Musings regarding the Austrin

[Dayen]

Hey folks, long time player, never posted before. Of course, I've never really had a reason to, as I was very satisfied with the experience on the whole.

I jumped into Fall Further out of boredom -- I've got FfH2 pretty ironed out -- and the Austrin immediately jumped out at me as a "must play" race. The flavor is great, and it suits my preferred playstyle in mechanics.

But there are some failings. The first one is Harmatt, the race's hero, is obscenely bad. He comes in too late to be truly useful as a recon unit hinged as he is on Tracking. Frankly, as he is now (3), he should just start with the race's first settler. But I think it's salvageable; Harmatt is an explorer, right? As an explorer type hero, shouldn't he be able to pick up new tricks as he goes along?

So, starting out with the first settler and Exploration, Harmatt functions like a hero Scout who has 3 and the Adventurer promotion. When the player researches Hunting, Harmatt gains the ability to carry a Hawk like a Hunter. At Horseback Riding, Harmatt is an early adapter, gaining +1 mobility through a free promotion or item. At Warfare Harmatt is bumped up one with a free promotion or item. He gets one more bump at Blasting Powder, being the only Austrin unit that benefits from its discovery. But really, aside from the fact that he enters the game pretty late, considering his expertise, he's not at all bad. I actually have one save where I cannot see his stats because he's got so many promotions and items (and holds his own against anything shy of national units and twice+ promoted champions).

Harmatt aside, the civ's basic culture: expand, explore, and be quick about it, is great. Except that you cannot pursue a complementary tech development path even with the bonuses from the civ's unique buildings. They simply cannot keep up with the demands the units and multitudes of cities will put on you, and woe betide you if you end up at war. I'm not sure if the unique buildings simply aren't compensating hard enough, or if I'm so far ahead of the curve I'm essentially out-developing my ability to develop (I've been playing my first few games through on Noble and Prince).

The Austrin also seem to have issues with "flavor start;" I've started everywhere from the ice flows to the high desert. Not that it's truly an issue given how mobile the race is, but it can seriously cramp your starting game. A bad starting city is a no-go for the Austrin.

My final nitpick is more of a lore huh than anything else. Air I get. Shadow I get. Spirit I don't understand; but then again, the only other fits for the third type from my perspective are also as weak. Life, Body, Nature...all about as decent a pick as spirit for the race's theme.

Thanks for reading.

 

[WarKirby]

Harmatt has Air mana affinity, and you start with one free air mana. that can be put to your advantage.

I can't recall how much movement he has, but I think it's either 2 or 3. He also ignores terrain movement costs, and has Adventurer and Hero as free promotions. The Spirit mana allows you to rush KotE, crank out an adept, and cast courage on him, too. In case yo0u don't understand the significance of it, these three promotions improve the results you get from random dungeons. With harmatt having them all, plus the movement to reach dungeons quickly, you can get a LOT of good results out of them

Afaik, he also has some inbuilt withdrawal chance, and can learn Flanking promos to increase it farther. If he can't we'll need to sort that since it was discussed and agreed upon internally, though I can't see it in the changelogs..

Harmatt isn't a combat hero, that much is certain. he's made for exploration and dungeon delving. I do personally agree that his tech requirements are a little steep, although vehem feels he'd be overpowered if allowed much earlier as it would be too easy to profit from dungeons.

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that austrin can't tolerate the demands of a large empire. be sure you're using the latest patch, Austrin cities get no distance maintenance. You should also run City States, which massively reduces your "number of cities" maintenance. At that point you basically pay 0 for your cities. Put the science slider at 90% and you'll probably be in profit for the rest of the game. All those cities are just as effective as anyone else's but they cost less, so you have higher profit margins. The main problem with a vast expansive empire, is defending it. But you've got to have some weakness...


A little advice.
Rush warfare, try to get the Form of the Titan, and change your civics to apprenticeship/conquest. The extra XP is critical. Most of the game, use only recon units for your army. The Exploration guild gives you 2 free xp, combined with the above mentioned civics, and any of the following: Form of the Titan, Command post in the city, Theocracy civic

You can start off new recon units with 8 xp easily. As a charismatic leader, you only need 7.5 xp for lv4. I also strongly advise taking Aggressive as your second trait. I know financial looks tempting, but with Aggressive and the strategy described above, the end result is that you're spawning explorers/trackers with Combat IV out of the gate, which more than makes up for their lower strength and city attack malus, and makes them powerful enough to use as a main army.

If you don't get form of the Titan, you'll want to either change to Theocracy later on, or change one of your traits to organised so you can build a command post everywhere to take advantage of the lv4 starting units. Getting FotT is definitely best though.

Other than that, expand fast, spam cities everywhere, get a great engineer and found a master outfitter so you can get windstones (ranged attacks for recon, yay) asfter that make all of your great people Great Merchants if you can, and found corporations with them to get the most out of your many cities. For religion choices I recommend either Order or RoK, for the economic benefits, however FoL is also good to help you make the most of forests, since trackers and recurve archers have Woodsman promotions for free.

I like the austrin best out of the FF civs, personally. I find them to be a triumph of design, and probably not in need of much enhancement for now

 

[Lemminkäinen]

Austrin are indeed simply awesome.

Harmatt is insane in his exploring prowess. Adventurer-Hero-Recon - wow! In my last game He brought me two techs and two great persons from dungeons. And these weren't even legendary ones.

I also have been thinking that their maintenance costs for a big empire are too little, so a polar opposite of the OPs view. That and preparing an Expedition is too cheap. It should be more than a Settler but it isn't after you switch away from Expansive. I mean, there should be some reason to build Settlers.

 

[Dayen]

I wasn't fishing for advice on how to play the race, but thanks for it nonetheless.

If I rush to get Harmatt he does indeed turn over a lot of positive results (and I did forget that he started with Air Affinity, oops on my part, +1 lightning isn't bad at all). I've actually got him up to 10 (at level 18, no less) in one game because of the absolutely silly amount of gear he's gotten out of dungeons and lairs (and killing Orthus -- and every single other savage and wild animal -- didn't hurt either). Like I said, he's not bad at all if you rush the technologies to get him out quickly so he can do your exploration for you. But then once you've got him there's a lot of going back to fill in your tech trees and your cities are woefully underdeveloped.

Prepare Expedition is very nice, I agree, but it only starts to cost less for me when my cities are at negligible growth, since it's based off straight production and not population growth as well. I suppose the difference in outlook is in how many cities you're ending up with out of the gate. I'm often up to seven or eight -- including one way off in the middle of nowhere that I captured -- by turn 97. Which is usually three or four more than where the AI is at.

As far as religion, I much prefer the Council of Esus. You keep the economic benefits of RoK and gain invisibility inside your territory, which is epically huge. No more raiders picking off your 190 year old workers.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

NEVER run city states as the austrin. It only gives -25% to # of cities maintenance, which is chump change to begin with. That's nowhere close to what you get from god king or aristocracy or even republic. Its big reduction is to distance maint which austrin are immune to anyway.

Your adaption should depend on circumstance, like with all non-grigori civs that have adaptive. Agg/Cha and experience boosting civics look sweet but you won't always have a target for units built by them. If you have plenty of room to expand and no aggressive neighbors I'd take financial and agrarianism instead.

7 or 8 cities by turn 97 is too fast even for the austrin. Cut a couple and build more workers instead. You're still expanding quite a bit faster than everyone else, just not overdoing it.

Harmatt kind of blows, yeah. Rogues are almost as good as him at popping the lairs and dungeons that start near you and the rest often get scooped up before you can research tracking.

 

[readercolin]

Addressing your points:

Harnatt. Strength 3, but +1 air affinity and can use metal. Because of the 1 air mana you start with, thats a base strength of 4 (same as a hunter... or whatever they call them). Getting bronze brings that to 5, iron to 6. The best part though is if you manage to snag a rod of the winds... it doesn't happen often, but it can be worth killing another civ to snatch it . For an early hero that comes around the same time as Gilden, he has alot more late game power than Gilden, making him more useful throughout.

Going to war. I hate to say this, but I feel the austrin are actually a little OP here. There is just 1 question to decide on - do you grab aggressive, or do you grab raiders as your adaptive switch? All your recon units (except your scouts) get no movement penalties... which means that you have a rather powerful, VERY mobile army. And snatching tracking (and upgrading to their ranger equivalents) is exceedingly easy. And their ranger equivalents are cheap... Having an excessively mobile, attack 5, defense 6 army, (by turn 150) all with combat 3 + commando, or combat 4 is... kinda OP. And then they can upgrade to recurve archers (who sadly enough make elven longbowmen seem weak... which can be mildly annoying, at least to the elf I'm usually partnered with ). Also, iirc, recurve archers can still use windstones, greatly increasing their ranged combat power.

As for expansion... if you're getting that many cities that fast, then you definately need more workers. How many do you have by that point anyways? Personally, I find a minimum of 2 workers per city is needed to upgrade your economy with any speed. However, if you have that, and that many cities, then running city states could lower your costs some. Usually I'll only have 4-5 cities by turn 100 (normal speed), but I'll also have multiple defenders, a few buildings in each city, and a few workers.

Hope this helps.

-Colin

 

[nzk13]

Austrin, Austrin, Austrin.... I never knew that the recon civs (Svartalfar, Austrin) could be so powerful. However, Council of Esus seems best for those civs.

 

[Ghostslayer]

Austrin, Austrin, Austrin.... I never knew that the recon civs (Svartalfar, Austrin) could be so powerful. However, Council of Esus seems best for those civs.

Austrin is a recon civ, but I rarely directly build recons with Austrins (and so I really don't care about the extra experience given to recons by expl guilds or Nox).
To my opinion, the best way to proceed is:

• build highlanders (with guerilla promotion), drop their useless equipment to make them *light*
• upgrade them to explorer (to get adventurer and woodman1)
• then upgrade them to tracker (to get woodman 2)

This way, you get from scratch trackers with

• 3 moves (2+1 from the light promo)
• woodman 1 and 2
• guerilla 1
• adventurer
• and -20% strength (because of the light promo), but I consider that it is largely compensated by the extra move and guerilla promo.

And to my opinion, this is really better in the long term than the +2 exp from the exploration guild.