The Armaggedon Counter

[Heathcliff]

Hi,

I've played quite a few games of FFH. So I know the basics of the armaggedon counter. But I would appritiate it if some of you could write a guide here what happens and the different stages.
At every 10th steps things happen. At least an event.

10 - "Heed me and heed me well..." But nothing happens?
20 - Nothing Happens
30 - Blight - a huge amount of unhealth to your cities all your cities will starve to 1.
40 - First horseman - Has the command ability. What does it do?
50 - Second horseman - strength and weaknesses? And what do you get when you defeat a horseman?
60 - Third Horseman
70 - Fourth Horseman
80 - ?
90 - ?
100 -?

Could you defeat the Horsemen with tier 2 units and a hero or you need to have tier 3 units?

What is the best way to get a high armageddon counter in the game? I guess the best way is to build Prophecy of ragnarok and spam lowcost units from that city. Combine with heroic epic so you can build 1 each turn. But it will drain money from you...
Any other strategies? Most other things does so little like a few steps only to the counter.

How does the infernal civilization interact with the armageddon counter?
What does the Sheaim ulti do?

 

[Irgy]

I highly recommend the PDF manual, which has this info in it and plenty more. You should be able to find it in this forum, I'm pretty sure it's stickied somewhere.

To quote:

AC=10: Warning, but no effect.
· AC=30: Blight: Causes Temporary large Disease Penalties in every non-Infernal city in the world (up to 15 disease beyond the city population) and does 25% Death Based Damage to all Living Units. Disease is mitigated by Health provided from Buildings (not Forests or other sources).
As long as the AC remains above 40, Pestilence can continue to strike at any time. This will also cause disease in every city in the world, but not do any Death damage. Disease will be up to 9 points higher than 1 disease for every 4 population in your city (minus any health from buildings).
· AC=40: Stephanos appears in the world.
· AC=50: Buboes appears in the world.
· AC=60: Yersinia appears in the world.
· AC=70: Ars Moriendi appears in the world.
· AC=80: Hellfire Spawns: This creates the Hellfire improvement on random tiles in the world (2% chance per non-
City flatland tile with no units and no resource), and creates a Demonic Champion (belonging to the Infernals
if they are in the game, and to the barbarian state otherwise) on these tiles to defend them. More such units will continue to spawn here if the AC remains high enough.
· AC=90: Wrath: The Avatar of Wrath appears in the world. All Land Domain Living Units who are not World Units have a 50% chance of gaining Enraged
· AC=100: Apocalypse: kills 60% of the living units in the world, and halves the populations of all cities of leader without the Fallow trait (anyone but Hyborem)

You can defeat the horsemen with tier 1 units (i.e. bronzed warriors) if you have enough of them. I find usually by the time they appear they're not particularly a threat unless you're unprepared for some reason. Defeating them gives you an item, unique to each one. I'll let you have the fun of finding out what they are (although it's also in the manual).

Infernals benefit from high AC by not suffering from any of the effects - they can ignore blight and the apocalypse (mostly), are barbarian so can ignore the horsemen, and the champions that spawn are under their control.

The Sheaim suffer from high AC as much as anyone else, but also benefit, by getting more planar gate units, and a bigger bonus from stigmata via the Sundered trait. Other civs can get the Stigmata promotion, in particular from the Stigmata of the Unborn.

Raising the AC is done a variety of ways. Spreading the Ashen Veil and building its special units works but is limited. The Prophecy of Ragnarok is expensive but effective - you don't have to build cheap spam rubbish units though, just build the military you want to build anyway, although obviously have a preference for the cheaper units in that city. Razing cities can be a great way to do it, whether intentionally or not, depending on the situation.

 

[travathian]

You can defeat the horsemen with tier 1 units (i.e. bronzed warriors) if you have enough of them . . .

And the horsemen spawn near you. If a horsemen spawns near a weak AI they can end up obliterating them and in the process end up with tons of XP and thus promotions. The latter couple horsemen can easily require a stack of T2 or decent number of T3 units to bring down once they have some promotions.

 

[Emptiness]

30 - Blight - a huge amount of unhealth to your cities all your cities will starve to 1.

This is a misleading claim. True, one's cities might starve to 1 if no measures to cope with Blight have been taken. If one takes the necessary precautions, however, they will not starve to 1 - and indeed, it is possible that some of them will not even lose any population at all. There have been quite a few threads discussing Blight and how to cope with it; anyone who finds Blight to be this devastating would probably find it worthwhile to read up on how to prevent this event from causing so much damage (or even control the Armageddon Counter to prevent Blight from even occurring).

 

[A Moon]

40 - First horseman - Has the command ability. What does it do?

The command ability means that whenever a units defeats another living unit, that dead unit might join them. Disciple units can get it. Say my Priest of Leaves has Command I. That means that when he defeats, for example, a Calabim vampire, there's a 10% chance the vampire will join my army, with all his xp and promotions.

 

[BvBPL]

It is true that a large number of tier 2 units can take down the early two horsemen relatively easily, however you should be wary of the fear promotion the horseys have. You might find that out of your stack of 20 axmen, only 2 attack in any given turn (and are promptly killed, or possibly converted by Stephanos) which just makes the job harder as they feed XP into the horseman. This is can be aggravating if the horseman spawn away from your highly promoted units who might be tied up in a war (higher level units are more resistant to fear); a horde of low level units does little good when they are too afraid to attack. You can get around this by using the courage spell.