I'm playing .33f for the first time (having finally won a long game on .32), as the Order-loving "good" Calabim. For starts, the Calabim are fantastic; once I bee-lined vampires and have a few of them, plus a vampiric Valin Phanuel rampaging across the countryside, it's become a matter of not "if?" but "who?" to attack next. I've been enjoying taking out all the evildoers (the Sheaim just fell in three turns) as well as an neutral folks who looked at me the wrong way... now I'm just trying to decide if it's time to turn on my good allies or how to win this one. I know I need to kick up my difficulty level, but having played almost all races now, I do think the Calabim have been easiest/quickest to get past the "hump" point where you know you'll win -- they've got a good mix of builder plus powerful early combat units.
Ever since I joined the Order, I've had Crusader units popping up all over the place, joining for free, far more than I've ever received random units before. Is this a feature of .33 or of spreading the Order or something, or sort of a bug? It does seem more or less correlated with my spreading Order to a new city, but I hope that's not it, since sacrificing a 3 STR acolyte to gain the Order in a city plus a 7 STR crusader is a silly tradeoff. How's this supposed to work?
Otherwise, I love the new events and hope more are added -- just got my first ever gorilla (a game _after_ my Balseraphs had everything but the gorilla for the Grand Menagerie) via the hunter event, and the hill giant wanting his pigs event cracked me up.
Who's Decius? Xienwolf's 1.94b manual shows him as a Bannor leader, but he's built an entire island of Malakim in my game. His civilopedia entry doesn't work and his picture doesn't look Bannor or Malakim. Is he a Minister Koun random type?
March of the Trees is crazy. Now to teach the AI when to use it... in a previous game, my entire (vastly more powerful than anything in the world) invading army was destroyed in two turns by the treants -- which wasn't fun and does strike me as overpowered, definitely vis-a-vis something rather lame like River of Blood (I know, world spells aren't supposed to be of equal power, though the elves are so good anyway that giving a killer world spell seems a bit over the top). However, this time, I walked in with a similar army and Thessa sat there and let me destroy her cities when a simple casting of the spell would have made things MUCH more challenging. She had the spell available to cast and instead sat on it and was wiped out. Even though the spell needs to be toned down, that's no fun.
When does it ever make sense to cast River of Blood, btw? I'd much rather leave opponents' populations high, conquer the city and eat the population! Speaking of which, what's the formula for XP gained by feeding on a city? It looks like you get more the larger the population eaten (which is fine and is a reward for big cities but is actually somewhat backward since by the time a city's at size 19 or 20, it's probably so well-fed that it can regain the missing pop point pretty quickly, whereas 1 pop point is a huge thing for a 3 pop city to lose).
Are there many guild-related events in the game these days? I've had a number of games with Aeron's Bounty, Guild of the Nine, Ratcatcher's Guild and Guild of Hammers and almost never seen them do anything. Guild of the Nine and of Hammers do things in their own right so they're fine to have but I feel like the other two are sort of pointless -- or are there things happening behind the scenes with the crime rate that somehow impact things? As it stands, it's fun to spread guilds but I feel like it's sort of pointless, and the same goes for caring about the crime rate.
Whew, that's a lot of rambling and random thoughts... I've been enjoying the game a lot and thought I'd throw out some questions/observations for people to comment on. Keep up the good work, everyone!
-Kilrathi
Ever since I joined the Order, I've had Crusader units popping up all over the place, joining for free, far more than I've ever received random units before. Is this a feature of .33 or of spreading the Order or something, or sort of a bug? It does seem more or less correlated with my spreading Order to a new city, but I hope that's not it, since sacrificing a 3 STR acolyte to gain the Order in a city plus a 7 STR crusader is a silly tradeoff. How's this supposed to work?
Otherwise, I love the new events and hope more are added -- just got my first ever gorilla (a game _after_ my Balseraphs had everything but the gorilla for the Grand Menagerie) via the hunter event, and the hill giant wanting his pigs event cracked me up.
Who's Decius? Xienwolf's 1.94b manual shows him as a Bannor leader, but he's built an entire island of Malakim in my game. His civilopedia entry doesn't work and his picture doesn't look Bannor or Malakim. Is he a Minister Koun random type?
March of the Trees is crazy. Now to teach the AI when to use it... in a previous game, my entire (vastly more powerful than anything in the world) invading army was destroyed in two turns by the treants -- which wasn't fun and does strike me as overpowered, definitely vis-a-vis something rather lame like River of Blood (I know, world spells aren't supposed to be of equal power, though the elves are so good anyway that giving a killer world spell seems a bit over the top). However, this time, I walked in with a similar army and Thessa sat there and let me destroy her cities when a simple casting of the spell would have made things MUCH more challenging. She had the spell available to cast and instead sat on it and was wiped out. Even though the spell needs to be toned down, that's no fun.
When does it ever make sense to cast River of Blood, btw? I'd much rather leave opponents' populations high, conquer the city and eat the population! Speaking of which, what's the formula for XP gained by feeding on a city? It looks like you get more the larger the population eaten (which is fine and is a reward for big cities but is actually somewhat backward since by the time a city's at size 19 or 20, it's probably so well-fed that it can regain the missing pop point pretty quickly, whereas 1 pop point is a huge thing for a 3 pop city to lose).
Are there many guild-related events in the game these days? I've had a number of games with Aeron's Bounty, Guild of the Nine, Ratcatcher's Guild and Guild of Hammers and almost never seen them do anything. Guild of the Nine and of Hammers do things in their own right so they're fine to have but I feel like the other two are sort of pointless -- or are there things happening behind the scenes with the crime rate that somehow impact things? As it stands, it's fun to spread guilds but I feel like it's sort of pointless, and the same goes for caring about the crime rate.
Whew, that's a lot of rambling and random thoughts... I've been enjoying the game a lot and thought I'd throw out some questions/observations for people to comment on. Keep up the good work, everyone!
-Kilrathi
![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
