FFH - A Shadow Introduction

Since no one had any objections, I decided to leave research set on Festivals. I would then begin the set following a round of micromanagement to emphasis growth.

ffh1258festivalsxx0.jpg


The Great Library was completed in our capital on that same turn. I began training the AV hero, Rosier the Fallen, next. With that barb city to our NE being defended by the trapped barb Elephant, there is no way our Warriors will be able to take the city without heavy losses. If anybody can take out that pachyderm, Rosy can! He's due in 3 turns.

I completed most of the Breweries that were in production. All of them except one: Sledgehome. We will have to wait until that city grows (in 7 turns) in order to :whipped: the Brewery.

I built 2 more Workers, with a 3rd due in 3 turns. I hooked up one of the silks, but did not get to the sugar. Also chopped a few hilltop forests in order to build mines. We are still woefully lacking in production. :sad:

Completed Drama on the last turn ...

ffh1270dramawz3.jpg


I queued up Infernal Pact for the next tech. It would enable the sacrifice the weak civic, as suggested by our resident Vampire. Feel free to change it, as no beakers have been invested.

The free Great Bard still has movement. I suggest sending him to the marble city of Graelingving to be merged. The city is pumping out 2.7 culture per turn, and slowly taking back our reagents.

ffh1270graelingvigqk7.jpg


We had 25% ownership of that tile when I started my set. The 12 culture from the bard will have that tile back in our borders in no time.

Not everything went well, though. I lost an Adept to Curly the Hill Giant. In retrospect, it was probably a :smoke: move to scout Dain's cities with an Adept. And due to an errant mis-click, I suicided one of our Warriors into an Elephant. :(

Our fires also got a bit out of hand. :rolleyes:

ffh1270wildfiresyt9.jpg


Ozbenno said:
If we want to go early on the attack against Dain (which may be a good idea), we should switch research to Warfare and build Rosier the Fallen and Diseased Corpses. That should be sufficient
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, Oz, I did not see this post before I started playing. I know that Jonas already has Warfare, because he built the Form of the Titan. Also it has already been researched by Capria. Truth be told, I was a bit apprehensive about not building troops when I saw her revolt ...

ffh1260capriakx0.jpg


Fortunately, she does not have "enough on her hands" at the moment. It may be my inexperience with FFH, but an AI switching to warmonger civics like that in the base game usually means a declaration ain't far off ... :dunno:

I shall close this report out with a screenshot of our religion spread ...

ffh1270religionup0.jpg


And the save, of course ...
 

Attachments

My educated guess is that Capria may be gearing up against either the Illians or the Svartalfar.

What should we research next? Infernal pact and warfare are good targets. Perhaps head for better spellcasters after them?
 
2 wonders? Drama? No army? You guys are clearly not being evil enough. I'll have to do something about that.

No turns are invested in Infernal Pact. It will take more than my turn to get ready for war since our military is pathetic right now. Someone already built Form of the Titan, so we can put Warfare off. Switch to Priesthood so we can train ritualists. We'd probably like to delay Sacrifice the Weak until we get our next sage out for the Veil holy city anyway since it's -20% GPP.

Looked for things to whip. Oh look, elder council in Tongurstad for 1 pop.
Uddrur - veto library, build adept
Sludgehome - queue Temple ahead of brewery. It's usually better to have a temple for the associated benefits and run Religion civic. We are spiritual so make that "always better". I revolted to Religion civic to boost our temples. This fixes unhappiness in this city for now and gives a small culture boost to claim the mana faster.
Marble city - Temple (15 turns) queued ahead of carnival (23).

Our great bard can mostly lightbulb priesthood. but since we have plenty of other units to train before ritualists come online in 11 turns I send it to marble city.


272 - Whip temples.
273 - Rosier is out. Chilling in our capital. Which doesn't have a temple. Start one.
276 - Our bard arrives in marble city. Fire a culture bomb, bringing the reagents back under our control and gaining a mana source. Our adept will go deal with it. What isn't under control is the forest fire.



277 - Faeryl wants to trade Horseback Riding for Knowledge of the Ether. as this enables the important Mobility promotion I accept.

277 - Marble city was still trying to construct a carnival. Due to the blatant non-evilness of building a carnival I order them to train diseased corpses first.

280 - Priesthood done. Trade Knowledge of the Ether to Jonas for Warfare. Set research to Infernal Pact, for Sacrifice the Weak.

281 - Our people get really sloppy with fire, we got the event where a forge burned down and had to pay 61 gold to rebuild it. I set our research down 1 notch to build up a small bank account again to deal with events.

In other news Sludgehome whipped that brewery. The citizens were too busy eating the newly connected sugar to notice. Our road network is pretty horrible and I'm trying to do something about it. Trade Warfare/Festivals to Faeryl for Construction, we have a lot of rivers.

282 - I tried to construct a death node but we don't have necromancy yet (duh). Dain wants our fire mana for his wine... don't think so

285 - Auric DEMANDS bronze working from us. Os-Gabella would tell him where to stick it. So I do.

286 - Auric comes back and this time offers us hunting for bronze working. Since he was rude last turn, I tell him to get lost.

289 - Dain converts to Ashen Veil, changing his alignment to evil.

290 - I notice someone turned on several 'optimize commerce' buttons explaining why the computer kept messing up my city micro.

Also on this turn, constructed the Veil shrine and connected Reagents, starting a ritualist in the capital. This looks like an ideal stopping point. Oh yeah, all our cities are now producing powerful, EVIL units instead of soft and weak buildings. :lol: Enjoy.

Most of my screenshots didn't take somehow. Sorry.
 

Attachments

I like your playing style. :goodjob:

Time to slap Dain around like the [female dog] that he is.
 
Roster:
Ozbenno - under two false starts now
uberfish - Just Played
stuge - UP
darrelljs - On Deck
Morganknight
Conroe
 
Excellent turn! My only suggestion is to get mages sooner rather than later. They are our collateral damage dealers, and having a few with our attacking armys will help considerably. Build more Adepts and tech toward mages...
 
We have ritualists for collateral damage (or did ring of fire get a big nerf?) So we could go down the summoning line too and get lots of expendable units. I'd probably get necromancy next and build a death node so we can give our adepts death 1 for skellies.

Oh, I had another evil idea - we should send a low level adept out to start fires out near other civs (especially the Svartalfar) just to cause trouble.
 
Unfortunately I played before seeing uber's suggestion about the forest fires. That is definetly something for the next player to do.

Trading with Auric:

Civ4ScreenShot0000-1.jpg


That was mostly for the +1 trade routes from trade. We have no use for cartography, but he wouldn't trade anything else so whatever, ok.

Rosier went elephant hunting:

Civ4ScreenShot0001-1.jpg


During these turns, Rosie earned enough xp to go combat 5. That's good, but I'd come to regret keeping that city.

You see, we finished researching infernal pact and summoned Hyborem into the world. His capital popped up three tiles east of our new city, taking over the pigs and turning them to toads.

So that region turned into an annoyance pretty quick. We should consider founding a city to grab the floodplains and mana node north of Galveholm. We can gift the former barb city to Hyborem, if it's of more trouble than worth.

Infernal pact brought also sacrifice the weak with it, and is it just me, or is that civic a bit broken? I mean, +10% :science: and :gold: in all cities would be a pretty good tradeoff for +4 :yuck:, and then there's the half the food required to boot! I'm not complaining, though.

Builds this round consisted mostly of evil smashy-smashies. As I clicked save on the last turn, I realised that I'd missed an opportunity. We're spiritual, so when we build units we should leave a bunch of them in the build queues with one trun to go, switch to apprenticeship/military state or something similiar, and then churn the units out with free xps, switching back to better civics when possible.

Sorry for being a bit slow, but better late than never, eh?

An event so useless that it's funny:

Civ4ScreenShot0002.jpg


Yeesh. Perhaps we'll build a filler city there at some point and actually benefit from those parrots.

That mana node is being improved. I researched necromancy, so we'll soon have death mana available.

Our empire:

Civ4ScreenShot0004.jpg


I started building a planar gate in the capital in hopes of getting some mobius witches. If it spews out nothing but chaos marauders, they're still free units. (Even if horribly useless.)

Sludgehome is working lots of cottages now, so a library there is appropriate.

Research is set to military strategy. The free Great commander is still available, and blitz would be good for Rosie.

Our military:

Civ4ScreenShot0003.jpg


Should we go to war already? Dain still has nothing but warriors defending his cities. And three hill giants, of course. It'll take 14 turns of research to get conjurers. A bit longer for mages, because we'd have to research a prereq.

SAVE
 
uberfish seems to have embarced the Veil :devil:. I do like killing...I haven't looked at the save yet but I think we should go to war immediately :evil:. Will be able to play in about 7-8 hours. And yes, Sacrifice the Weak is probably overpowered. In fact, FFH is wonderfully unbalanced. I've played private games now as the Calabim and the Grigori, and between Feasting and Twincast Hero Archmages, there wasn't much left on the map when I was done. After playing CIV for so long its nice to play a mod that let's you do tricky fun things!

Darrell
 
I'll do it, but it won't be until later tonight. Cheers!
 
The AC was already at 38 when my round started. Somebody, somewhere has been getting busy.:goodjob:

Two turns pass and the first pangs of Armageddon strike. All of our farms, pastures and plantations disappear. Our Corn disappears completely. Our citizens are more upset about the small hiccup in alcohol production than their impending doom...We only have 7 workers at the moment, so I set most of our cities to pop out quick workers and we soon have 13 or so. We set to work restoring our plantations and pastures. Since we will be running Sacrifice the Weak for the remainder of the game, I only farm tiles with resources. Soon, I will switch from Agriculture to Conquest, but want to whip out a couple of things before abandoning Slavery for Apprenticeship.


This turn is even more eventful as the Cult of the Dragon is founded in our capitol. Of course I allow the cultists to continue their good work - the Cult might prove fun...:mischief:



Um, no... (I almost feel sorry for Dain...)



In preparation for our war with Dain, I drop science to zero for a while and emphasize gold for a few turns. As the cash rolls in, I upgrade many of our most experienced warriors into Pyre Zombies and move them to the front.

Ring of Fire is a nice way to initiate hostilities.


We start capturing Dain's cities. They fall like so much overripe fruit. Larry, Curly and Moe are as stupid as they are strong. Our summmoned units lure them into open fields where Rosier makes quick work of them.

We finish researching Military Strategy and receive a Great Commander. After examining the options, I decide to build a Command Post in our Capitol and then whip out our Heroic Epic as well for a combined 120% increased military production there.


With the construction of the Heroic Epic, I bid a fond farewell to Slavery, adopt Conquest and Apprenticeship and start pumping out beefy troops. All units now start with 4XP and 6XP in our Capitol.


Not quite ready yet, sorry...:scan:


Here's a snapshot of our cities...


...and the religious scene...


...our army is a little stonger than when I started...


...we are running almost 200 science per turn @ 40%...This is a breakdown of our current finanaces...


...and our demographics...


We are very close to completing Summoning. Dain is on the ropes - only three cities left and the best units he's fielding are hunters. Auric seems to be moving a lot of troops around. The troops we have in the south are probably enough to finish up there. It may be time to start pulling some more strength to the north. Sending some "living troops" to our newly conquered cities in the south will surely make them happier. Undead policemen can be quite disturbing...Workers are en route to finish a trade route to hook up our new cities.
 

Attachments

Alas poor Dain, I knew him well!

We've got the choice of Auric or Jonas as next victim I suppose. We should maybe look at razing most of these cities to increase the AC, especially if we go after Auric as his lands are close to the Infernals. For that reason Jonas might be better (and we're down there anyway), if he has some nice cities with resources near our new border, we could annex them, otherwise raze.

On the subject, how do we want to win this? Conquest seems most suitable. Will we have to beat down Hyborem as well?

Roster:
Ozbenno - Finally has a new daughter
uberfish
stuge
darrelljs - UP
Morganknight - Just played
Conroe - On Deck
 
Nice turns, MorganKnight :goodjob:. I got it and should be able to play very shortly.

Ozbenno said:
On the subject, how do we want to win this? Conquest seems most suitable. Will we have to beat down Hyborem as well?
Click to expand...

Conquest is highly appropriate. It is odd, but the AI always seems to enter into a permananet alliance when the Infernals enter, but the player doesn't. I think we will have to kill him OR get him to (peacefully?) vassalize to us.

Darrell
 
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