Marathon game help.

[worldspawn]

I can't seem to resist playing games on huge maps at marathon speed. I run into a problem though. I'm trying to play as evil and going for ashen veil, but I never succeed, even at chieftan difficulty. The other civs seem to be able to expand like crazy AND tech up without a problem so they always found it first. For me it seems I have to pick one or the other. If I focus on expansion I have to drop my research almost completely, if I tech up I don't have enough cities and fall behind on tech anyway. In both cases I get trounced by about 2-3 overpowered civs in the 300-400 turn range.

I'm Svartfar(however it's spelled) if that makes much of a difference. Does anyone have any specific strategies on how I can expand, tech up AND maintain a functioning economy so that I can have a military, too?

 

[Methuselah]

I can't seem to resist playing games on huge maps at marathon speed. I run into a problem though. I'm trying to play as evil and going for ashen veil, but I never succeed, even at chieftan difficulty. The other civs seem to be able to expand like crazy AND tech up without a problem so they always found it first. For me it seems I have to pick one or the other. If I focus on expansion I have to drop my research almost completely, if I tech up I don't have enough cities and fall behind on tech anyway. In both cases I get trounced by about 2-3 overpowered civs in the 300-400 turn range.

I'm Svartfar(however it's spelled) if that makes much of a difference. Does anyone have any specific strategies on how I can expand, tech up AND maintain a functioning economy so that I can have a military, too?

Well, first off I'm wondering why you're trying to get AV as Svartalfar - Council of Esus and Fellowship of Leaves would probably help you better as them.

You do need to expand early game, but civ depending not a large amount. Aim to settle 5/6 cities or so relatively early on - make sure they're placed around resources if possible, don't build one for the sake of building one. Tech mysticism for elder councils - early game the boost these provide is amazing, tech festivals for markets - it will help you earn commerce, and then basically play out from there. If you're aiming to found a religion, you should after getting any essential techs (education, agriculuture, mining) focus straight on it if you really want to found it. Remember that even if you're not the first to finding the religion, you still get a relevant unit with which you can spread it around your empire.

 

[worldspawn]

Yeah lately I've been focusing on going for festivals then burning to religion but the AI always seems to beat me to it. My latest game is succeeding but only because I generated a map that was islands all isolated by ocean. Thanks to the wonders of portals in dungeons I managed to get to 2 other islands early and expand more than anyone.

Despite this I'm still getting out teched. I just got AV(I'm a sucker for AV) and already there's now boats showing up at my doorstep

 

[PotatoOverdose]

Judging by the fact that your playing on marathon(which favors the player) and chieftain(which in ffh is even easier than normal civ chieftan) and you are running into problems, I would go out on a limb and say your doing something fundamentally wrong. Could you post a savegame file or two? That would definitely help in identifying any issues.

 

[shapecharge]

I can't seem to resist playing games on huge maps at marathon speed. I run into a problem though. I'm trying to play as evil and going for ashen veil, but I never succeed, even at chieftan difficulty. The other civs seem to be able to expand like crazy AND tech up without a problem so they always found it first. For me it seems I have to pick one or the other. If I focus on expansion I have to drop my research almost completely, if I tech up I don't have enough cities and fall behind on tech anyway. In both cases I get trounced by about 2-3 overpowered civs in the 300-400 turn range.

I'm Svartfar(however it's spelled) if that makes much of a difference. Does anyone have any specific strategies on how I can expand, tech up AND maintain a functioning economy so that I can have a military, too?

Worldspawn

I also tend to play mostly large and huge maps and always play marathon, if you tend to be a slow methodical expander, throw in Barbarian world, raging barbs and double animal options(can't remember the name of the option), this will tend to slow the AIs city spamming down and still leave plenty of open space/dungeons/lairs ect.. even in Mid-game and dark areas for barbs to spam.

 

[worldspawn]

I'm playing another game now and having no problems at all now, so maybe the last 5 games I was having bad luck?

Well it helped that I immediately found a settler in a hut and conquered my next door neighbor right away. It probably also helped that I found two techs I needed in huts as well.

Also, I found barbarian world only slows them down at first, but then the AI explodes as they start conquering the barbarian towns.

 

[Sarisin]

I'm playing another game now and having no problems at all now, so maybe the last 5 games I was having bad luck?

Well it helped that I immediately found a settler in a hut and conquered my next door neighbor right away. It probably also helped that I found two techs I needed in huts as well.

Also, I found barbarian world only slows them down at first, but then the AI explodes as they start conquering the barbarian towns.

It must be the difficulty level you are playing at. I find at Monarch, the barb cities stay around longer because they get those Goblin Clan Archers which are very hard to kill in the early going.

I would suggest you try a game at Epic speed and see it there is a difference. I used to play Marathon on huge maps, but never finished those games. The map would fill up quickly with the game only about half done (timewise) and then I would get issues of long times between turns, CTDs, Memory Allocation Failures, etc. and I have a fairly powerful machine.

Epic is better (although I have the above problems about 50% of the time with the huge maps) and I play all my games at that speed now. Guys that play the even faster speeds probably don't see these problems.

 

[Blackmantle]

Yea, have to chime in with Sarisin here.
FFH is already slower and Marathon is a real crawl (and totally broken without things like half XP checked among other things.)
Also it totally gimps the AI (which is utterly killed at the lower difficulties anyways by anything a player will field.).

Try Epic (will play like vanilla marathon from what i have heard time and again. Having not played vanilla in ages myselves. ) and a game at noble difficulty and see if it works out for you (the AI should still cope worse at epic.
And noble should be fine for most people who have some experience with vanilla since the AI still can't grasp all of the concepts. If its to hard scale back a level or 2.).
If you get grips on things instead of scaling the difficulty up check things like no AI-building-requirements and no AI-minimum-levels for upgrades as well as aggressive AI. Which should enhance the experience since the AI will start to field diverse units and use all the tools. You can still reserve going further up the difficulties once you start to find those games boring.

If you still feel the game goes to slow you can always go back to marathon. (many players seem to favor normal though, with the multiplayer community favoring quick. Count me into the bunch who likes normal. And i do like long games. But it does really suffice in providing a long and fun game one can sensibly finish.).

It might even be that your problems with the game stem mostly on the combination of extremely low difficulty + marathon gamespeed which both are not really supported heavily by the design of the mod in its current form (and i can't exactly say i would think its a good area to put the teams resources in.).

Also the FFH2 Manual by Xienwolf is highly recommended to get the basics (just focus on the main themes first and use the manual for reference when you are stuck. The in-game documentation currently is mostly broken. Don't buy anything! found in the pedia unquestioned.). Saves you a lot of time since FFH2 has a steep learning-curve anyways.