New to FfH, my impressions and lots of praise

[Racsoviale]

Hi all

I was first introduced to the Fall from Heaven mod last year, but never had the time to get into all the new game mechanics and I ended up uninstalling the mod while cleaning up my computer.

last month I got the Civ fever again and began playing around with the mods and scenarios and started up the age of ice mod. I got a bit bored with the game since I remembered all the different races from FfH2 and downloading the mod again.

And wow I finally had time to get into the mechanics and im really impressed by all the changes. What really captured me was the all the fundamental changes(capturing animals, building mana nodes, religions that have an impact and much more)

It was also around this time I found the FfH scenarios, which I didnt know about the first time I tried this mod. And I really like them all. Im not through yet and it took me lots of restarts before I finally was able to defeat Sheelba in the barbarian scenario, so I could continue with the decius campaign in the desert scenario.

I have already some prefered civilizations that I like the most: the Lanun(I really liked them the first time I installed this mod, and now that I know more about the mechanics I like them even more) another of my newfound favorite civs is the Hippus mostly because they fit my playstyle with the Mongols from civ4 perfectly except they are even more horse based and I keep thinking about Rohan from LoTR when I play them.

The addition of spellcasters also caught my eye and wow they are cool if not a bit difficult to learn how to use, in one of my attempts to beat the barbarian scenario I tried the Amurites and started with an adept and wow does it feel cool to just burn down the entire jungle instead of waiting for Bronze Working.

The tech tree too is hard to learn and I often find myself researching worker tech and after that the cheapest techs, simply because there are mind boggling many choices and paths to choose from, but I think it becomes easier to understand after having played more games. But then again the tech paths are very different from civ to civ.

There are lots of more stuff I would go into, but I feel my post has already become quite long.

All in all I have really fallen in love with this mod and lots of thanks to all the modders who made this. This has become my default game when I want to play civ now and I really hope I can get my friends hooked on it too. So we can try it in multiplayer.

And to wrap it all up I have a few questions for the veterans:

How much do you specialize in only a few tech paths?
I found out with the Hippus I only needed horse archers to beat the barbarian scenario(although the ogres are nasty still) I didnt need any of my mages and they ended up doing nothing but cast inspiration and spring(infrastructure spells).

Do you have designated adepts/mages running around in the homeland whos only job is to use spells that enhance city output/transform deserts?
I realized the inspiration spell was awesome in my science cities, but I still felt I had wasted my mages on giving them that spell instead of giving them maelstrom/fireball. I admit that so far a lot of my experiments with spells have been to just give them all the defferent spells they could get, so I could learn what the spells do.

Is is preferable to build the same kinds of nodes(does it do anything) or is it better to build as many different as possible?
So far I have done what I could to get as many different types of nodes, again this goes back to the previous question about the mages, where my main reason for building as many different as possible was to get to learn the different spells.

Note im a noble player so some of the stuff I have said is probably wrong and/or impossible on higher difficulties.

Again thank you very much for this mod and sorry about the long post but I felt I had to give something back, and since im a poor university student I dont really have much else but my gratitude to give.

 

[Kael]

Thanks for the comments. Im also playing Barbarian Assault right now (as the Bannor) and struggling to survive because of some bad dungeon explore results (I know I should wait until I can handle them but I just can't resist the shiny temptation!).

I may restart and try an Amurite burn campaign. See if I can't beat the orcs at their own game. Makes me wish for a pyre zombie horde.

 

[Bill Bisco]

Most of your impressions are not far off.

Lanun are a good civ, especially in a game with Islands. Hippus are a top tier Civ (along with Kuriorates) and indeed Horse Archers are the Shiz. Just get a big stack of Horse Archers with Withdrawal and conquer the world.

The Magic system is confusing and convoluted. It takes way too many beakers to start using magic, the building to build Adepts costs too much and adepts cost too much. You get much more bang for your time with Bronze working and Axemen.

You absolutely want to specialize in a few tech paths. Why use Archers, Swordsmen, and Horse Archers when you only need Horse Archers to win the game?

You certainly can get lots of mana nodes, but I'd generally recommend against it; for example the Death 2 Summon Spectre gets Death Mana Affinity which means that the More Death Mana you have, the more powerful each summoned spectre you get. Again, Specialization trounces generalization.

At higher difficulties you simply have less leeway in the tactics you can utilize to effectively win the game, and the leaders and civilizations you will want to choose will significantly narrow. At lower difficulties you can get away with a wider variety of sub-par tactics (as with most games).

BTW, the key to beating most scenarios is setting the Game Speed to Marathon. This allows you to build up super units (lots of XP and Promotions to take down cities) as well as take advantage of non scaling mechanics. For example: there's a Hippus scenario where you buy units with Gold: the gold cost is the same for Marathon and Quick.

Overall FFH is a fun game, and while Vanilla Civ4 is far more balanced, it ends up boring me more.

Enjoy the Game,
Bill

 

[Azhral]

Magic is too expensive? Bah, on the higher difficulties you can't win without it, since theres no way your bronze axemen can match the numbers and strength of the enemy SoD's.

As for the original post, I never really found the techs that hard to get my head around. Just hit F6 and spend a little time exploring what you get for your various techs. It really is worth spending time and beakers on a few expensive techs to get that super unit that it is just constantly researching the inexpensive ones. I usually do this too much however, and head off for something fancy when I don't even have mining, so I usually play Classical start with Marathon game speed. Just makes everything that much more epic, without spending 300 turns just pressing enter over and over.

And specialising is very important. As you've noticed, each race is unique so each race needs specific techs to make the most of their mechanics. And there are multiple paths to a few techs also, meaning if your good you don't need Necromancy or Way of the Wicked and vice-versa. Also if your landlocked there is little reason to research Fishing or Sailing. For the Hippus you'll want to focus on the Melee/Mounted line, and the Lanun want Optics and then head up the Religious line (most likely anyways. I prefer going melee with the Lanun since the Immortals just look so damn cool).

And yes, usually its a good idea to have a few adepts/mages running around doing terraforming/buffing and whatever. I run two types of magic users. The support mages (who get nothing but spells and hang around in my lands. They get the occasionally offensive spell to help fend off any enemies also) and the offense mages who usually just get the Combat/Spell Extension promos and rely on mana-stacking to get their spells.

And yes, stacking mana can be very powerful. For each source of mana beyond the first your units get a free spell if they can learn it. So two Sun mana means any magic users with Channelling 1 get Sun 1 for free. Three Sun mana means any magic users with Channelling 1 get Sun 1 for free AND any magic users with Channelling 2 get Sun 2 for free. Having four Sun mana means your Archmages then get a free Sun 3 promo. Add to that the fact that certain mana types give small bonuses that are cumulitive for each one you have. So Mind Mana gives you a 5% research bonus which means that having five sources of Mind mana means you get a 25% bonus to your research. And then there is the mana affinities. This gives strength based on the number of mana nodes you have, most often used with Death mana. The Death 2 summons (Spectres) have 3 strength +1 Death affinity, which means with 5 Sources of Death mana they get an extra 5 strength. Pretty much all of the Level 3 summons have a mana affinity, but remember the bonus strength is based on the affinity type. You may have 10 Sources of Fire mana so that Fire Elemental could have over 20 strength, but thats not gonna mean a damn thing if you try to attack something thats immune to fire.

Take a look at this thread here to read more about each Civ and what you wanna do to help them conquer Erebus.

Hope that helps, and anyone can feel free to correct any errors I've made.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

funny how even Kael himself falls victim to the "I wanna explore that dungeon NOW, dammit!" syndrome. it plagues myself as well, it takes lots of discipline to wait till it's safe it seems... good mechanic

 

[Racsoviale]

Kael: Yeah I tried the scenario with Bannor several times but I kept getting really bad start locations(all jungle and no hills anywhere) which meant I got kicked for being last in score.

In general I find the magic system(along with the way religion is handled) the most interesting parts, and I see that I am not to wrong in my handling of religion.

regarding the tech tree, I think the thing that makes it difficult is the fact that it scrolls up and down(it makes it hard to quickly see how it works.)

The specialization part I get as well, I was mostly unsure as whether it was worth it(I now see it is)

Oh yeah I get the "most resist urge to explore" bug as well, but If my scout/warrior is far away and close to another civ, I usually go and have a look. This is because I see only benefits from exploring close to enemies: either I release something horrible(not my problem hehe) or I get some nice juicy stuff.

 

[Bill Bisco]

funny how even Kael himself falls victim to the "I wanna explore that dungeon NOW, dammit!" syndrome. it plagues myself as well, it takes lots of discipline to wait till it's safe it seems... good mechanic

When Multiplayer games have to institute rules preventing players from opening lairs or waiting until a certain turn to open a lair, that tells you that it's a bad mechanic.

 

[Azhral]

Not really a bad mechanic. We just do it in RP games so that a player doesn't have to face down a Combat IV Wraith with 2 warriors (I've personally seen this happen a half-dozen times) cause somebody popped a lair.

All of the 'rules' are mainly guidelines to make the MP game a lot more balanced (no free religions) and to keep players in the game (it can take hours to finally get a game going, really sucks when someone dies to a lair spawn 15mins in)

 

[Nikis-Knight]

When Multiplayer games have to institute rules preventing players from opening lairs or waiting until a certain turn to open a lair, that tells you that it's a bad mechanic.

You have a more narrow definition of game than I.

 

[Bill Bisco]

You have a more narrow definition of game than I.

If you consider this a game.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

And here I was expecting to see you link to one of my maps...

Yeah, I'd consider that one type of game. Not the "test of skill between evenly matched opponents" type, but do you ever get that against the ai, anyhow?

 

[Pickly]

Responding to the original post: This mod for me has also gotten quite a bit more fun over the past few months, as I've experimented with some more spells (And learned to play on quick), and play around with some more of the different features.

I've had a lot of game ideas in the past, and have a few actual mods planned for some other games in the future, but the fall from Heaven setting pretty much smashes these ideas apart.

(I also had a quite creepy dream involving the octupus overlords last night, enough to wake me up and for me to not want to go back to sleep and sink into the dream again. This was made even creepier after waking up thanks to having read about Hemah some time before. It's hard for game settings to sink in enough to do that.)

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

how is it a bad mechanic? you're supposed to wait until you can fight against the eventual bad result. if you can't resist the temptation, cry me a river cuz it's your own fault for lacking discipline

 

[Valkrionn]

Frankly, I agree completely. If you HAVE to explore now, then you pay the consequences.

The only flaw in the system is when the AI is unable to understand it... But that's been fixed in the next version of RifE thanks to Snarko (entire system is now in the DLL), and I believe Sephi wrote AI for it as well though that relied more on globaldefines, IIRC.

 

[Grey Fox]

He meant that its a bad mechanic cause you have to enforce rules in MP so that people don't kill off the OTHER players by exploring dungeons close to them. (and also themselves cause its not fun if someone dies before turn 50 from something no other player did).

But I don't think that's enough reason to call it a bad mechanic. Either you play like gentlemen or you play like an arse, its your call.


And yeah, if you are gonna pop one close to your cities, be prepared for the aftermath.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

RifE's upcoming method Valk mentioned of having the outcomes depend on the game turn sound like a good solution there

 

[Valkrionn]

RifE's POSSIBLE upcoming method.

 

[Earthling]

how is it a bad mechanic? you're supposed to wait until you can fight against the eventual bad result. if you can't resist the temptation, cry me a river cuz it's your own fault for lacking discipline

The problem is that you can clear a lair near an enemy civ, and they'll be helpless against what spawns. Even guarding the tile doesn't work unless you declare war, and that's equally fruitless (it would be nice if there was a way to actively claim/stake out a dungeon for the future, and no other civs could explore it)