Immortal University 63 Frederick

First, I lose my 2nd city to barbs despite it having 2 archers and being attacked by a total of 2 archers and a warrior (in a short time span, I lost 3.3%, 3.3%, and 20% odds battles for the barb attacker. Hello, 99.9% chance failing!

Second, the recording I did for it fouled up in the audio because somehow the settings I'm using for both speaker + game sound can't be handled.

I still won, mostly because I bulbed engineering even though I said I wouldn't and chain-capped 3 AIs (ragnar, izzy, roosevelt in that order) before anybody got to rifles. I won diplo UN ~1750 AD when my idiot opponent left the hindu bloc to go FR.

I did a bonus recording where I raced to space to see if I could have won that way. If I didn't win UN, I'd have won space anyway at 1915 AD, significantly ahead of other AI launch times (20-30 turns at least, top AI was 4 techs back and not consistently researching space techs).

it's free... enough said ;-) (technically it isn't since you will very soon feel very motivated to give out some bucks, but at the level I am willing to play it it's really free).

I saw some videos from sullla that catched my eyes.
When I was still playing WoW and raiding, our raiders a lot was talking about "let's play dota", "go dota" etc. when it wasn't raiding date. Finally got to it and has to say it has it's aspects ;-).

In one of our czech mmo forums people a lot bashed each other with HoN x LoL warfare so I know a thing, the consensus seem to be that HoN is more hardcore, thus us casuals (I don't HC anymore) will feel dragged to LoL.

Lately I was thinking a lot about these f2p models and I think it brings to consumer one very important thing that subscription based lacks. And that is freedom and choice. You spend when you want for things you want, don't have to buy the whole package.
I can see why for HC people sub based models work better, they always paid less then they would in more fair business model.
But I think it wasn't the question

Not going Free to Play from the beginning was a big mistake. F2P model beats regular one. It drags in more people and makes them pay more in the end. S2 - HoN developers company - realized that a bit late, but about 2 months ago HoN become F2P too.

Managed to settle 7 cities and got surrounded by AIs very quickly.
Since there were no horses and iron in my lands, went for muskets+trebs/cannons+rifles.
Teched there asap, hit Lib @ ~700AD, started building army of muskets/trebs while teching to rifling/steel.
Saladin declared on Hammurabi, Roosevelt joined against Saladin, Izzy against Hammu, Ragnar was Roosevelt vassal. So I joined in too, vs Roosevelt, though waited some turns for him to move his SODs away. Capped Ragnar/Roosevelt quite quickly, have rifling, while others are still lagging behind a bit, only Hammurabi has it. Next target - Izzy, after that we'll see

Settled in place and got as much land as possible (6 cities and room for 1 more later) and started building axemen for Ragnar defense. I settled so i wouldn't touch borders with him until after the BCs and he declared on Izzy. Everyone but Izzy and Hammy are Hindu so I go Hindu. Aesthetics run fails (really needed to trade for IW) as the only two civs with alphabet have aesthetics too around 500 BC. I go for Code of Laws next and found the religion. Decide since I only have 7 cities and am Philosophical to go culture so i bulb philosophy and get that religion too.

350AD Izzy caps to Ragnar and i get him to friendly by giving him philosophy for some gold i think.


780AD i lose lib to Sury. Hammy is only war threat but he's worst enemy of a few civs and Sal is in between us so i'm pretty safe. Frankfurt is late getting national epic up cause i was worried about liberalism and forgot to trade/tech literature. Pacifism and Philosophical should make up for it.


Defensive pact and religion made it an easy diplo game.


Timed the cities pretty well - last artist is 1 turn from Cologne.




Notice 0 wonders in my 3 legendary cities - that made it a little tougher. Was close to getting Sistine Chapel and a couple others but just got failure gold. Not having marble sucks.


Good thing about going culture is games are fast (3 hours including dinner break). Bad thing is they are pretty boring. Probably should have had more than only 12 artists being Philosophical but i think the late national epic, GP farm with only 2 special food tiles and getting 3 scientists in the attempt for Lib cost me a few artists. I think this is only my 3rd time going for culture on any skill level too.


Looking back it probably wouldn't have been a bad map for any other VC since no AI's were big. Probably could have kept Ragnar friendly and taken all Sury's land with an early war (elepults). Didn't get a world map until 350 AD though and the tech path going for culture ruled out any early war by the time I knew I had just about as much land as any AI.