Sidar survival challenge- winnable?

[Jules.lt]

How do you ever finish?

Altar of the Luonnotar

 

[Darkwind3.0]

I tried this as my first Diety game. I agree with the other guy that it was surprisingly easy (though I didn't team the AIs, and played on a large Erebus). I went Order and used Archers (later Longbows; 8 from Bless and Fire Arrows was awesome) for defense and Confessors for offense, with a few adepts for the spells and to eventually wane (though I waned every unit that got to level 6 minus heroes). It was fun, to say the least. Social order basically lifted the happiness cap since I generally had 10-20 units in my city at any one time; I also went Theocracy for the priests to pump out an altar. By midgame I could pump out a confessor a turn and could probably have gone for conquest if I had some boats.

Interestingly, the elves managed to build Basium, who began spreading Order and basically single-handedly gave me a reason to build the Order shrine.

 

[civ_king]

Alter? I use time... much more fun

 

[OzzyKP]

I'm doing this now. It's actually disappointingly easy so far. The AI has beat me to founding every religion, though. But I got most of the good early wonders. Protecting my one city with a vast horde of archers and axemen at present. Repeated Ljosalfar incursions are easily dealt with, and nobody else is on my continent.

I'm guessing the AIs are too busy fighting amongst themselves elsewhere.

Well of course it is easy if you play on a continents map and only have one civ to deal with. Pangea is the only way to do this challenge. I just made it through 280 turns before big stacks of Bannor, Amurites & Lurchip all attacked me on the same turn... ugh.

 

[Jules.lt]

Last night was so epic
Still in the same Sidar survival game, the AC crept up lightning fast.
Ars transformed my flood plains into normal deserts
Someone converted to Empyrean and revealed my workers
The Avatar came to finish off my improvements
I got my first experience of AC90 at turn 220 or so. It's a good thing it doesn't affect heroes (even if the 3 of them got killed of by AC100 3 turns later)
I rush-bought the Mithril Golem in the one turn I had mithril before the Avatar came along to pillage my new mine (I was lucky to have some mithril 2 tiles away from my city)

4 altars so far. Getting a bit more difficult because all the food I get is the one from one Oasis I accessed with the City of a Thousand Slums and my Great Merchants. I only make GMs, now
I'm teching towards Berzerkers at 1,200 bpt in hope of damaging the Avatar enough with collateral that my other units can finish him off...

 

[Blackmantle]

At least it has been (even though it naturally gets harder the more civs you fight...) (without reload for in-game reasons of course... ).
If its still true, i don't know for sure. Since the Sidar have suffered some (if rather small) hits thanks to some changes in the recent patches since Ice/final release has been started.

 

[cIV_khanh93]

whats the secret? been having some serious trouble i think my ech path is just wrong.

 

[cIV_khanh93]

also, i had the deranged idea that every unit to get to 24 exp ould survived to shade-hood, so i though i could manage to actually capture(raze anyway) their cities.

 

[Demus]

you can raze their cities, once you've got over 3 hero units with blitz running about, and a few air/fire mages. Start from your own borders inside the CoE influence, and decimate their armies. Then go razing.
Units with 24 exp should survive to shadehood, if you take care in your combat orders (it gets tougher once your AI foes start to field assassins though, take them out before they get to your city).

 

[Mesix]

Do Shades get the immortal promotion from the Blood of the Phoenix ritual? Does it make sense to stockpile some shades in the mid game and beeline Devine Essence to exploit this?

 

[Verdian]

It seems like they should. But you do not really need to stockpile them. You can only have four at a time, so just wane four units right before the ritual finishes.

But don't shades keep all of their promotions? If so, that effectively means any unit you wane after completing BotP gives you two shades...

 

[slowcar]

3 heroes and a few mages? did you ever play this setting? you need at least 15-20 units babysitting the heroes as the AI throws unbelievable huge stacks of units at you, sometimes 50-60 in a single turn. floating eyes/falcons are a must and some rathas or similar help a lot.

i used some small stacks in strategic locations to control the razed parts of the maps. note that you should never ever raze barbarian cities, as the AIs are peaceful to them they conserve the free space and deny them settling areas.

playing as the sidar uses their unique strength in this szenario quite well. of course your city needs to be well defended, lead a lot of sorties though to get promotions, especially as a single longbow with drill4 will get all the kills in time.

i also won the szenario playing tasunke, but only 2 in 5 tries, it is a very good training for successful warrior rushing as you won't be able to really research past bronze working. go for axes and city raider asap and have a few elite stacks razing everything.

 

[Demus]

you don't need units babysitting when those units are still within your own borders (invisible). The stack size obviously also depends on the map size, i generally play against 2 AI's on small maps. Typically, i get rathus up to lvl 15, after which i give all his equipment (usually nether blade + orthus axe + 1 or 2 lair items by now), hide him and go free brigit. Afterwards, build the shrine . A drill 4 brigit with the nether blade and the axe should be able to hold off quite large stacks on her own, and should be able to bring city defenders to their knees. Remember: now matter the production bonusses, the AI can only field 1 unit per city per turn max. Say each AI has about 10 cities, this means 20 units per turn max, quite killable if it keeps throwing it's stacks at you.

 

[slowcar]

in the original survival setting only conquest is a valid victory. i guess it is a bit difficult to achieve without leaving your cultural borders. i have seen it once in a vanilla-SG (and only one of four teams managed it) - but not in this setting.

there are 3 deity AIs, allied, one of them barbarian. etc etc.

 

[Demus]

heh, i hadn't played it in a while, so i was only up against 2 AI's (game isn't finished yet though). I'm not out of my borders yet, but i've just freed brigit and am on par with my teching, so i should be able to start wittling down the endless hordes. I've founded both runes and CoE, at the moment running runes with both heroes (arthendain as city guard, bambur as forger), going to switch to CoE once i hit warhorses for the shadow riders.

By the way, i don't shade my T4 units, just the T1-3. You need high-exp elite squads to take down enemy cities. In my experience, once you start to put pressure on the city next to your cultural borders (which the AI will found 9/10), they'll start to pull city defenders from other towns to defend that site. Keep the cultural defences low, keep hitting 'em, and their numbers will start to drop.

 

[Xuenay]

Tried this a few times. The first three times, I tried it on the Erebus map, and the map generator consistently spawned me somewhere that had no land connection to the rest of the map. Since that would've made the exercise a bit pointless, I restarted and finally switched to Highlands.

On my first Highlands try, I got killed by barbarians (!) pretty early to the game. In the second one, I had a promising start and waned several units, but then the barbarians stopped coming. I had the Amurites as a neighbor, but they didn't send units often enough to grant any serious experience. As a result, I started falling behind, up until I was finally hit by the combined forces of the Amurites, the Calabim and the Sheaim on around turn 210. Then I fell pretty fast.

Two lessons for my next game: for one, I was playing on Quick, like I usually do. I now realize that was probably a mistake, since playing on one of the slower speeds would give me more time to be assaulted by the barbarians and thus gather more experience and shades. Second, I was trying to fortify my whole valley, setting up archers on all the choke points. This required about six stacks, making each of them weaker and dividing the experience earned between many different units. I'm now thinking that it might be better to just fortify them all in the capital.

Runes seems to be the favored religion, and that's what I also went for. But then, might it be good to pick a forested map, first go for Runes and build Gal-Dur, then switch to Leaves? That will give a bunch of Ancient Forests and Guardian of Nature, helping give a strong economy even without improvements, and also spawn the occasional Treant.

 

[OzzyKP]

What I generally do for these games is start out with Runes, build Gal-Dur. Then switch to OO, build that wonder that eliminates unhappiness. Then finally switch to AV and run sacrifice the weak so you can sustain a larger population and run more specialists. Plus, of course, their priests are good for injuring incoming stacks.

 

[Xuenay]

Heh, I suppose that theoretically an optimal path would involve a lot of religion-swapping. First Runes for Gal-Dur, then OO for the Tower, then Leaves until all of your forests are Ancient ones, and finally AV for Sacrifice the Weak.

That would probably be pretty lethal.

Of course, that's quite hard to pull off (especially at Deity), since you won't have the chance to found all of them. Researching the appropriate religion tech does always give you a missionary unit for that religion, but the religion will have quite high a chance of failing to spread. Though one could try to give his existing priests lots of command promotions, and then hope that one of the AI's stacks contains a priest of the religion you're hoping to switch to next.

 

[Jules.lt]

The Tower of complacency isn't that useful when you're running on specialists that don't add to unhappiness. And in many situations you won't have much pop because you will have no farms.

On the other hand, Mines of Gal-Dur is a must. RoK is the first religion to aim for, imo. Then you can aim for your next religion depending on your options and preferred strategy.

Edit: I actually used Pillar of chains, which is equivalent to a few additional great engineers for production, depending on your pop

 

[Xuenay]

I realized that going for Ashen Veil won't do, as that would make me Evil and unable to complete Luonnotar.

Just did two more tries on Epic speed, Arborea map. Seems impossible. Each time I lost when I *thought* I was doing well, but then suddenly a stack of doom showed up and with no warning I was dead.