Questions from a new Wild Mana player

[HanValen]

I recommend that you custom game with the option "barbs and animals only spawn in fog of war".

It gets a LOT more peaceful.

IMO it's even better than the tamed lands option since you can recognize a pattern in their attacking procedures and react accordingly. Or have a scout in a well placed anciet tower. Feels more like if you protect your lands the barbs will prey less on you.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

otoh, that means that all you have to do to completely neuter barbs is place one unit in each 5x5 area. it's the civ4 default behaviour

 

[Gaminic]

I recommend that you custom game with the option "barbs and animals only spawn in fog of war".

It gets a LOT more peaceful.

IMO it's even better than the tamed lands option since you can recognize a pattern in their attacking procedures and react accordingly. Or have a scout in a well placed anciet tower. Feels more like if you protect your lands the barbs will prey less on you.

I've started a new game with this option enabled and I'm enjoying it very much. I have a very nicely placed Ancient Tower near my starting position which I used for early defenses. Now that I have Rosier the Fallen, I've withdrawn some "sentries" to increase the spawning odds of Barbarians/Animals around me for some free exp (and cash! Those layer destruction things are awesome early on!). It does make the game more predictable, or at least reduces the "messed up moments" where everything seems to suddenly pile up on you.

However, the amount of control sort of turns the Barbarians from an active threat to an XP farming opportunity, which is a bit sad...

Another note: A few days back I noticed a topic about someone claiming the Bannor were overpowered because he Evented a Flesh Golem and got to steamrolling early on. I've had that event now (I'm playing Sheiam and I was still toying around with early warriors) and used it to completely freeze my island-buddies (Yes, it spawned me on an island again. Even thought I picked Pangea, but must've forgotten while selecting custom options) by placing it one step outside their city. Eventhough I couldn't attack it (6 or 7 Warriors with some promotions and city on hilltop), they were too afraid to send out their worker. With good reason, as I would've attacked it on sight, or waited for it to remove jungle in case of defenders.

I've had a similar problem while playing The Momus scenario in regular FFH2: if a single super-unit walks into your lands, there is no way to stop it early on. Sure, it can't attack you if you stay inside your base or high defense tiles, but it can just walk around and destroy improvements, racking him up cash and disabling your economy. In that scenario, the culprit was the everyone-mutates setting, but here it was the random event spawning me a very strong unit in the early game.

Maybe events should be tweaked a bit to prevent these things from happening in the first X turns? Similarly, I always get the "stellar" events which form some good/bad signs for a certain religion, while not enough turns have passed for anyone to research any religion. I've never seen one during the later game. Maybe this is intentional to benefit those who beeline their religion ("the real believers"), but I'm not sure if it's actually possible to unlock the religion by then...

 

[HanValen]

Meh, it's kinda ridiculous when a lot of barbs appear in the middle of my country. Is this civil war or something?!

hahaha it sure puts them in a fence, but if they are raging barbs (sounds menacing) some packs come from outside the border. You can still lose some cities if you are careless. And they still spawn LIKE HELL from those cities specially acheron hahah. There shouldn't be much rassle in pacified lands in the first place

This post from the bannors was mine. And believe me, having one of those machines is minor compared to a early 4 crusaders devastation.

It seems like those big guys will not appear until given tech is researched in some future patches.

oh, and yea, about your post in the other thread. with city states and a source of gold or incense nearby 4 cities of advantage is really something..

 

[Gaminic]

Without the Golem, you wouldn't have gotten the chance to rack up those crusaders!
And yeah, I always thought the Crusaders came at a later tech (Fanaticism or so sounds logical?), so your post was quite the gasp-moment.

On my current game (Still Sheiam, on the island) I've got a bit of an issue. I'm still playing on Chieftain and the island is entirely mine (the single Lanun city didn't last long when I finally got my PZ's and my free Adept). Since I was reluctant to research Optics and unlock the Pirates, it was a game of solitude once more, combined with some good ol' "WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE AGRESSIVE HUH WOULD YOU HUH WOULD YOU?!" spam, until I got a random event to sell me the location of a Treasure for a bit of gold. I accepted this and lucked out on revealing a Grigori neighbor. An initial surprise was them having a score slightly above mine (1400 to my 1250 or so), which is odd on Chieftain and even more so considering I have quite a few number of decent cities, nearly every Resource known to man or zombie, a few nice wonders and two holy cities with their buildings (founded AV and stole OO from the Lanun). When I entered the trade window, I found that they had practically double the amount of techs I had. I know I'm running a -25% research leader, but DAMN...

This made me wonder: unlike the regular Civ, where everyone had 2 traits which were more or less balanced depending on your playstyle, FFH (and WM even more so) has leaders with different numbers of traits as well as plain negative traits. Why is that?
Foolish is a pretty harsh trait and I don't think the other traits (Arcane, Greedy and Emergent iirc) are such a powerful combination that they had to be nerfed so severely. Especially considering the Leader is Evil, which blocks one of the free Emergent traits (Magic defense) anyway. Even after 3 Golden Ages (Goodie hut, Event and Prophet) I didn't get the other free trait, so I feel my Leader has been severely punished and that in general, the leaders aren't exactly as balanced as they should be.

I understood the logic behind "minor leaders" for scenarios, but it's kind of annoying if they come up when randomly rolled. :/

 

[Neomega]

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

I, for one, don't play giant, ugly pancake maps. That's part of your problem right there. the tectonics script works on the idea of continents and subcontinents colliding. Big boring pancake doesn't even start to show what tectonics can do.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

now it's me who is not sure what you mean there

that's a standard pangea tectonics map. non-pangea tectonics might look a lot better, but playing maps with continents in FFH2 sucks due to the AI being bad with navies. I'm pretty sure lakes ( 30 % water ) tectonics looks pretty good, but that makes navies COMPLETELY useless, which is sad imho. yet, one can see in the above screenshot that the algorithm used to create the map is not nearly as complex and realistic. that's why perfectworld and erebuscontinent take a lot longer to generate, they're calculating a whole bunch of stuff like place tectonics, geostrophic winds etc.

 

[Gaminic]

Okay, I can't get the hang of the Malakim and Kuriotates.

With the Malakim, the unhealthiness from Flood Plains and lack of resources on desert pretty much kills me. Before Agrarianism, my capital just won't grow and producing workers is slow as hell. None of the +health buildings do much without their resources. Also, I can't seem to build roads, which is fine in deserts, but how will that ever work outside of deserts? For a Civ based on Trade income, the inability to connect your city to foreign ones is a bit of a problem. :/

With the Kuriotates I simply fail to pick decent city spots. I had a very lucky start with a Centaur event on a Horse tile that gave me a free pasture and Centaur before I even had my first worker up. After a few Goblin and Skeleton kills, I managed to successfully take out a nearby threatning Sheiam Civ (high score but low in military power, so I went for it), but the resulting settlement was pretty useless. Guess there's no point in early military conquests?

Any chance someone has a few hints or maybe even a save file of a good start with the Malakim? They seem like one of the neatest Civs out there, but I just can't get started.

On a semi-related note: I hate the -10% modifiers on Civics combined with the terrible handling of rounding. Early on (especially considering the -10% Food on a starting Civic) it pretty much forces you to get a food resource if you want to grow or use a lower food but high production/commerce tile. Apprenticeship is completely useless early on unless combined with Nationhood, which is also very frustrating...

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I definitely agree about the Malakim, the unhealtiness from floodplains is way too high.

 

[Gaminic]

Guess they could use a building for desert health... Even better would be a Malakim-specific Civic, since this is mostly the problem in the first 100 turns.

 

[graywarden]

Guess they could use a building for desert health... Even better would be a Malakim-specific Civic, since this is mostly the problem in the first 100 turns.

Review the Malakim thread here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=371031

A lot of this has been discussed, argued and rebutted.

I personally have more of an issue with the "magic mechanics" of the terraforming (purely on a purist perspective) then having to deal with the flood plains themselves. With a concentrated strategy the flood plains can be dealt with with the mechanics available.
Irregardless of opinions, that is the correct thread to discuss and debate.