How to get an early economy

Hamilton321

Prince
Joined
Jul 15, 2016
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In orbit of Io
Hi, I'm a noob in Fall From Heaven, I've gotten into the mod lately because of my friend, but I have no idea how to be successful. My biggest problems in the Fall from Heaven mods are getting my economy rolling early on and getting rushed in the mid game. The early techs are expensive, and it takes me many turns to even get the basics such as farms, cottages, mines and specialists. The AI or my friend I play with seems to have more eco than me and I get killed at around turn 200 unless I have some good free spellcasters.
 
Another question I have is how I can stop my friend from raising the AC endlessly, he always picks Tebryn Arbandi and beelines powerful spellcasters. He then raises the AC and hell terrain/horsemen of the apocalypse show up all over my land and I can't figure out how to lower it
 
Pick the Elhonim. They have a ritual that can drop the AC. They are kind of the anti AC faction. Sadly the AI is less than stellar at that job but as a player you can do it.
 
The other thing is to highly prioritise commerce resources in the early game. In particular calender resources and wine are much more valuable than in the base game, because they're easy to tech to. Incense is a top-tier resource that I try to get in my capital.

In terms of main line economy beyond markets and, to a lesser extent, elder councils, the focus should be either on using city states + cottages or aristocracy and agrarianism + spammed farms in the mid game. Specialists don't really kick off until much later
 
Play orc, go Runes of Kilmorph. Four horsemen don't care about Orc.

Or do Lanun because the civ is easy eco.
 
Pick the Elhonim. They have a ritual that can drop the AC. They are kind of the anti AC faction. Sadly the AI is less than stellar at that job but as a player you can do it.
Another option would be playing as a Barbarian faction - Either the Clan, Doviello with Charadon or, the strongest and likely most unexpected one for your friend, the Infernals themselves! Civs with the "Barbarian" trait won't be attacked by any of the barbarian-civ units, including the horsemen. The Sheaim aren't and so they will actually get attacked!
You can play as the latter by being the first one to unlock the Infernal Pact technology. Ideally you want a good economy for that, Lanun (with Hannah) and Kuriotates are most likely the easiest to rush it. Sheaim themselves lack any sort of economic bonus, so once you get the basics down, you can reach whatever you want before them when having an economically superior civ.
The Sheaim's two main strengths are: 1) Rushing with pyre zombies, but that doesn't seem to be what your friend is doing. 2) Many cities with planar gates and a high AC. This however is a slow thing and raising AC in particular takes quite some effort. 5 AC counter value per 300 Hammer ritual is very expensive, especially since map size and civ count will often have you need something like 250 AC value to actually reach 100 (displayed on hovering over).

As for economy, take a look at this channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQPjXaLpGKmRm05QGkhQ4Ww/playlists
He does some good videos at high difficulty vs the AI, which should be mostly applicable to games against humans.

Or, just tell your friend that you are impressed by his skill and that he shall teach you the game, then learn what he does and counter it. :p
 
Thanks for your advice, everyone, these were all good tips that I've been incorparating into my games. My friend did a succession game with me and walked me through what I should do. My problem seems to be that I am too used to unmodded civ4 where you can recover from a lot of early expansion relatively easily, and I build too many cities before having the techs I need to support them so now I don't build any more than 4 cities before I have education and I focus on getting calendar early if I have plantation resources.
 
One core difference between vanilla and FfH economy however is that more yield comes from your tiles directly, because there are considerably less buildings giving you +% of something (like science, production, money). Instead, some buildings give flat bonuses, which do not scale with city size but city number. So having more cities is definitely beneficial.
 
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