FfH 2 Manual

[Blackmantle]

Well the only thing of my last post, i whould deem worthy of putting into a short basic summary whould be that massing warriors / scouts early and continue to build them until later is a very interesting strategy as sidar (for getting shades). Many people seem to get it wrong in that for sidar its shades vs. military power.

If one plays them right one builds the 1-turn units or fast-build units for ones sades and builds + keeps highly experienced ones / higher-tier ones. Overall one just builds way more units compared to a regular civ (augumented in cap by early greath merchants and bards yielding alot of possible unit-support.). And less infrastructure. If you shade a good part of your early ghosts (later on those are ok for it) or archmages (unless those are level 10 with few promotions because the have failed to dominate Units 7 times in a row in which case shading is a possibility to make room for a new one.) or War-Chariots and the likes you are makeing something wrong (might still be enough to win but another way just works better.).

The rest is just to explain why ghosts are not all that outstanding compared to the rest.


And you sure seem to be playing to low a difficulty with the way you play sidar. Try immortal or at least emperor. (unless you allready do in which case you should try deity.)
For Sidar thats not a big problem anyways since higher difficulties mean more fights which equals more shades. But the battles are not all that much Druids / Warchariots / Archmages vs. Axemen / Hunters / Horsemen / base Religious.


I don't find Gunpowder needed for sidar in particular (because the +1 production to mines does relatively so much less in comparison to other civs) but its another good way to kick butt. Archery-units get augumented by flaming arrows for sidar thanks to enchantment. Its only that the rest of the archery-path is so underpowered and overpriced (techwise.) but as you explain even archery-path might make sense in case of the Arquebus.
Unless playing deity you should be 1 Tier of units ahead anyways at tier 4 at the latest (at full Tier 3 on anything below emperor.) so good odds should be easy to obtain no matter what path you follow. Add to that, sidar units at that time usually start with 3 Promotions on building or up to 5 ones with mounted ones (Shrine of the Champion + Ride) and you got at double whack-the AI which it can hardly resist. Not to mention Power 25-30 City defenders on build make your cities impenetratable sorts of.

Oh and i failed to mention that im a builder as well so im not using their full offensive potential. But immortal / deity without reload (which i just do with sidar currently. immortal / emperor with some reloads for most other civs.) keeps one busy enough with that while still playing a builder-game (also its not a matter of getting virtually all wonders and religions first anymore at that difficulties.).
The Warriors / Scouts mostly level vs. Barbs anyways.
Axemen / Ghosts / Chariots and the likes are rather fit for early-midgame fighting vs. AI. Vs. AI fights also yield more XP so its ok for those to get a few shades from. Just Warriors / Scouts don't do it vs. AI.

 

[orangelex44]

I don't think the Arquebus comes from the Archery path - isn't it at the end of the "engineering" path?

And yeah, I'm not really a high-level player. I'm sure that I COULD do it (after a dozen tries) but I like to stay at Monarch, or even lower if I'm being a new civ or trying a new general strategy.

For these little blurbs, I'm figuring that Monarch is about the highest applicable level, really. Any higher and you have to have a clear plan from turn 1 - which requires a lot more knowledge about the civ that either 1) is in the Strategy threads; 2) isn't written down anywhere; or 3) doesn't exist yet.

Again, for my game, I didn't need a whole bunch more units than normal... but now that you mention it, I did maybe increase the number a bit. It's tough to say, since my current tallies are off - I'm playing a Mercurian game, and have about four stacks of 30+ Angels wandering about. It's great!

 

[orangelex44]

I *AM* still working on a couple more of those summaries, I'm just a little bogged right now - and excited for .34, maybe I'll just wait and do the Illians right away...

 

[xienwolf]

Yeah I tried doing some updates on the manual and wound up not reading all of the post about improving the colors before I went through. Changed all ~700 links to Appendix A into a dark green, then looked at the next color which doesn't print well and found that it is almost exactly what I just changed Appendix A into!

So... that stopped my brief desire to update color schemes Hopefully I have time this weekend to polish things because I will certainly need to release a large update the next weekend.

 

[Polobo]

I haven't look at any of the various OpenOffice XML file formats but wouldn't it be easier to try and identify how the color definition for the links are being saved (in XML) and devise a search-replace type routine to parse the saved XML instead?

I downloaded the .odt file from a few pages back but it is a binary format. Is there a way to export/import the xml format and if so I'd be happy to try and scan the xml and see if any changes could be done at that level and then have you re-import and see what happens. I really don't have time to play around with the OpenOffice side of things but I am already setup to analyze XML and have an idea of what I would be looking for (assuming the XML is in at least an English dialect).

 

[Polobo]

Actually, I'm going to go down the OpenOffice path now so I'll let you know if I need something else later.

 

[Polobo]

OK, so maybe not. Another idea, however, is to use the "style" capabilities built into OpenOffice to associate a style with the various link types and then you can modify the style definition and all the text associated with that style will change automatically.

The hard part seems to be the re-import aspects since exporting seems to be somewhat straight forward. Will look some more and let you know if I come up with anything else.

 

[Polobo]

Ok, I take that back

The .odt is simply a zip file within which the XML and graphic files are contained. I opened up the content.xml file in the .odt file and started making sense of things, and this could work.

What specifically are you looking to change? I scanned cross-referenced unit links and they do seem to share a common internal style (T71) that we could replace with an actual defined style name and/or updated the defined style as it is stored in the document to take on a different color. It may take a few passes to identify any variances that occurred, and if different types share the same format they will all have to change unless we scan the document and change the style name ourselves to separate them.

FYI - There appears to be around 1500 table styles defined in the document (assuming maybe a little over 1 table per style so...)

 

[davidlallen]

Hopefully I have time this weekend to polish things because I will certainly need to release a large update the next weekend.

It may be worthwhile to annotate the civ specific strategy sections with a version number. For example, we have collected about eight "new" sections, which are up to date for 0.33, but 0.34 is about to come out. I think it may avoid a little pain for beginning players, to know that the guide they are about to use may be a little out of date. Of course we will make every effort to update every civ guide every release ... but ... just in case.

 

[Polobo]

Also, breaking up the document into distinct parts should be doable if that is something that you think would be of benefit. Then just prior to publishing you can combine the different parts into a single document and generate the output. The only thing I'm not certain about is how the links would work, if at all, while the documents are broken apart (or whether there are errors that occur because of it - though I am guessing not).

I am unable to put time into the automation aspects that I was working on before but putting together some XML scripts for this Document is something I can fit in.

 

[xienwolf]

Good idea on marking any strategy section with a version number for when last updated. Since those ones are a low priority item for me when updating to a new version.


As for all the .odt and .xml information... more than I have looked into anything thus far I have looked briefly at setting up macros to automate the color changes, but the best I have managed is to get it down to pressing 2 on-screen buttons. So if I could get something to automate my mouse motions that would do it I suppose. Really annoying overall that the search tool I have can search by format, but cannot replace format only Possibly it can and I just don't know the command for pulling it off yet

Overall, I wouldn't bother with creating any new tools for me. I change styles and approaches often enough that it might wind up becoming obsolete in short order. I'll just check out the OO forums again briefly and see if there are updated or new plug-ins which accomplish my goals

 

[Polobo]

The changes for the colors is quite easy, no tools necessary except to identify the internal style associate for the links in question and update a single value with the desired hexadecimal color code. Just let me know which ones you need changed and put out a link so I can download the most recent file you are working on. If you know the color codes you want that would be great, otherwise I'll pick something then get feedback.

Question: Is there a way to disable the loading of the image files? Performance sucks and I have a half-way decent machine. Albeit the text alone is 15MB so even without images its still going to be a load.

 

[xienwolf]

Aye, I just played with how to use the search/replace tool I had and I found a way to replace the style of the text, so that is all good now. Just need to settle on some good RGB values which are notably different on the screen, but all printable to B/W paper.


Load time for the whole file is just horrible, but once loaded it runs fairly well. Not sure how I could make it quicker, but I wouldn't want to be unable to see any parts of it while editing, so not something I have bothered with before.

 

[xienwolf]

Ok, all text colors are changed, and in the future I know how to change them rapidly, so we'll get some feedback on how well these colors look and how nicely they print and start tweaking. Rather than just fixing the colors requested by DavidAllen initially, I have changed out all of the colors so there are only small shade changes between most of the categories, but those are areas that are fairly closely related with minimal chance of an overlapping word. I used "Web Colors" for everything so that they should be maximized for printability.


I have also placed tags on all of the current strategy guides (Civilizations and Religions) marking them as being written by me for 2.033 Patch G (even though some are already outdated by that patch). Mostly this was just to have the format set up for inserting all of the contributed text. Nice thing about nobody helping with the manual was that I didn't need to bother too much with credits Nice thing about having to bother with credits is that I got all of you pitching in to help write GOOD strategy, instead of "words of wisdom" from a guy who hasn't actually played the game in almost a year.


Anyway, I am going to go through this thread in reverse order of the posts back till the start of my page 6 (Post 201 - so start of Page 11 for many of you probably). That way I should get the most recent version of any contributed strategy guide plugged into the manual (at this point only the "Intro to FfH" piece is actually added in. Quite a few Civs were written up quite nicely since, I just haven't updated on my end of things).


No serious re-organization so far, and no further progress on entering the Landscape/Civics/Technologies either. Doubtful that I will wind up placing much of anything in any of those categories until well after 34 is out and stabilized to about a patch a week.

 

[davidlallen]

Anyway, I am going to go through this thread in reverse order of the posts back till the start of my page 6 (Post 201 - so start of Page 11 for many of you probably). That way I should get the most recent version of any contributed strategy guide plugged into the manual

Please note some of the strategy text was in this other thread.

 

[xienwolf]

And that would be the kind of advice I was searching for by posting that

 

[xienwolf]

Update posted, perhaps crappy work for my own standards, but I keep on putting it off, and I would like to provide SOME update.


Not all of the walkthroughs/guides and whatnot recently posted are in here. I'd love it if people could re-post anything which wasn't included. Even if you just go back and quote your own post to bump it and remind me that it exists (but preferably, tweak it to account for the new changes in 34 ).


There are a couple of things which I have not included in the manual, most of them are things which are intuitive, a few are just such a minor change from the norm that they aren't really worth the space. But I'll probably add them back in later.

I also haven't done anything with the Trophies, and have done nearly nothing about the Explorable Lairs. Eventually there ought to be a full write-up on the lairs, or at least better details listed under the exploration spells (which at this point aren't actually listed at all).


Another thing which will come later is some sort of indication on each spell/ability to indicate if it is blocked by Arcane Lacuna or not.


Also, due to the method I used for updating, I may have forgotten to remove a lot of things which were taken out of the game, especially in the spells or promotions. Or failed to include information relevant to a Civ in their Civ section in the beginning of the manual. So any missing/wrong information, please let me know

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

thanx for the update xienwolf. I'll take a look at it later and report if anything has gone wrong

 

[Skitters]

Looks good Xienwolf (and team!)

Minor point on the new player guide - it still refers to starting a new game if you start by the Broken Sepulchar. Thats probably not as relevant now that it is an Epic Dungeon, and if it is then the same could be said of the Pyre of the Seraphic and Aifons Isle

 

[xienwolf]

Aye, that should be updated to be a warning not to go exploring lairs before you have a second warrior defending your city.