Leader: The one and only Perpentach.
Map: Huge, normal, fractal, low sea, temperate weather.
Options: Aggressive AI (more fun), Living World (double the goodness), Require Complete Kills (still open for trade, can vassalize and gift city later on), Permanent Alliances (cheat? maybe. In my game it didn't matter too much).
Civs: Everybody. 19 starting + Bas and Hybo.
Vic Cons: All enabled.
Victory: Tower of Mastery on turn 272, for a score of 203753.
Here's how it went:
* Starting position: river city, mostly forest and grassland around, some flood plains and wine. On my east: Thessa with plenty of room behind her, Ethne (bad news for Loki). On my west: Tebryn, Faeryl, Beer Bowl. Most of the other civs on my large continent further south behind Beeri, 4 civs on Islands.
* Build order: Loki, then worker for wineries and cottages, then warriors like mad to survive.
* Tech: Crafting for the wine, Ancient Chants from goody hut, Education, Bronze Working.
* First 80 turns or so: the scout picks up the goody huts and goes exploring, the warriors levels on a wolf and goes back to defend Jubilee since I can't waste a turn building Loki. The general idea is to flip as many cities as possible wherever I can, that means you have to rush Education for City States and also for the cottages, since you don't know what resources you'll get. Also, happiness isn't important, I'm going for a lot of pop 5 cities and not a metropolis.
* Loki: If you have a creative neighbor, don't go there. Any civs who start with chants are also better left for the time being, get Loki to the closest civ without AC. This way, he can flip a few cities which have been standing around for a while, maybe even grew a bit. Once everyone has AC the AI will build an obelisk in every city, but he's not smart enough to chop rush it. Spreading scouts is important if you've got 'em to find new cities quickly. Otherwise, Loki does a tour of the big cities to see which are building settlers and how long it would take them. Then you can plan ahead and get Loki to every city the moment it pops. What will the AI do? That's right, immediately build another settler. I had Loki go west and flip some Sheaim cities pretty far away, and that allowed Thess to creep up to my borders. Still, it turned out to be the best move I've done all game. The formula is 15% chance of flip every turn, so 5-6 turns after Loki arrives in a new town it's yours. Then try and catch the next settler that pops. I acually kept a list of the settler queues on paper.
* Diplomacy: your first military advantage as the Balseraphs is super mimics, but getting them takes time and requires some luck with easy opponents to start them going. Until Beastmasters and Druids, the best thing you can do is be ultra defensive and make friends with everybody. I paid half my soul in tribute to Tebryn and the others, and they repaid me with an empire.
* The thing that will make or break your game is an AI-AI war. Tasunke is great because he can be bribed, but otherwise just sit and wait. Did the aggressive AI help me unfairly? I think Tebryn would of started fighting anyway because Loki left him with only 4 cities and 40 pyre zombies, not a healthy balance. Anyway, he decided to go Hitler on everybody, much to my delight. The first to go was Faeryl, which is also a beach for Loki because he can't enter cities with hidden nationality defenders. After Tebryn took 4 of her cities, with Loki flipping every single one (a freshly conquered city has no chance of building and obelisk in time) he declared war on Beeri, and 10 turns later on Auric and Sabathiel. You'd think the combined armies of the world would slow the crazy Nazi down? No such luck (for them). Two stacks of 25 combat 4-5 Pyre Zombies just ripped through them. The fire damage is just unfair, as I've tasted myself later on. On an earlier try I made the mistake of joining the stronger Rhoanna when she attacked Varn Gossam. Conquer and flip gets you twice the cities, right? Wrong. It meant I had to defend all my new cities, and then watch in horror as Varn killed off Rhoanna's horsemen, then wiped her empire, and then turned to me. If I had patience, I'd have gotten Rhoannas cities for myself. Now I had to restart another game.
* When Tebryn was stopped I had about 6 built cities and 8 conquered cities flipped, and blossoming cottages throughout. Tech line: everything you need for resources, hunting for mutating harlequins, then a few economic techs and going for trade. The thing to do when tech trading starts is the famous Magellan Hawk: build a hawk, rebase to an opponent, fly on a peak, discover a new opponent, lick his behind, get open borders, repeat. I dicovered everybody except for 3 Island civs and tech traded my way to 5th place in score. The leaders are Thessa who founded FoL and had room to build and Rhoanna who was beating up on Dain and Varn. For people to like you, you really need to get everybody going to the same temples. I helped Thess spread FoL as much as I could, just so everyone could be my friends. It makes the AIs like each other too, but you only need a few big wars, which Tebryn and Rhoanna were happy to afford.
* With the Allies building huge stacks of defenders against Tebryn and Rhoanna settling, I had to build an army. It takes time and tech, but you can get a very decent army consisting of:
1. 4 beastmasters, varied. The BM is the easiest tier 4 unit, and you need harlequins more than horsemen anyway. The thing that makes them better for the Balseraph is the variety you can have: I had two upgraded from freaks with City Raider 3, one with light, mobility and commando for strikes deep in enemy territory, one with Drill and Blitz for beating up stacks of weak units. Of course, all should have passed through clown school and learned Dance of Blades and charming manners. Actually, I only used freaks for the beastmasters, I always prefer to have a harlequin with Chaos 2 running around with a bag of plutonium
. How did I get the two CR3? The arena is a harsh mistress for a lonely freak, but fair.
2. 4 Druids, the same. Mind 3, Chaos 3. One of the strongest regular units in the game, there's really no reason to waste one going around and vitalizing. Fun fact about pit beast: the AI will attack it with weaker units even if it's parked bext to his city and will dissolve into thin air if he leaves it alone (Kael, FYI). Fun fact about domination: it gives you your enemy's units. Hey, it's fun and it's a fact. Also, switch to Empy or RoK as early as you can. You stay neutral when you switch back to FoL or OO and the AIs like you more.
3. Super mimics: either build them straight up or up from warriors. The enraged ones go scouting, the weak to garrison, the strong/heavy/light/regen go to war. (By the way, heavy + light is excellent). Keep a priest nearby to get rid of diseases. The thing with mimics is that there's a tipping point you need to get over. They start out weak, but once you get a few promotions they can win battles and reach 15-20 promos in no time. I've read somewhere that they can't cast, but after beating a few rathas my mimics were blinding with best of them. They still don't do collateral damage if they steal barrage, which is actually good. You don't want this to be too easy, do you? I preferred keeping the light ones so my entire army could move 3 turns, though I had one heavy mimic that survived like 6-7 arena fights in a row, so I kept him. He later died attacking a city with the battle odds 99% in his favor.
* The rest of the game was smooth sailing: I teamed with Thessa, which actually didn't help me too much. We were trading techs anyway, and I had all the techs I needed except for Arcane Lore which I'd have gotten anyway. She gave me two mana types I din't have but I could have just conquered them, and her armies never saw any combat.
The allies invassalized themselves to me so I had to beat up Tebryn, and stole some of his Death and Fire adepts with domination. (I hadn't built any adepts, settlers, archers, ships or mounted units during the entire game. Specialize.) I let him capitulate also, so by that time I had 13 mana types.
I started building the towers when the Empyrian Rhoanna attacked Dain again, so I vassaled Dain and conquered two mana nodes from Rhoanna. (By the end of the war I had 20 Rathas, more than she had).
* Since I didn't need any archery, naval or mounted techs as well as anything in priest and melee beyond druids, I just started saving up money almost 40 turns before the end of the game. It takes some awareness to decide when you don't need any techs any more, but you should do it in the end game. The cash always helps build the wonders to win or buying an instant army. Alternatively, the earlier you switch to 100% culture the earlier you get the culture win. After 20 turns for finishing the 4 towers, I bought the Tower of Mastery for 36,000$ straight up. Nobody even had a chance to declare war.
* Game over.
Thank you for reading, I'm looking forward to stories of your wonderful victories.
+3
, so they're good for new cities to help with maintenance costs.
