Earlygame Scions

[Nadrak]

Hello,
we are really enjoying this modmod with my friend and thank you for your hard work. We have been playing FFH for a long time and we tried to switch to FF and we really like it. I have a few questions/feedbacks.

Scions are looking so powerful in the early game. They are not using food, so they can focus only on production and commerce. Early on it's a problem, because they can produce/research stuff faster than others. They are the best civ for an early warrior spam with their production and aggressive trait.

Another things are worker and settler. Respectively Engineer corpse and Awakened. Scion's worker should be a little bit costly. Workers are not a tempo hit to growing your city. Normally the city is stagnant, but here Awakeneds are still spawned. Same goes for a new cities.

Awakened shouldn't be able to build a new city. This will prevent so early expansion without wasting a single hammer into building it. What about this change: Reborn is spawned instead of Awakened, but it can only add to city. Awakened must be build, but can found a new city too.

Maybe ban them from building Elder council.

I really enjoy playing Scions, but I feel it is one of the strongest civilization.

Sry for my English, it is my second language...

 

[WarKirby]

They only have aggressive under korinna.

And while it's true that they don't have to focus on food. The flipside is that they CAN'T focus on food. Other civs can plonk down a city beside clams/fish/pigs etc, and have it at size 10 within 50 turns. Scions would be lucky to get size 4 in that time. And awakened have to be allocated between cities. Scions are near impossible to expand rapidly with

And if you're worried about warrior rushes, try looking at the Hippus first. Warcry makes them the undisputed number 1 warrior rush civ. And the Clan of Embers are close behind with their double unit production after Masonry.

 

[Tarquelne]

They are the best civ for an early warrior spam with their production and aggressive trait.

The Centeni have the Unreliable promotion that gives them a combat penalty, one offset for a turn if you give them some gold. I suggest increasing the penalty from "Unreliable" for discouraging warrior spam/rush.

Awakened shouldn't be able to build a new city. This will prevent so early expansion without wasting a single hammer into building it.

What difficulty level are you playing at? Are you getting lots (too many?) of Awakened by building or from free "spawns"?

I ask because I think people generally have trouble expanding, but Awakened spawn frequency and hammer cost are both heavily influenced by difficulty level. The hammer cost adjustment follows the standard difficulty adjustment formula, but the spawning adjustment doesn't.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Scions are more heavily influenced by starting position than most civs. A lucky start can be a huge boost. (I'm tempted to change the Flavorstart code to make hills-plains starts less likely.)

 

[WarKirby]

I think unreliable is fine, and balances perfectly.

Making flavourstart put them in disadvantageous situations is silly, I'd advise against that too. most civs have their own preferred habitat, and moving them out of that because it's overly advantageous is a bad idea, I think. I'd rather see them get extra commerce from grasslands to make up for the lack of hammers.

 

[Tarquelne]

Making flavourstart put them in disadvantageous situations is silly, I'd advise against that too. most civs have their own preferred habitat, and moving them out of that because it's overly advantageous is a bad idea, I think.

Most civs have some good reason for being in their own preferred habitat other than hammer or food count. Hills/plains isn't really a "preferred" habitat for the Scions - it is simply the most advantageous. If anything they'd prefer the standard temperate river valley most human civs like. (There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.)

Given the lack of "Lore" to the hills/plains start, it's like weighing them toward Gold or Iron just because they're desirable. Weighing them toward a less advantageous position would only be as silly as the exiting weights, or adding in a weighting toward Gold: It's purely an issue of game-balance. If they've got too much of an advantage in hills/plains "loosening" the Flavorstart code could only be a good thing.

I'd rather see them get extra commerce from grasslands to make up for the lack of hammers.

... and that could only be a bad thing. I don't think the solution to fixing a too-great advantage in one area is to give an additional advantage in another.

 

[WarKirby]

I've never seen the scions do any better than average in AI hands. Compared to world spanning balseraph, ljosalfar, calabim, dural, and malakim empires, that happen rather frequently

I don't think they need any nerfing.. Early game, you're limited growing one population somewhere in your empire, on average once every 10 turns. A city placed next to food resources can easily grow in less than that, and quite importantly, other civs can grow all their cities at the same time. Scions have to allocate each awakened

 

[Nadrak]

I've never seen the scions do any better than average in AI hands.

Human hands are the problem. Ancient Chants - Mysticism (God King,Elder House to get a scientist for an early Academy - Mining - RoK...this path is so strong for them, that no one can catch up.

 

[WarKirby]

I'm not seeing how that path makes the scions do so much better than anyone else who adopts it. they still have the severely limited population that most others don't/

 

[Nadrak]

As you said, other civs can sometimes have bigger city than scions, if they work some food resource. Scions are working only production/commerce..so they are more productive, because they don't need to focus on food. It's terrifying, that they could set up 2nd city around turn 30-40. Lack of population? With the research path I described above, they will tech like crazy and could easily raze few cities for ppl. I usually start near hills/plains, that is like a god mode for them.

 

[odalrick]

Most civs have some good reason for being in their own preferred habitat other than hammer or food count. Hills/plains isn't really a "preferred" habitat for the Scions - it is simply the most advantageous. If anything they'd prefer the standard temperate river valley most human civs like. (There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.)

I'd like to take this opportunity to repeat a suggestion from a few months ago:

Give Scions civ specific yields for terrain, so that they don't care about the base terrain.

Either give all terrains a hammer or remove the hammer from plains. Snow, sand or little green plants... why would undead care?

Heck, include coast and ocean in that. Undead are excellent freedivers.

 

[Iceciro]

Honestly? The Scions are really, really good in the early game, so much so I find myself looking for random stuff to build instead of troops (honestly, even a nothing option would be good.)

But then that tapers off relatively quickly. I'm playing at turn 100 and everybody has a bigger empire than I do. Sure, if you want to spam warriors, the scions can do that - but they don't get much out of it besides more maintenance in far away cities of 1-2 pop (because the Scions eat pop when they take a city.) You have all of those dudes, sure, but that's honestly not the best way to play scions - it's to build up and make an industrial base. The way the Scions play it's almost never more advantageous to eat a nearby civ in the warrior era, unless they're right next to you and you have no room to expand.

Trust me, I play the scions very agressively, and I can see the initial "SO MANY HAMMERS WHAT THE HELL DO I DO" moments, but they end pretty quickly, and then you're having to, ugh, build population points. Scions wanting to expand and have other large cities, meet screeching halt.

 

[rocklikeafool]

Awakened shouldn't be able to build a new city. This will prevent so early expansion without wasting a single hammer into building it. What about this change: Reborn is spawned instead of Awakened, but it can only add to city. Awakened must be build, but can found a new city too.

Well, here's the thing. As I understand it (and how it works in-game), Awakened are spawned (obviously). Of course, you can affect the frequency of when they spawn. You'll notice by the Manabar Display that there's a % counter. That can be affected by different things. (There's a list of what affects that in the Pedia, under "Fall From Heaven Concepts" and then "Scions of Patria - Gaining Population". Scroll down a bit in that entry and it'll give a list of resources and buildings that affect the spawn rate of Awakened and how much they affect it.) That % counter, I've never gotten it above 20% myself.
Anyway, Awakened are spawned. Reborn, however, are built. The idea is that eventually the % counter for Awakened will go to 0%. (As each turn progresses, there is a negative bonus to the % counter. So, by a certain point, the % counter disappears altogether and no more Awakened will spawn.) Since it'd be highly unfair to prevent the building of a settler unit, the Reborn comes in. After building a "Cathedral of Rebirth", you can build Reborn. That's the difference! Reborn are built, Awakened are spawned.

Maybe ban them from building Elder council.

Why? Explain your reasoning for this maybe? I don't really see the point, but if you explained it...I might.

 

[rocklikeafool]

As you said, other civs can sometimes have bigger city than scions, if they work some food resource. Scions are working only production/commerce..so they are more productive, because they don't need to focus on food. It's terrifying, that they could set up 2nd city around turn 30-40. Lack of population? With the research path I described above, they will tech like crazy and could easily raze few cities for ppl. I usually start near hills/plains, that is like a god mode for them.

In my Scions games, I'd researched everything by turn 500 or so. Since I play on epic speed, no more techs gets kinda boring. I didn't even finish most of my games as Scions cuz I got bored and did other games as other civs. I mean, I can only conquer so much without some incentive to research more units. And with about 500 more turns to go...BORING...

 

[Tarquelne]

In my Scions games...

So you found them easier than other civs, yes? Where did they seem to "take off" - early, mid, or late game?

 

[Monkeyfinger]

No matter how good a start the scions get, they can't aggressively turn it into more population until sorcery + priesthood, by which time their population is in the crapper and the fact that they don't need to work food tiles doesn't come anywhere near making up for it.

 

[Iskar Jarak]

Very good in the early game, when they can grab a couple cities real fast, then start to peter out till they can get Ghosthunters and a source of reborn, at which point most people are 2-3x your size. Nerfing early game could be crippling.

 

[Nadrak]

That's the difference! Reborn are built, Awakened are spawned.

Yes, I know. I'm playing them all the time. The idea behind this is, that spawned Awakened should be only able to add to city. No more free new cities. Build it (they have more than enough hammers) or conquer it (they are not lacking power too).

Why? Explain your reasoning for this maybe? I don't really see the point, but if you explained it...I might.

As I said, they don't need to focus on food, so early game they have good research even without elder house.

 

[WarKirby]

They really don't have enough hammers to build awakened repeatedly. Those are 600 apiece. And the scions don't need food, but they have less population, therefore less tiles being worked. Expecting them to build a 600 settler to make new cities is ludicrous, seriously. The awakened building option is there as an emergency fallback if you don't seem to be getting spawns, afaik. or a "something to do" if you have nothing to build.

 

[Iceciro]

I'm sorry to be so brutally honest, but I've been playing some Scions games lately and nerfing their early game pretty much nerfs their main advantage. Sure, they don't need food early game and can go warrior rush the crap outta people, but lategame, especially if you don't capitalize on the early game (like I didn't last game) you get sorta screwed because you have maybe an 11 pop capital, a 8 pop city, and then a whole bunch of one or two pop cities not really buidling much beyond infrastructure, while your neighbors have 6, 7, maybe 8 8/9 pop cities and are cranking out dudes far faster than you are. You're not going to do much conquering with Honored Bands, so you're not getting much further, your spawn starts to plummet as it gets nearer to Reborn Only Time, and now you have to turn all those hammers, magically, into Sorcery/Drama/Religious Law just to build population points, because even if you go conquer somebody, thier 6-8 pop city becomes a 3-4 pop city for you if you're lucky - I conquered a kurio 18 pop city and it became 6 pop. Talk about screwed.

The Scions are pretty much right where they need to be early game. Powerful, but with a very limited window in which they must secure their terrain and be prepared because nearby AIs/Players will try to eat you midgame.

 

[Vehem]

I did use to find the Scions really quite strong on certain tech-paths, but haven't been able to keep up using them with the AI tweaks. Now that the other civs tech a little more smartly, getting the techs required to make Scions conquest most effective means that I fall behind on the techs required to perform that conquest efficiently. It's quite nicely balanced in that regard.

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One thing I have noticed during the discussion though is that there seems to be some difference of opinion between the Normal Speed and Epic Speed players - perhaps the production-centric setup works better naturally at slower speeds? Being able to construct an army quickly then move it into position relatively faster (movement isn't speed-scaled) allows the enemy less chance to respond/recover? In that regard Epic does seem to promote a rush over prolonged warfare as there is less chance that the enemy can rebuild units over a short period of time (same issue with summons at slow speeds).