / Caste vs. having roughly twice the number of sages under StW/Guilds, then the significant practical differences between the two will be twice the population for pushing against health and happiness caps; my suspicion is that this will make them significantly closer to one another than indicated above. As side points of interest, you also generate more GPP with StW/Guild and more culture with Scholar/Caste.

Of course, FoL gives up Aristagracy and all the extra gold from tiles that this entails, but I believe this is already included in the conversation above. There is also no requirement that StW run guilds - a caste system approach with a variety of specialist types may actually yield superior results, depending on how many sage-allowing buildings you have. But for a pure theorycrafting exercise which requires an unlimited sage ceiling, StW's opportunity cost of Scholarship should be recognized.

/ wall of text

Angel-Julia said:

for happyness you can always go for tower of complatency in one city, or resources, and still getting lots of from all those unhappy people.

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Tower of Complacency removes all , which causes the Governor's Manor to produce 0 , so you won't still be getting lots of .

xAlephx said:

StW has to run Guilds to get unlimited sages, which means a. they miss out on any of the quick production options (whipping pop or buy with gold)

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Guilds allows gold rushing.

The only things that do not allow buying with gold are the starting civic, apprenticeship, and slavery - arete, caste system, and guilds all allow buying with gold option. This means that both caste system and guilds are equal on that note.

The bigger issue with StW is it requires ashen veil, and being able to get StW first requires summoning hyborem. This leads to hell terrain expanding, which will lead to resources changing. Animal resources become toads/nightmares - that is -2 , 5 with smokehouse (toads don't count double with smokehouse), rice/corn/wheat turns into snake pillars (-3/6 ), and dye/sugar etc. turn into razorweed/gulgarn (- and ). The only things that don't change are mineral resources, incense, reagents, and (possibly) ivory. This means that the vast majority of your health/happiness will have to come from buildings, and most buildings that give health/happiness do so by giving additional bonuses to resources, which you would no longer have. This can be fixed by sanctify... but that kinda goes against the point of sending the world to hell...

-Colin