Svaltafar on Higher Difficulties and Epic Speed with Extramodmod Continued

[TrilobyteOverlords]

Svaltafar is by far my most played civilization. You get to focus on the lesser used recon units, you can build in forests, they're evil but not end-of-the-world Evil, and are about the synergies between different units (magic, recon, and disciples) rather than a straightforward op strategy like hippus horse spam or mobius witch rush.

I am mostly a monarch player, but as I've attempted higher difficulties on epic speed, I've also realized svaltafar are not, compared to some other civilizations, actually that good. On crowded, non-flavored starts you can easily get into no win scenarios like doviello and khazad declaring on you synchronously while surrounded by flood plains or something like that. Recently I've been attempting emperor difficulty on the default Erebus map via extramodmod continued and losing repeatedly.

This isn't really a guide, but some observations I've made.

(1) The +1 recon unit bonus applies to scouts, hunters, satyrs, lizardmen from the dwarves versus lizards event, rangers, beastmasters, alzakan the assassin (you must give him movement promotions and blitz or orthus' axe; he wrecks this way) and mistforms from the the tier 3 shadow spell, but only on attacking. They also all can get another point of damage from the poisoned blades. And even though Faeryl has raiders and benefit immensely from 2 movement units with commando, none of these guys can pillage. Early on it's therefore okay to get some warriors and you may even be able to pillage some with the hidden nationality world spell, which helps a lot.

(2) Once you hit emperor, it takes way too long to set up a conventional economy or leaves. Since you start with farming, the best strategy I've come up with is to build a worker right away, research animal husbandry and calendar, research festivals, research mysticism, and progress towards deception while funding my economy with markets and god king city great merchants. I save a great priest or merchant to found the esus holy city.

(3) I then found (hopefully) and convert to Esus. Now you're thinking, sure esus is nice to have around, but why would I want esus as a state religion? Well, my free nightwatch could cast poisoned blades without researching sorcery, cast blur, and extort a 100+ money for 1 population, which is a lot of money. The second shadow mana gives the mages a free blur promotion, which will help you much later once you have mistforms with archmages, and you can get gibbon.

(4) Gibbon deserves his own section. Getting an early shadowalk (lets you ignore city defenses, which by default you have no other way to get around) or mistform may let you win a war on monarch or on emperor with an ally, but I've come to the conclusion that the impersonate leader ability is totally broken.

With impersonate leader, you -can't- do conventional diplomacy unless someone initiates with you, nor can you outright delete their units. AI also gets to control your civilization and they will tend to run it into the ground by doing things like changing civics or even declaring war. At this point you may be wondering what's so good about it.

What you can do with impersonate leader is:

- Make them lose their religion restricted units by converting to a useless religion.

- Convert to useless civics and crash their economy to the point units disband.

- Use slavery on useless buildings to drastically lower their population.

- Drop items like Orthus' Axe in your territory (being up against the 19 strength war machine unit with 5 movement and orthus' axe in my current play through was bad news).

- Declare war on other civilizations by attempting to move a unit into a civilization they don't have open borders with.

- Move all their units out of cities, leaving them defenseless.

- Declare war on your own civilization - I think gibbon is like a spy unit or something, but he certainly doesn't get kicked out if you close borders directly before using impersonate. Even though your AI is running your civilization into the ground, it's still smart enough to attack undefended cities, which can double your territory against someone who may have much higher strength than you. By the time you are in control of your old civilization, your enemy will often be willing to sign a peace treaty or at least be close to it. There's also no diplomatic penalty for the war since it's a 'defensive' war.

Therefore the AI may run your old civilization into the ground, but that doesn't matter anymore since you've gained so much territory you effectively have a new civilization. The AI will probably convert you to leaves or something while you're gone, at which point you may as well with it since you aren’t getting Gibbon back.

(5) At this point, your military strength may still be low, but you are now one of the major players in terms of territory, economy, and research, assuming you got the great library and built economy tiles and buildings. If you have access to five mana nodes you can go for the magic victory since Faeryl's arcane trait means you will be relying a lot on magic techs anyway. The reason 5 nodes works is that you can learn dispel via a metamagic node, dispel the metamagic node, and use those five nodes to get every type of tower by dispelling after each tower. Preferably you were able to set up the slave trade and can use that to complete the tower of mastery in one turn; otherwise everyone will declare war on you.

If that doesn't work, you can attempt to go for domination, which air magic will help with since people have big stacks by now (or alternatively veil ritualists casting fire). A hybrid approach is to vassalize people for mana tribute and use that to build your towers.


What do you all think? Are there any Svaltafar strategies I’m missing that are effective on Emperor? Some other tech path that would work better?

 

[TrilobyteOverlords]

I ended up losing this one too, but it's the closest I've come to winning on Emperor. I was 25 points from having the highest score and well on my way to a tower victory, but Einon Logos pulled a cultural victory at turn 515, which is around when AI usually pulls off a victory type. The only big thing I can think of is to try to rush knowledge of the either (using great sage and then mind magic to make up for losing the sage?) so I can get mage XP for air magic sooner. I think I need to be much more efficient about engagements and think about the opportunity cost of going after someone, as well as the danger of leaving someone like Einen alone on a island until he has twice as much military strength as anyone else. I probably also need to be more proactive about getting the raw mana nodes early on as well if I'm going to go for that type of victory.

Esus is also showing itself to be a pretty useful late game war time religion. You can instantly recruit the nightwatches like mercenaries in captured cities, extract money for nightwatches from cities that are still under unrest using population that would die of starvation, and the seemingly gimicky mechanic of not getting pushed outside borders has some uses, like being able cross a body of water prior to declaring war instead of needing a big navy to bring them over at the same time. For a similar mechanic, you can also have hidden nationality units declare nationality right before taking a city.

I'm curious if the border mechanic also applies to defensive wars. Like lets say I put a horse'man' next to every city, impersonate leader, and then start the war, will they be able to take all the cities in one or two turns since they're already by the cities? Will I lose the game if all the cities get taken before I'm back in my old civilization? That seems worth testing, anyway.

 

[TrilobyteOverlords]

In the vein of continuing to talk with myself, I have an important discovery: You do in fact lose the game if the civilization you're impersonating gets destroyed. For some reason my civ's AI went with making a puppet state instead of keeping the cities directly, so I will redo that war regardless.

I am also late to discovering what is probably actually pretty obvious: svaltafar are really good at specialist economy. The AI goes after Catacomb Liberalus pretty hard, but I've had better luck getting it if I skip an early religion, use a great scientist to rush Knowledge of the Ether, and finish the wonder up with slavery. The mage guild lets you get a sage, the Catacomb Liberalus lets you add another one (and one in every city from the mage guilds!), the elder council lets you get another one, and inspiration from mind mana gives you a free one. Great Library is easier to get, which gives you a free sage and boosts your sages, while the regular library lets you add another sage. That's 6 sages, relatively early on, in your capitol and then you can put a national epic in that city and keep settling the sages. Once you're done with the sage related wonders, that's a good time to switch off god king usually.

Going this deep into the sages requires being left alone for a while, so it won't be possible to do all of that every game, but this avoids a lot of the economy and research issues I was having. This also makes it easier to found esus without another civilization beating you and, since you don't need to put as much money in research, lets you spend money rushing military units or recruiting nightwatches, which are honestly pretty strong defensive units even if we're the wrong elves for an archery bonus.

[Edit: I just won, of all things, an Esus religious victory on turn 595. I lucked out with no one else getting a victory condition that late and with Sandalphon converting to esus early on and spreading it, which spiked it to being the largest religion without me doing anything. I then ran purge the unfaithful since I couldn't get priests without converting and losing Gibbon.

While I was building that, I had gibbon run through the Clan of Embers territory spreading Esus, which he can do without open borders. Jonas was Order, had summoned Basium, and had furious relations with me, along with around 3 times the military strength. Around one turn before Jonas won a domination victory, I impersonated leader, converted to esus, and then rapidly spread it through his territory.

Esus is one of the easier ones to spread because you can recruit nightwatch and then have nightwatch either spread it or tithe to fund spreading it. Since he was Order, he also had a big stack of confessors that I used to inquisition out non-Esus religions, including Order from Heaven. With his huge territory and population, this was enough for me to push over to the victory condition.

My AI, meanwhile switched around 2/3 of my cities to a puppet state every time I tried impersonating leader. I think it's because they were on a different continent and had a high upkeep cost with me running republic, but losing control of 2/3 your cities is pretty bad. This meant I couldn't use impersonate unless it was going to win me the game, though maybe moving my capitol to the larger continent beforehand would have fixed it.]