Early Game Strategy

[Set]

Been playing a lot of FFH with MNAI lately and I'm struggling a little bit with the early game. I can run away with it sometimes, but at least some of the time I feel like I'm just put in unwinnable situations. I tend to play on Immortal difficulty, which is also how I play vanilla BTS.

Usually struggle with AI warrior rushes, particularly when multiple AIs attack. But not sure about my early game in general.

Do you ever go worker first in FFH? It seems like there's a greater than 1% chance that you just lose the game if you don't go warrior first. A lair pop of lots of lizardman or barbs winning some lucky battles will get you. On the other hand, river of blood means growing your city early is not always a great idea. I usually go worker first since I don't like falling behind in development, but I also definitely lose games reasonably often on turn 20 to a couple of barbs showing up at once and managing to beat my garrisoned warrior.

Do you pop lairs/dungeons near your capital? I used to avoid this because of the aforementioned barb situation but my experience was that AIs would come through and pop the lairs and I would have to deal with the barbs anyway. Might as well take a chance on a good result.

What's the early tech path like? Early game commerce seems more important in FFH than vanilla BTS so I tend to prioritize education. Tech path often looks something like Agri->AC->Edu. But if you have lots of forests you might need to detour to Mining. Mysticism is also needed for God King and sometimes Calendar and/or Crafting for plantations/agrarianism and wine. After this I usually look at finding something to beat an AI Warrior rush. I don't have actually have a good solution for this though. Fawns seem to do the job if your going straight for FoL but this is rarely a good idea and even then they sometimes come too late without good early commerce. They also don't perform very well if AI decides to wait a little bit and come with Axeman. Bronze Agg warriors do okay but obviously require copper and Agg leader. And they're still not amazing since AI can also get copper and be Agg. What are the other anti-warrior rush options? Of course there are some civ specific ways to deal with this like March of the Trees, Sanctuary, being the Lanun and not worrying about land improvements etc.

Tied very closely into tech path is starting settler strategy. I'm not quite sure what a good capital looks like. I value wine a lot since the commerce can let you maybe skip education and go straight for a mil tech. Or tech education faster. Gold is also obviously good, but a lot less good than in vanilla BTS since mining is so expensive in FFH. Food seems a lot worse without early slavery. I'm not sure how to value calendar resources, particularly if they're in forests and AH food resources. Both of these I often don't end up improving for a while. Is it ever a thing to settle a low food capital by calendar resources and go straight for calendar for an agrarianism capital or is this too slow? How long do you usually explore with a settler before settling down? I try to settle before turn 3 usually due to fear of barbarians.

When do you usually think about a second settler? I tend to grow to size 5 before building one since I figure I need at least 4 warrior for two cities, but what if the happy cap is higher? Is an earlier settler much better?

Less tied to the early game but still important. What are the military breakpoints? In vanilla BTS cannons an cuirassiers are good examples of this. A lot of strategy at higher levels is about hitting cannons or cuirassiers early and either winning the game immediately or taking out enough AIs to put you in a position to win easily later. Trebuchets are another good example. Hitting Engineering early can let you take out a nearby AI. In FFH military breakpoints seem attached to getting heroes but maybe I just don't know what's possible.

One of the things I'm really enjoying about FFH is how variable the early game is. Not only does it change depending on the civ pretty extremely but the map can really shift your game too. Only good food is seafood and you pop fishing from a hut? Time for Octopus Overlord Elohim. Elves find gold by the capitol? Svarltfar are migrating to the desert and going for early mining. These can be really fun stories to tell in your head about the game. But I would enjoy being a little better about reading the map and playing to it than I am.

 

[Vintage Strategist]

Hey Set, so many good questions

I'm doing FFH let's plays on YouTube, currently working on Clan (MNAI, Immortal, small Pangea). Past games were on base FFH (deity). Check it out, there are some hints and strategies: Vintage Strategist

To your questions:

• I always go worker first, except Calabim (usually grow to 3, River of Blood to 5 then worker). I think if you don't get the worker out early, that's as bad as losing turn 20 to early barbs. No early worker - no turn advantage, higher chance to lose later.
• IMM in MNAI = Deity+ in base FFH basically. So it is hard. Especially on smaller denser maps (not sure what your preferred map settings are). Need to be picky about the starting location, better to regenerate to have no jungle, some cereals/flood plains and commerce resources to make it easier. Cereals, incense or other calendar resources are great because they are fast to go online. Silk sucks for everybody except elves.
• I don't pop lairs/barrows/dungeons near the capital. The lizardman place - maybe, but I would usually regenerate the map if it's in the vicinity - too much trouble guarding workers. The RNG can destroy you with AI popping assassins or similar cheese, but that's part of the game flavor.
• Tech path: with cereals and commerce resources in the capital: Agriculture - Calendar (Agrarianism is awesome for building settlers, workers and growing). Then if wine/gold is available - Crafting and Mining (this one also shows Copper, often a good idea to see and place a city there). Festivals to get markets and compensate maintenance from new cities. Exploration to road into neighbors and start courting them. Mysticism to boost the capital and generate a great sage for the academy. If you expect a lot of pressure - Great Merchant then, and trade mission to upgrade warriors into archers/axemen. If you have few commerce resources around you, cottages would be necessary, but if you can pull this off - go for Aristocracy and Construction for mass farms.
• Delaying the rush: try to not meet the AI if you can Like if you receive a local map from a hut and see enemy borders, don't go in there. They will claim all the huts around anyways and chances are they will meet somebody before you to mark as their worst enemy. Try not to settle near them not to overlap borders. Road into the AI and give them your palace mana for a relationship boost. Trade resources. When you see somebody starts plotting, try to bribe others into attacking them. Have some spare resources that they can demand and give in for a temporary peace. If it's possible, switch a religion to match the alignment of the biggest bully next to you. But the rush will happen sooner or later, so yeah, build up the troops. Also Orthus may come and nearby barb cities may send stacks, so military needs to be there.
• Warrior rush is a problem because the AI picks Shock and if all that you have is melee that's hard. Maybe somebody builds Mines of Galdur and you can iron your boyz up. Might go other unit categories for a more diverse defense force - archers early, hunters, cavalry.
• For capital settle - check the first few minutes of starting episodes that I have on the channel. Basic FFH rules for capital placement apply in MNAI. It's also possible to pull off a forested start if your civilization starts with ancient chants - just go mysticism for godking, and don't build a worker first. But that's the start.
• Settling a second city - depends on the resources around the capital and the location of the second city. If it has incense, or gold or something else, that's nice and juicy. Usually I would also grow to 5 and build settler then. That's good timing to get the warriors out and fill the free maintenance slots.
• Military breakpoints are not as pronounced as in CIV4, because str increases in unit tiers are fairly small. Catapults early are pretty much mandatory for whittling down stacks and city defenses because you can't outproduce AI in sheer unit numbers. Also Construction is an important tech anyways. You can pair catapults with bronze axemen and a couple archers or cavalry and start to take out cities. Be friendly with a Runes of Kilmorph founder and you will have iron from their Mines of Galdur from a trade deal eventually. After that magic comes into play. If your enemy is coastal or you can pull off tsunami next to a lake, Cultists replace catapults. OO melee is quite efficient. Stygian guards are cheap to upgrade to and cheap to research, best melee unit overall. Stirrups are also cheap to research and horse archers own. Also chariots. Knowledge of the Ether can add strong bonuses to your armies depending on your palace mana (dance of blades for first strikes, enchanted blade for +20% str melee, blur for immunity to first strikes etc.). Later you have Maelstrom, Fireballs, Ring of Fire and even later Chalid and Dwarven Druids.
• Yep, FFH is very, very, very diverse. Various civs have various strengths that change your strategy a lot.

With early AI rush - MNAI is clearly and blatantly overdoing it. If an AI spawns next to your capital, you have a guaranteed rush between turn 70-80. You don't have time for diplomacy. It's possible to sink hammers in warriors to hold a couple waves off, but then you are still up against Shock-1 warriors, garrison maintenance kills your research and you are stalled for the rest of the game. I'd advise to restart the game if an AI is very close to you.

 

[swapoer]

Weird, in my latest play through of MNAI, AI ddi not value my palace mana much. I gifted my manas to them and received not relationship bonus. In one of my trade, I had to trade 3 palace manas, one copper and one wine for just one iron.


Overall, I think this change is good, since early game mana is useless most of the time. In vanilla, AI valued mana too much.

I saw in your Clan LP, that AI still valued palace mana though. I believe we both have the same version as 2.19 betau2. Strange.

 

[Vintage Strategist]

I noticed that in base FFH when you give somebody your palace mana to buy attitude, it grows from 0 to +4 gradually but fairly quickly. In MNAI the process seems to be slower.

I suspect, but not sure that the AI gives more favorable trades based on their attitude. 3 palace mana and two resourced for iron seems like a very one-sided deal. What was your relationship like with that civ? Same or different alignments? Deity difficulty maybe?

Elohim gave me their Iron in the Clan Let's Play for way less IIRC - one mana, copper and maybe some other random resource. Yes, I run the same version of MNAI.

 

[Set]

My sense is the AI values mana for some arcane reason beyond me. Sometimes I can catch up on tech when way behind by selling my mana for half the tech tree. Other times, in the same game even, the AI will value my mana similarly to how it values 10 gold even with the same attitude as before.

@Vintage Strategist I've been enjoying your youtube channel a bunch. One thing I've noticed is you tend to only play high commerce starts, which are the only starts I have reliable success with too. I've been experimenting a little bit though with Agriculture->Mysticism as first tech route in low commerce starts. Elder council and scientist specialist actually let you tech quite quickly. Change into pacifism with god king and you can get out a scientist around turn 55-60 for very early academy and even better tech rate. I still die to warrior rushes more often than I'd like but that happens on high commerce starts too! I've also been having fun trying to bulb into early mil techs to deal with rushes. The Elohim Preisthood bulb for monks has been the only reliable success so far but I find it quite powerful. I'm curious how to use archers to counter rushes? I find them not very useful as they can't attack the AI stack and as a result you just sit in your cities while they choke you to death by pillaging and forcing you to make more units.

One thing from Vanilla BTS that is even more important in Fall From Heaven is running binary research. Keep research either at 0 or 100. This way you don't lose any research to rounding (which can be quite bad early in the game when you only generate little research) and you can accumulate gold to use for nice events just in case. Later in the game it might not be as important in FFH because there are many GPT bonuses in the game, unlike in BTS.

Have you ever checked out the Erebus Continent mapscript? Creates some very fun fantasy worlds with enormous deserts, mountain ranges, etc. without a lot of the problems the default Erebus mapscript has (AI can actually get off the ground, no huge unusable parts of the map, no mountain labyrinth maps etc.)

Settings wise I play Large Erebus Continents, two extra AI, Standard Speed, Reduced Jungle and Flavor Starts. I also like enabling Living World since random events are fun and I have a theory that it makes the game a little more balanced (events can be very powerful in FFH and in Living World it's more likely they'll balance out)

 

[Vintage Strategist]

Interesting, we have yet to understand why mana is treated so differently from one game to another.

Yeah, I do the video LPs to show off what various civilizations have in terms of units, buildings and abilities and it's best to do it with strong commerce-rich starts for fast development. I also like early Mysticism and especially in forested starts. Pretty strong with Sidar for more warriors hunting after the barbs (well, at least in base FFH). But then the second city would probably be in a commerce-rich location

Nice Priesthood-bulb idea with the Elohim! Never tried it but sounds very smart! And good thing you mentioned the binary research - I completely forgot about it.

With archers - well, that's just another unit type in a garrisons/stacks that will make it harder for the AI to attack it. Not for the early rushes of course. It's situational (too many beakers for the tech and hammers for the archery range). If you plan on using assassins or horse archers later, you can have archers early for defense and then upgrade. Can buy some time and minimize losses until it's possible to peace out... if it ever is.

I've played Erebus Continent in Orbis a lot. Good map type. Yes, I'll use it for some later games. Also I know I want to do Kurios on Erebus and fly an army across a mountain ridge once.

 

[Calavente]

A tip you didn't seem to use in the Clan gameplay : micromanaging your body adpets to give double build time to workers...and especially to adepts.
once the worker/adept has worked, a bit of haste and he can work anew
I loved the AI-interaction you had... which I never use, playing with less dense worlds, and less brains I learned a lot, it gave me the wish to start a new denser game...

 

[Vintage Strategist]

Great idea with double worker turns using haste! Never did this before. Will try it out in the Doviello let's play - just acquired lots of territory that needs to be improved. I hope it works in MNAI.

 

[Calavente]

it should... unless it was an unexpected effect in other modmods...
it's just a huge amount of micro... having body adepts with worker stacks... and cast haste "only just before end turn".

I noticed that you like to have your adepts and mage "mono-mana" .. why?
why not have a body-shadow adept ? or a body-sun or chaos-water to double on terraform or haste and on combat buff ?

 

[Vintage Strategist]

hm, i think this is just an auto-pilot decision based on experience with creating adepts into mages for dmg spells (and then combat 1-5 makes sense). With adepts for haste and blur etc. - you are right, making them this way is better - so they can pay for themselves both during war time and peace time. I'll correct my play.

 

[Dangerous Hat]

Really interesting discussion - I'm also playing MNAI on Immortal and trying to work my way through the civs - have done about half now, the stronger ones or maybe just the ones I play less badly. So I have also been on the receiving end of the early rush many times...

By trial and error a critical factor seems to be how many warriors you have - having 3 or 4 more early can make the difference between being declared on or not. But the usual suspects will declare soon enough anyway and attack with a stronger force than you have. Agree that sometimes this feels and probably is unwinnable, but I find (more trial and error) you can sometimes turn the tables by building lots and lots and lots of warriors (start building when they start plotting, and keep building). It's no good building strong city defences as the AI doesn't attack strong cities, so you have to destroy their stack before you get pillaged to death. Wait or lure them onto a spot without defensive bonuses, then suicide your warriors on the stack. Eventually, and if you have enough, you will get to a point where you can win against their injured shock warriors, drown, or whatever, and destroy the stack.

When the carnage subsides you will have a few troops left, and they will now have reasonable (but not great) promotions. So you will need to build more and do the same thing on their second stack. This time you finish off with your promoted warriors, after which they will likely be stronger than most of the invaders. Now you can use them to win battles at good odds, and turn the tide.

I find this can work, but often takes a couple of attempts to get the strategy right - most often I stop warrior building too early and don't have quite enough. It helps that the AI is good at sending a strong stack first, but its reinforcements are generally somewhat random and in smaller groups. And of course warriors are super cost-effective and quick to build, and it's much easier once you have bronze. With bronze you can just about take down Bambur and the like if you have enough.

For lairs I find the results are invariably bad if you explore, in contrast to the AI who invariably gets goodies, so if they are in my borders I have a scout sit on it for a hundred years and if outside I hope for the best. Barrows are useful for levelling up though - post a couple of warriors next door and attack as soon as the skeleton spawns and before it fortifies - same strategy as above really.

Virtually always go worker first - have learned through bitter experience to keep the starting warrior at home though if there's a ruin close by.

Great tip about hasting workers - thanks! Had no clue about that.

 

[Calavente]

@Vintage Strategist
I've seen your Doviello 7 ... and you tried the hasting the workers.
to see if the workers were hasted, select another stack then come back to the worker stack.
If you don't leave the stack, you'll only see the red bubble and think that the workers were not hasted...
I don't know why.

NB : it works in AoE and in Magister's modmo which is based on MnAi (so it should work on MnAi...)

But it indeed seems that it didn't work... because a floodplainfarm should take less than 8 worker turns (4 workers *2 ... strange)...
(I haven't tried it again with MnAi yet, I'll do it next thursday or so)

 

[Vintage Strategist]

@Calavente I tried this some more off camera, switched between different stacks, but the workers didn't get hasted. They don't receive the "Hasted" effect, so I guess this hasting of workers is blocked in MNAI.

 

[Calavente]

too bad.. sniff

 

[MagisterCultuum]

XML-only promotion granting spells like Haste only give their promotions to units with a UNITCOMBAT for which those promotions are eligible. (Those with bBuffCaster ignore this restriction.) In base FfHs and MNAI, workers have no UNITCOMBAT and so are not available for any such spell buffs, although in MagisterModmod I gave them UNITCOMBAT_CIVILIAN.

 

[Tielby]

XML-only promotion granting spells like Haste only give their promotions to units with a UNITCOMBAT for which those promotions are eligible. (Those with bBuffCaster ignore this restriction.) In base FfHs and MNAI, workers have no UNITCOMBAT and so are not available for any such spell buffs, although in MagisterModmod I gave them UNITCOMBAT_CIVILIAN.

Does that include mud golems, since they have a defensive strength?

Edit: I realize they couldn't get the Haste promotion anyway. I'm just wondering if they have UNITCOMBAT.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Does that include mud golems, since they have a defensive strength?

Edit: I realize they couldn't get the Haste promotion anyway. I'm just wondering if they have UNITCOMBAT.

No, none of the golems in the game have a UNITCOMBAT except for Barnaxus. That is why Barnaxus is the only one able to purchase promotions with experience.