Questions from a new Wild Mana player

[[to_xp]Gekko]

that aggressive trait thingie is definitely a bug and will be fixed in 9.0 ... although I thought it got fixed already, are you running 8.34?

for all your other complains, imho you are trying too hard for your experience. you say you're not a very good civ player and haven't played much ffh2 before switching to WM, which can be very mean

my advice is to start a play now! game at settler difficulty, which will mean lowest difficulty and no custom gameoptions. you should definitely get a hang of what's going on BEFORE turning on additional stuff which will make things harder and more complicated imho. also, play on ErebusContinent, it's by far the best map. you can check its own thread in the modmods forum for more info about it, where you can also get the latest version. I recommend you use high cohesion as the AI doesn't handle non-pangea-style maps well.

also, the Grigori got additional goodies in WM compared to vanilla so I'm not sure if they're the best to start with anymore. imho right now the best would be the Hippus, since they are only getting unique stuff in 9.0 and right now are still rather bland


this will make sure to produce a setup which will allow you to experiment and get used to WM. settler difficulty will probably be damn easy, but don't just jump to high difficulty levels and turn all a bunch of nasty gameoptions at once

take it easy and increase difficulty one step at a time, that will give you enough wiggle room to get accustomed to the gameoptions you want to use. based on your post, I can recommend avoiding wildlands, pirate invasion, rise of the dragons and raging barbs, and using tamed wilderness instead. I know those sound cool, but you gotta realize that they also make the wilderness VERY dangerous.

mana guardians can be nasty as well, so that's another option that demands respect same for ranged combat, those goblin archers camping on forested hill tiles and shooting everything are really annoying

so take it easy and use a setup that's easy to handle, then increase slowly. there's no point in getting frustrated once you get some experience under your belt, you'll be ready to move on and know just how to handle crazy wilderness stuff at high difficulty levels

edit: I'll have to disagree with tesb about something though: mysticism and godking are not as good as they look. the first thing you gotta do is get an economy going, which usually means education unless you're lucky and got some resources providing enough commerce in your BFC that require easy to get techs. immediately after you get some commerce coming in, choose a tier 2 military tech. third, get a religion of your choice. from then on things get more manageable and you have more freedom. imho getting a tier 2 military tech without some decent commerce first takes simply too long.

 

[Gaminic]

Hey tesb,

Thanks for the quick response, most of them make a lot of sense to me; I'm thinking one of my problems was responding too slowly to the high threat causing them to somewhat overrun me. I did find that Hill Giants (are they barbarian or wild animal? I'm thinking the second as I did see them enraged and saw them fighting gobling forts) enrage a whole lot. After the third or forth border expansion on my capital, I don't think I've experienced a turn without one of them in my borders. Then again, when I travelled to their nest, I found an insanely large mob of them so it might have been simply the law of large numbers.
Most of the problems came from guardian spawns though. Deactivating it would solve both that and the excessive Wither nonsense, but it's one of the coolest things modules in my eyes.

I checked the pedia before and I think the Guides section only has one on the magic mastery thing. (Which is very incomplete, if I may say so. :/ It states some general hints on achieving it, but I'm still clueless to what the goal actually is.)

I'll start a new game tomorrow and try out some of the hints. Any suggestion for a Civ & tactic? Don't really feel like working with Grigori Adventurers again for a while.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

check the ffh2 concepts section of the pedia, there's a couple tabs specifically for wild mana changes and a lot more for general ffh2 stuff.

 

[Gaminic]

[edit]

@ gekko: That seems like solid advice right now. Guess I'll be doing a few quick games to get the hang of the game all over again.

[real edit]

That wasn't an edit at all!

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

basically, when you're just starting off too easy is way better than too hard.

 

[tesb]

the strongest civ in the early game by far are imho the scions although they are very unique so playing with them may seems more difficult at first. a second choice i like is elohim when you tech straight to priesthood to gain monks they are very good early on and just get better when increasing the purity counter. i can only say that you probably have to play some games before you get the hang of it.

you should always have a small stack to respond to threads within your borders additionally to the at least 2-4 units in each city. don't go out and kill stuff unless you want to expand just play defensively in the early game.

don't explore lairs until you have quite a good stack of units to defend against possibly bad results.

 

[Gaminic]

Alright, playing a game on Chieftain now (Couldn't bring myself to going even lower...) with just the basic rules (so no custom game). Rolled a random civ and received the Clan of Ember. Forgot the name of the Leader, but he likes disciples!

I had some questions though:
a) I'm barbarian, so "friendly" with (non-animal) barbarians. I had read somewhere long ago that they declare war to you if you gain too much of a lead on the other Civs. However, due to my lonely island start (Why does civ keep putting me on the small islands? The two other islands I've discovered are a) huge and b) crowded!), it took until Optics to actually discover any other civ (Actually, one turn before I discovered Optics, I captured a Griphon. Considering regular games don't have the Jesus Raptors, it was safe to cross the ocean with him alone.) Now I'm wondering: if I had gained the lead (think it was 50% more score than the 2nd?) on all other civs without actually having met them, would they still declare war? If so, that's a bit troublesome, considering I had both Orthus and Zarcan on my islands and a surprise attack from them can be devestating.
Also, I can't seem to destroy (skeleton-spawning) Barrows. Is that normal as barbarian?

b) I had only just researched Sailing (or was it Optics already?) and now I'm being ambushed by Pirates barbarians. I have a pretty decent production city as capital, but they still destroyed most of my coastal improvements. I had two early explorers running around the coast, but they were severely outgunned. Do those Pirates come randomly, or did the tech discovery (Sailing or Optics) trigger them?

c) Is it me or did the AI become a serious ball-buster when it comes to trades? In regular Civ, they'd often settle for a lower researchpoint total in exchange for their tech, especially if it were many small techs combined. Now, they seem to demand an equal-or-better trade. I'm not against this change (I remember gaining a tech lead by nearly extorting Isabella in regular Civ, eventhough she had me beat tech-wise and army-wise...), but it is annoying in the early periods where you can't add gold yet to cover up small differences. Having a Civ decline a nearly-fair trade at some point and a few turns later retrying the deal and seeing them demand that extra 15 gold is just silly!

d) Quite a general question now: My first "real" (as in: didn't die in the first 50turns) FFH2 game (Balseraph on Warlord) was won pretty easily because I (ab)used Gibbon Goetia to have a nearby neighbor destroy itself so I could simply walk in and double my number of cities in barely any turns. I did notice however that there was actually little point in killing them off. By Vassalling them, I could demand their Palace-manas, giving a huge boost because I was somewhat mana-starved in the early game (Practically every node spawned on the other side of the island for some reason. Same thing when I used the new-nodes ritual.)
This made me wonder: considering the extreme usefulness of having a variety of mana around, as well as the extreme power that comes by stacking certain types of mana, why would anyone ever consider fully destroying an opponent? I always saw Vassals as a role-playing alternative to destruction with little economic considerations (extra cities versus "foreign trade" boost), but now it seems there is little choice. I don't think there's any Civ/Leader/Playstyle that doesn't greatly benefit from three free manas. What gives?

 

[Neomega]

I play with vassalage off

But i think, if you look back, you will see your horrible first game was just the thrashing you receive when playing wildmana. As Sephi said, "this isn't madness, this is wild mana!"

don't expect a cakewalk, expect constant challenges.

Some units, like spiders or hill giants can be either animal or barbarian
No, as a barbarian civ, you cannot explore barrows, sucks.

You may not have been doing as bad as you thought, although entropy and death nodes are bad places to build cities around, and that must be taken into consideration, however, I would not suggest turning off wild mana, since wiuld mana is half the faun, there are also many fun positive mana nodes.

If before you quit, you had checked the world map in world builder and seen how the AI's were doing, you may have seen you were not as far behind as you believed you were.

 

[tesb]

the pirates spawn when optics is researched. i personally don't like them at all and in wildmana 9.0 there will be an option to turn then completely off.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

Alright, playing a game on Chieftain now (Couldn't bring myself to going even lower...) with just the basic rules (so no custom game). Rolled a random civ and received the Clan of Ember. Forgot the name of the Leader, but he likes disciples!

I had some questions though:
a) I'm barbarian, so "friendly" with (non-animal) barbarians. I had read somewhere long ago that they declare war to you if you gain too much of a lead on the other Civs. However, due to my lonely island start (Why does civ keep putting me on the small islands? The two other islands I've discovered are a) huge and b) crowded!), it took until Optics to actually discover any other civ (Actually, one turn before I discovered Optics, I captured a Griphon. Considering regular games don't have the Jesus Raptors, it was safe to cross the ocean with him alone.) Now I'm wondering: if I had gained the lead (think it was 50% more score than the 2nd?) on all other civs without actually having met them, would they still declare war? If so, that's a bit troublesome, considering I had both Orthus and Zarcan on my islands and a surprise attack from them can be devestating.
Also, I can't seem to destroy (skeleton-spawning) Barrows. Is that normal as barbarian?


d) Quite a general question now: My first "real" (as in: didn't die in the first 50turns) FFH2 game (Balseraph on Warlord) was won pretty easily because I (ab)used Gibbon Goetia to have a nearby neighbor destroy itself so I could simply walk in and double my number of cities in barely any turns. I did notice however that there was actually little point in killing them off. By Vassalling them, I could demand their Palace-manas, giving a huge boost because I was somewhat mana-starved in the early game (Practically every node spawned on the other side of the island for some reason. Same thing when I used the new-nodes ritual.)
This made me wonder: considering the extreme usefulness of having a variety of mana around, as well as the extreme power that comes by stacking certain types of mana, why would anyone ever consider fully destroying an opponent? I always saw Vassals as a role-playing alternative to destruction with little economic considerations (extra cities versus "foreign trade" boost), but now it seems there is little choice. I don't think there's any Civ/Leader/Playstyle that doesn't greatly benefit from three free manas. What gives?

d) do know that you DO lose the game if the civ you're controlling thanx to Gibbon gets destroyed, so cautious there

Sephi disabled mana trading exactly to stop that behaviour of enslaving civs to get their palace mana.

a) sadly, Zarcaz just stands still the whole game right now which I dislike. also, there are still Jesus Raptors ( awesome name ) in regular games, just not nearly as many.

most important thing, stop playing on maps that place you on small islands!

ErebusContinent. seriously. there is pretty much no point playing anything else in FFH2. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=308590 get the latest version here, I recommend High cohesion low sealevel to create a pangea, since AIs are bad at using navies right now. aside from those, there's lots of other options you can choose, check the thread for details

one thing I recommend is to go into wildmana/assets/python/pyFM folder, open settings.py and set normalization, marshes and flavourstarts to false. this disables some functions of the excellent flavourstart gameoption that interact badly with the mapscript.

warning, you'll get some totally awesome maps! some other settings I recommend are Great Plains, smart climate modify settings, advanced terrain on and ancient ruins on.

another thing you should REALLY do is go to wildmana/assets/xml, open globaldefinesalt.xml, go to the last entry and set usenewaisettlecode ( or whatever it's called ) to 1, otherwise the AI will settle crappy, crappy spots. with this set to 1, it's much better.

 

[Caradoc]

My first starts were a little rocky, mainly because I had underestimated the impact of the more extreme form of wild mana (and the dragons), but once I settled on a less challenging set of options, things have gone fairly smoothly.

One thing I learned was to work at getting free units by maintaining a lead on one branch of the tech tree. Another is that it pays to send out Triremes with scouts to troll for coastal Tribal Villages, hoping to pick up free techs. And finally, I found that it is possible to divert a barbarian attack by getting them to chase a fast, weak unit. Hope that helps a bit.

 

[Gaminic]

I'm playing the regular Erebus map I think, which has only one small island and two very large continents. Think the game just enjoyed the irony of putting one of the Civs that needs to get his edge very early in the game on a solitary island.

I'm having my doubts about the start generation mechanism: there is a very small island (where I'm located), a large island (holding 5 Civs) and a huge island (holding two Civs, a large number of Barbarian cities). As a result, much of the huge island was unexplored. Once my griphon reached it, I managed to pick so at least 5 techs from the numerous goodiehuts and found at least 4 cities ready to be Rantined. Maybe Civ starting locations should be tweaked a bit? :/

Another thing I noticed is that when Rantine converts a city, the Barbarian defenders (usually around 10 warriors) just keep defending it. Considering they're hostile to everyone else, will they actually help defend it?

The pirates are REALLY annoying. With their many moves, they can jump from fog and destroy one or two coves/fisherboats in their first turn. By the time your boats (or Cultists!) reach them, they've plundered most of your shoreline. I lost nearly every coastal improvement due to a very vicious pirate attack that started on the first turn of Statis. Quite humiliating to have your economy devestated like that one Chieftain difficulty.

I'll mess around with the settings and the Erebus continent map on my next game. Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

And finally, I found that it is possible to divert a barbarian attack by getting them to chase a fast, weak unit.

that's classy!

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

never ever play the Erebus map, it's the worst. unfortunately for some weird reason Kael decided to name it Erebus so now new people think that's the default mapscript and the best one for ffh and the one they are supposed to play. nothing could be more wrong.

 

[Neomega]

ErebusContinent. seriously. there is pretty much no point playing anything else in FFH2. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=308590 get the latest version here, I recommend High cohesion low sealevel to create a pangea, since AIs are bad at using navies right now. aside from those, there's lots of other options you can choose, check the thread for details

tectonics is better than erebus conitnent, IMHO. The mountain ranges are better, much better.

Another thing I noticed is that when Rantine converts a city, the Barbarian defenders (usually around 10 warriors) just keep defending it. Considering they're hostile to everyone else, will they actually help defend it?

Yes, a unit cannot take a city until all hostile units have been destroyed inside of it. Being allied with barbarians can be a lot of fun.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

the mountain ranges may be more wall-ish, but the script itself is way worse. it doesn't look nearly as natural, plus it misses much ffh specific stuff like kelp, haunted lands etc. you could try increases mountains settings on erebuscontinent and see if you like it more

I've tried tectonics like a week ago, and one look at the map it generated was enough to show me that I've been spoiled by cephalo's awesome work. it looked way too artificial... stripes of different terrains based on latitude, it looked like a zebra

 

[tinstaafl]

I have a soft spot for the mountain_coast script. It offers little variety, but a decidedly LotR feel. Which, according to the comments in the script file, seems to have been the point.
Following some screenshots that i used to advertise it to a friend a while back.
civ distribution at game start (6 civs on normal, one short of the default number)
http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/8283/civ4screenshot0026u.jpg
some played out maps:
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/6485/civ4screenshot0025r.jpg
http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/4527/civ4screenshot0028.jpg
http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/64/civ4screenshot0017.jpg

(and yes, i'm doing a private all leaders challenge on mountaincoast normal 6 civs
3 won, 111 to go, not counting summoned civs. i hope version 9 still takes a while to go public )

Back to gaminic though. As mentioned, build your first 5 cities close (even 3 tiles is not a bad idea), and forego some econmonic potential just to build them on hills. Build enough warriors.I find that i have around 3 warriors per city before archers. Your cities should be arranged so that you can shift warriors between cities fast. If you are near hillgiant spawning lands (typically deserts) and an enraged hg enters your territory, sacrifice an unpromoted warrior so he will leave your lands. Put him on a nice hill if you can obviously, so that maybe he wins still. if a warrior dies, don't wait at all on replacing him.

Oh, on of the reasons the erebus script sucks may be related to your problems. I think regular erebus maps have a reputation for being even more extreme concerning barbarians. the issue, as i recall, is that in certain situations, because of the erebus-typical one tiel gaps in mountain ranges, a large group of barbarians is all routed the same route. often, one civ will be hit with full force.
That discussion i read about the issue concerned FfH though (where barbarians and animals do not attack each other) so i don't know if it still aplies in WM.

Then again, the center island isolated start isn't the typical scenario for that to happen.

Options. I found that in my first WM games, the "pirates"-Option would be the most gamechanging one. They typically come at a very unconvenient time, when i have dealt with the early barbarian onslaught but am not quite ready for 4 pirates every 5 turns yet. I leave them off now.

 

[Neomega]

the mountain ranges may be more wall-ish, but the script itself is way worse. it doesn't look nearly as natural,

Ill just disagree and say it looks the most natural to me

plus it misses much ffh specific stuff like kelp, haunted lands etc. you could try increases mountains settings on erebuscontinent and see if you like it more

I don't know what you are talking about, it has kelp and haunted lands.

it looked way too artificial... stripes of different terrains based on latitude, it looked like a zebra

Whatever, dude.

 

[Valkrionn]

Difference between randomly placed kelp, and kelp forests in the ocean.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

this is what I'm talking about. way too much plains, and notice the two long strips of desert where the tropics are. deserts actually don't work like that at all. it doesn't have much to do with latitude has it has with rainfall. the further away from the sea, the more arid it gets till you get deserts ( fried egg effect ) . mountain ranges can also block incoming clouds and prevent areas from getting rainfall even if close to the sea ( rainshadow effect ) . I'm not an expert, I've just been using cephalo's maps for a while