Megacities

[solistus]

I love forming ridiculously powerful cities in FF, especially since I normally play on No Settlers, making cities valuable and scarce commodities.

A few of my favorite methods include:

-As Lanun, I always try to start somewhere with plenty of seafood so I can justify rushing OO. Fishing first, build work boats to work seafood and make my pirate coves as AC and Mysticism come in (faster and faster as those delicious coves come online), OO, convert, Mind Stapling. Thanks to the Lanun's disgusting research potential and ability to safely ignore improving land tiles for much longer than other civs (plenty of self-sustaining commerce tiles to go around off the coast!), and the relative lack of OO beeliners compared to other religious paths, it's usually possible to get to Tower of Complacency before needing more than 3-4 warriors on defence. Once the Tower is up, Innsmouth will become truly monstrous rather quickly - post-Lighthouse you're getting 3 food from every water tile, for starters.

-Obviously, Elves with GoN can get all their cities pretty huge, although the maximum size potential falls short of Tower of Complacency.

-Order is the easiest way for any civ mid-late game to develop uber cities. With enough troops, ALL your cities can become as large as food supply allows. Try with Malakim for free troops in your desert cities to avoid the killer maintenance costs. Added bonus that the hammers you spend to secure maximum city size also directly boost your power rating, keeping your uber cities safe from jealous rivals.

The Tower of Complacency is fast becoming my favorite. Last game as the Lanun, I noticed that the Tower requires Mind Stapling (which, in turn, requires OO state religion to research), but the wonder itself doesn't require OO. After doing my usual Tower rush strategy, I had a booming Innsmouth and 2 smaller conquered cities and went AV once I researched it (didn't get the holy city though, damn Sheaim). After Infernal Pact I switched to Sacrifice the Weak and watched Innsmouth's population reach ludicrous levels. Once I got the City of a Thousand Slums, things were just getting silly.

I was hoping to score my first Deity win that game, but then Basium got brought in by my only significant rival (the RoK-follwoing Khazad on my southern border who led the power chart even before getting some angelic assistance) and things got ugly. After 20 turns of fighting off the endless hordes of dwarves and angels (all my AV friends, including Hyborem, were on another continent), Innsmouth finally fell - and promptly began to hemorrhage population as the greedy liberated former AV followers began to demand a normal human allotment of food

Next experiment: try the OO->AV->CoaTS progression with Calabim and see how much exp a size 50+ city can give (totally attainable with lots of grassland farms)

Anyone else have any tricks or stories regarding 'uber cities?' Other civ or religion-specific rush paths, uber city-focused early game strategies for something other than OO/Lanun, options I forgot about or blew off (I'd love to hear some more detail from Ljos/Svart players about using GoN to its fullest potential) or just a fun story about a game where you tried such a strategy would be perfect.

 

[WarKirby]

if you want uber cities, play infernals.

Bonus points for disabling all good religions.


I once had a size 200 Dis.

 

[far_wanderer]

My most epic city actually happened entirely by accident. I was playing the Kuriotates, and my first city had a river running diagonally through it in such a way that about 2/3 of the city tiles were floodplains. That by itself was pretty good, but later in that game I discovered that Genesis and Vitalize could upgrade deserts without removing floodplains.

I have a soft spot in my heart for OO Calabim because of the novelty of Vampiric Kraken, which I hope is still possible.

Try the new Malakim, I've been extraordinarily pleased with their city-building talents the last two games I've tried. What's best is if you can find a river that isn't desert yet, to give you a window of opportunity between Scorch and Flood Plain development to fit in a few Bedouin Villages.

The Scions are also good, as you simply don't have to worry about food. I think I remember hearing somewhere that their cities were capped at 30, but even if that's true the fact that you can do it with EVERY city is pretty cool.

 

[solistus]

I've never built a Kraken, with Calabim or anyone else, but Vampiric Hemah is saweeeeet. Having an archmage with twincast and every spell you want (along with plenty of other promos) before most civs have archmages at all is pretty devastating.

 

[WarKirby]

Wouldn't Gibbon be better for that?

Arcane lore is still kind of late. At Deception, gibbon is about the earliest archmage.

 

[Valkrionn]

Try the new Malakim, I've been extraordinarily pleased with their city-building talents the last two games I've tried. What's best is if you can find a river that isn't desert yet, to give you a window of opportunity between Scorch and Flood Plain development to fit in a few Bedouin Villages.

That's not actually supposed to happen. I had set the Floodplains to appear in 5 turns, generally not long enough to build a Bedouin Sit... Vehem changed it to 30 when he incorporated it. I think they were working on a fix?

 

[stupidnewbie]

In my last game as svartalfar, I got my capitol to size 53. Nobody seemed to be researching OO, so I gave it a tower of complacency to go with my agrarian/ancient forest/grassland farms. Further, I sent out my shadows to farm for great people, and now it has a master's hall, a final altar, every corporation but fabrica, and about a dozen great citizens. There's enough food to get it up to size ~70, but I think I set the game difficulty too low and so I'm not going to play it through.

If it wasn't a coastal city, I bet it could have reached 100...