Hippus Mercs

[Moxxa]

These guys are way too strong.

After getting all your worker techs and founding one other city, beeline for currency (making sure you have 300 in the bank for the first merc event), then beeline trade. Now you can trade for techs, sell them, then trade and sell some more with the goal of aquiring GOLD. Now just hire mercs left and right while researching metals. Make sure you keep the slider low enough that you're bringing in 40-50 GPT. Once you have a nice stack, go take your neighbors' cities. This will give you more and more gold, allowing you to hire more and more mercs. Build lots of cottages, build money changers, anything to keep the cash flow coming in. You don't need more than one production city, which should be the only other city you actually build other than your capital. All your units come from gold, not hammers. This allows all the rest of the cities you conquer to be cottaged. Hammers mean almost nothing. I never even had to use Warcry.

I think this works for 3 reasons...

1.) The mercs are unbalanced, not to mention Agressive Raiders mercs.
2.) The AI has a tendency to put all its eggs in one basket when it comes to city defense. They also build their cities close enough to allow you to capture several in one turn.
3.) I just rule at this game...NOT! (just look at my other completed games in my HoF pic...

Playing with this strategy allowed me to win by domination on turn 270, Immortal difficulty, bringing in a normalized score of 246133. This is also using the "Play Now" feature, so no special settings to help me. Not bad for a FfH noob, although do I have tons of regular Civ experience.

Look at the pics to see how few units I had to actually build. Everything else was economy. Workers were mostly captured.

One bad thing about this strategy is I still haven't seen any of their high level units. I probably would have just built more mercs instead of researching all those other techs though. This civ needs to be looked at by the devs, I think.

 

[phoulishwan]

I just want to say while the strat is definately by all means overpowered the civ you use to do it is irrelevant, sure the promos make it even more effective but mean very little if within 3 turns of founding the Go9 you got a stack of 40 mercs thanks to the 10 workers you had sitting in the city to start the recruiting process.

 

[Moxxa]

I just want to say while the strat is definately by all means overpowered the civ you use to do it is irrelevant, sure the promos make it even more effective but mean very little if within 3 turns of founding the Go9 you got a stack of 40 mercs thanks to the 10 workers you had sitting in the city to start the recruiting process.

The big things are the raiders promotion and the extra movement points for the mercs when you're using this leader. They allow you to capture 2-3 cities, in which they can Fortify, in one turn. If you have a few extra movement points between turns you can pillage all their improvements, save the cottages, for tons of extra gold. You can even turn off research after discovering Iron Working, possibly sooner if you conquer the Mines of Whatever that give you 3 Iron like I did in the above game.

I like the idea of a mercenary UU, but it needs to be tweaked. Make it twice as expensive or limit the number of mercs that can be recruited per city per turn.

 

[Moxxa]

Double post.

 

[phoulishwan]

The big things are the raiders promotion and the extra movement points for the mercs when you're using this leader. They allow you to capture 2-3 cities, in which they can Fortify, in one turn.

Like I said the free promo's certainly make an already overpowered strat even more effective, but it has nothing to do with the leader choice, the mercs don't get the horselords promo, so no extra movement, same movement as for anyone else, apart from the raider promo which is arguably strong but could be acquired with a number of other leaders as well. Tasunke is meant to be the Mongols of FFH. I recall getting them nerfed way back when FFH2 was just out, 5 hammers a turn on deity is all I needed. They're no where near the level of power they used to be at and find while your argument is valid for the Guild of Nine it has nothing to do with the leader choice. So bringing them up as the main point of your case is imo false, it's the guild that is overpowered.

I like the idea of a mercenary UU, but it needs to be tweaked. Make it twice as expensive or limit the number of mercs that can be recruited per city per turn.

QFT, no argument here, it's the UU and the guild.

 

[Moxxa]

Like I said the free promo's certainly make an already overpowered strat even more effective, but it has nothing to do with the leader choice, the mercs don't get the horselords promo, so no extra movement, same movement as for anyone else,

Actually his mercs have 3 movement points whereas everyone elses mercs have only 1. He has the best mercs in the game, by far.

apart from the raider promo which is arguably strong but could be acquired with a number of other leaders as well. Tasunke is meant to be the Mongols of FFH. I recall getting them nerfed way back when FFH2 was just out, 5 hammers a turn on deity is all I needed. They're no where near the level of power they used to be at and find while your argument is valid for the Guild of Nine it has nothing to do with the leader choice. So bringing them up as the main point of your case is imo false, it's the guild that is overpowered.

I agree, its the guild that is overpowered. This is already being discussed in the balance thread.

But hey, if anyone wants any easy domination win, this is the way to go...for now...

 

[phoulishwan]

Ahhh, I see what you're saying, I thought the mounted mercs were open to everyone once you researched trade, after the first couple mercs I got were of the normal variety, I just assumed it was the trade tech that enabled the mounted variety. So yes, I'm full of . .. .. .. ., the Mounted Mercs are the problem and it appears they're only available to the Hippus.

 

[daladinn]

honestly they are completely balanced.

by the time you can get mounted mercs you could already have chariots which are slightly better then mounted mercs. for a little more effort on the calvary tree you get horse archers which are a bit better then chariots.

the price of mercs at 120g is right on par for where it should be. this is based on the hammer cost of building an equal power unit. also when you decide to crank up your cash generation you typically suffer a fairly large hit to your research.

hippus still have their traditional weakness of city taking. archers with city defense still stop the hippus cold. until they allow calvary the higher levels of city attack they will still be the masters of the plains but caught in the forests , stopped on the hills , and denied the cities.

 

[Moxxa]

honestly they are completely balanced.

by the time you can get mounted mercs you could already have chariots which are slightly better then mounted mercs. for a little more effort on the calvary tree you get horse archers which are a bit better then chariots.

the price of mercs at 120g is right on par for where it should be. this is based on the hammer cost of building an equal power unit. also when you decide to crank up your cash generation you typically suffer a fairly large hit to your research.

hippus still have their traditional weakness of city taking. archers with city defense still stop the hippus cold. until they allow calvary the higher levels of city attack they will still be the masters of the plains but caught in the forests , stopped on the hills , and denied the cities.

The thing is you have to actually BUILD the Chariots and Horse Archers, which requires hammers and in most cases, several turns. Creating an army this way is a slow process. When you have the Go9 founded, you can hire an army instantly, provided you have the gold. Gold can be aquired much faster than hammers through selling techs and resources, pillaging (which is also enhanced by the raiders trait), lower your research rate, building cottages, gold enhancing buildings, etc. You will still build other mounted units, but they are used to compliment your mercs city busting abilites with their extra high withdraw and will probably make up maybe 10% of your total army.

Just look at the game I posted to see how broken the Go9 is and how many times that brokeness is multiplied when playing as the Hippus, Tasunke in particular. I'll post the save so you can watch how entire civs dissapear in 3 turns in the endgame replay if you want.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

What was defending against your units? Anyway. Lots of steamroller strategies like this exist.

Try REXing with the malakim, making honor followed by priesthood your priority, spread Empyrean while going for priesthood, then cast your world spell and start rolling niggas with your ridiculous swarms of fire-spamming priests while using Rathas to freeze reinforcement stacks. Go for theology while they breeze through a target gaining XP, then turn the 3 best ones into high priests...

Or pick the Luchuirp, use your world spell immediately for a free engineer, get to construction really fast, and have a mighty golem army way before Tasunke could get currency. Eventually you'll get elementalism and future golems will be able to throw fireballs, thus making your main attack force double as siege.

I've broken 300k points with the Malakim one and gotten close to it with the Luchuirp one.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Monkeyfinger: I'm not sure what you mean when you use the term "niggas". I thought that is a word that is considered unacceptable to use. Or is there another meaning to the word?

Steamroller strategies, yeah, there's lots. Hippus Mercs is a complicated one though, because you have to balance pillaging with actually capturing cities. Could we label a "steamroller strategy" for each civ?

 

[thewyrm]

This is also using the "Play Now" feature, so no special settings to help me.

Ummm hitting play now and using the default settings gives you a huge advantage over the computer. Next time go custom game and change the settings to give the AI extra help against you. ie- require complete kills, no tech trading, ai no building requirements, etc.

 

[Moxxa]

What was defending against your units?

Warriors at first, then mostly axemen. The Khazad had a few religous units. The Kuriotates had a few Satyrs and the Grigori had mostly archers and axemen.

Anyway. Lots of steamroller strategies like this exist.

Try REXing with the malakim, making honor followed by priesthood your priority, spread Empyrean while going for priesthood, then cast your world spell and start rolling niggas with your ridiculous swarms of fire-spamming priests while using Rathas to freeze reinforcement stacks. Go for theology while they breeze through a target gaining XP, then turn the 3 best ones into high priests...

Or pick the Luchuirp, use your world spell immediately for a free engineer, get to construction really fast, and have a mighty golem army way before Tasunke could get currency. Eventually you'll get elementalism and future golems will be able to throw fireballs, thus making your main attack force double as siege.

Those both sound very interesting. I'd have to try them out before I can see if the brokeness compares with the brokeness of Go9.

I've broken 300k points with the Malakim one and gotten close to it with the Luchuirp one.

Sounds like they are strong!

I'm not sure what you mean when you use the term "niggas". I thought that is a word that is considered unacceptable to use. Or is there another meaning to the word?

I'm pretty sure that "niggas" is considered distinctly different from the simliar sounding racial slur that we all hate, in the Hip-hop community. Then again, I'm a white boy not at all associated with the hip-hop community and I could be way off. Definetly not trying to offend anyone.

 

[Moxxa]

Ummm hitting play now and using the default settings gives you a huge advantage over the computer. Next time go custom game and change the settings to give the AI extra help against you. ie- require complete kills, no tech trading, ai no building requirements, etc.

I just play on default settings anyway, so Play Now works fine for me. I think that if the civs and units (and the Go9) were balanced, I shouldn't have to give the AI more bonuses.

 

[thewyrm]

What I mean is that the AI will never be able to compensate to an intelligent human player. To make it fair, you have to let it cheat a little. Although, I routinely get my butt handed to me on Emperor so what do I know.

 

[slowcar]

actually you can win standard maps on deity just using warriors and, later, axemen. sure, mounted units are nice to have later on but they lack certain abilities like shock2 and march which makes melee units superior.

@daladin: cover2-units have no problems with archers in any way.

 

[Moxxa]

actually you can win standard maps on deity just using warriors and, later, axemen. sure, mounted units are nice to have later on but they lack certain abilities like shock2 and march which makes melee units superior.

@daladin: cover2-units have no problems with archers in any way.

The Hippus mounted mercs CAN get shock. They can also fortify, but I don't think they can get city raider or march. By the end of my game though I had a Combat V, Shock II, Drill IV, blitzing mercenary commando. The ogre also survived the whole game and became highly promoted.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Meh, 16 years living in oakland causes ghetto vernacular to slip in to my speech now and then.