Two Painful 0.25 Games

[[NWO]_Valis]

Raging barbs was never a good idea with FFH.

I disagree, that is the best option there is. In vanilla it was not so interesting like here. Here it makes the world taste like a real dark fantasy novel. You can set up a game were you are like the roman empire fighting of barbaric hordes that have no strategy, no chance in single combat with all your elite troops but in numbers and with rage can tear your empire apart.

Those barb cities are nice but when you wait few turns, get your wariors combat 5 + Orcish + [what was that promotion vs melle units?] you do not have to build settlers to expand. You do not chose your city locations but you can always raze those in bad locations and take only the good ones. At that time you have roads, farms and sometimes even some resource improvements.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

This thread is mostly bad luck stories, but I had the most amazing start. If I posted a pic you'd accuse me of cheating, but what I did was accidently leave it set to standard size--after setting 19 civs total. So I started with 7 gems and a clam in my captial radius. Also, there were 3 AIs on my continent, and one other continent about 3 times as big with 15 civs on it.
Needless to say, they were surprised when I showed up with my berserkers and inquisitors and heroes so soon!

 

[Caradoc]

Raging barbs plus that option that starts the game with barb cities can make for a thrilling run. In a recent game, I started with six barb cities with me on a large island. They were practically wall to wall. I was lucky to have some good starting resources and to hook up Copper before I was overwhelmed. I put up Forts on the four corners left by my fat cross and ran roads up to them. As my units got wounded, I shuttled them back to heal up and dispatched replacements. Even so, it was a good time before I could build anything but military units (and eventually the Training Yard). The payoff for this early bloodbath (besides some misplaced former barb cities) was half a dozen highly promoted units, ready to conquer the world.

 

[Kael]

Labruscum (barbs start the game with cities) was a option on the design docs for "Fire" but it wasn't ever implemented because we were limited to only 2 game options. Im really glad we were able to slip it into the last version of "Fire".

Personally I play with it all the time too and I like the huge variety in games you can get from toggling a few game options. I realized I was in trouble when I saw a goblin worker go by the borders of my country building a road as he went (meanwhile Im sitting there with one city conviently located right off the orc superhighway).

 

[BeefontheBone]

Those are a handy source of free workers if you've a hunter or mounted unit spare

 

[Blackclove]

Yes, in the "green elves" game there are goblin workers all over the place in my civ. I hardly build my own workers. Even better is if you can get a spider... lots of workers get eaten from the neighbors. I'm vaguely recalling that in earlier versions, spiders killed workers instead of capturing them. Shouldn't units that don't have declared nationality have trouble capturing people for your empire? Wouldn't that kind of blow their cover? I'm finding it a bit to easy to capture dozens of workers from my hapless neighbors now that I have a mobility +2, combat +5 spider roaming about...

 

[Lord Yanaek]

I disagree, that is the best option there is. In vanilla it was not so interesting like here. Here it makes the world taste like a real dark fantasy novel. You can set up a game were you are like the roman empire fighting of barbaric hordes that have no strategy, no chance in single combat with all your elite troops but in numbers and with rage can tear your empire apart.

OK, i should have made it a bit more clear. Raging Barbs could be nice, but each time i tried it, if i wasn't wiped out, then my AI opponents were. This means no challenge later on. When you manage to beat back the barbs, you could as well start a new game

I think it's a bad idea because barbs are already quite annoying in FFH, enough to give you some troubles in the early game, and if you enable them, your game will be you against the barbs as AI civs will be wiped out before you even knew they were there. Last time i played with raging barbs, all evil civs were wiped out early, or so screwed they never founded the Veil. Hybo never showed up, and AC stopped at something like 15.

It was prior to 2.25. I still haven't tested it, so maybe this changed a bit. Also i was never able to try the barbs cities either. Maybe this changed A LOT. I recall playing a pre-made map with barb cities and raging barbs, they were actually LESS annoying thant non-raging barbs on random maps, because they were not as roaming.

 

[MisterBenn]

I found that the Raging Barbs option in 0.23 FFH was too much. It made every game of mine develop the same way, i.e. rush for a basic ability to defend yourself, fend off the barb incursions to the point where you have enough defenders to start rolling out your cities. Once you were at that point, you were set up to domiate the other civs because they were either actually dead or very nearly dead, and you were finally growing and with a heavily experienced army. The raging bards option ramped up the difficulty of the first hundred turns, but in the long run equated to turning down the difficulty a notch or two.

For my preference, the regular barb levels in 0.25 play out a lot better. There are a few to force you to defend your towns, but your opponents are able to deal with it and expand themselves. Having your opponents be able to grow and put their unique characteristics to use is where all the variety and flavour come from.

That's of course just my opinion. The truly great thing is that these gameplay slants are just an option button away and we can all play out the game we desire.

 

[felwar]

Raging barbarians can be done a couple ways, but I think there is a lot of variation based on map type and the number of opponents you choose. If you have a higher amount of land than water, then the suggested number of opponents is pretty low.

I tend to like more opponents with raging barbarians. This makes for a period early on where it's a struggle against barbarian hordes, and then it slows down and stops as civilization spreads. Generally if a civ falls, it makes for a barbarian kingdom in its place.

Now Barbatmos... I started a game yesterday where the broken sepulcher was IN my starting city radius. That game lasted 1 turn and I was swarmed by wraiths. The next one I saw two civs get wiped out on turn 1, and when I entered the world builder to see what happened, sure enough there was the sepulcher right between their capitals.

Any way to set a minimum distance for capitals away from the sepulcher? If I set a game with a certain number of civs, I'd kind of like to have them in it longer than 1 turn.

 

[vorshlumpf]

If you don't like games with Raging Barbarians, don't turn that option on. I personally love having to scrape and crawl toward survival.

The main problem with Raging Barbs are the AI tactics. If the AI was taught to deal with barbarian problems properly, then we'd have very interesting games indeed.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

I wonder, does turning on aggressive AI help the ai defend against barbarians in anyone's experience?

 

[kioras]

I think it might, in a current game on prince, roughly 120 turns in no AI was wiped out yet, but a few of them did have their growth badly crippled, and it looks like they might get wiped out sooner or later.

I saw a few stacks of 5-10 units attack me, mostly goblins, warriors and a few skeletons.

 

[Sarisin]

I wonder, does turning on aggressive AI help the ai defend against barbarians in anyone's experience?

I don't think so. I use these two settings for all my games.

I've played three games of FFH2 .25g and they all had the same result: a Conquest Victory before turn 300.

I used the same game settings for all of them: Epic, Prince, Huge Fantasy map. I added one AI civ in the 2nd game and two in the third game. It didn't matter as the AI civs really went down quickly. All three games became a matter of me against the barbs. In the first, I had to go out and destroy an AI civ at peace with the barbs, but in the other two, the barbs destroyed all the other AI civs..including Jonas who for some reason declared war on the barbs.

I did use the Labruscum option in all three games. Maybe that makes it tougher on the AI civs. I still think the main problem is the AI not being able to deal with raging barbs and expanding when they should be defending.

 

[kioras]

The key looks to be that they are not building enough troops.

Ans the other thing is how they do promotions, human players will often do combat 1 and then orc killing, ai will not do that. Those 2 promotions allow units to be proactive on defense, saving many improvements instead of losing them

 

[Sarisin]

The key looks to be that they are not building enough troops.

Ans the other thing is how they do promotions, human players will often do combat 1 and then orc killing, ai will not do that. Those 2 promotions allow units to be proactive on defense, saving many improvements instead of losing them

I think that is a good point about the Orcish promotion, but your first point says it all. It doesn't matter how many promotions a single Warrior has defending a city against a stack of barbs. I have had some rather large stacks attack my cities, and I needed at least 4-5 defenders.

I'm always amazed how AI civs and their economies can grow (let alone expand) when their improvements are always wiped out by barbs.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

in my last game (the first time I tried Labruscum without using advanced starts), my units started within barbarian territory. 20 or 30 turns latter, Acheron appeared about 4 tiles from my only city, so I quit. I was playing as elves, and all the tiles around both cities were heavily forested (and as soon as Acheron appeared, he shot a meteor at my scout, and burned down the first forest tile).

Edit: no, I don't have the save. I've stared 2 games since then

 

[vorshlumpf]

I don't suppose you have the initial autosave for that game, do you?

 

[Vittra]

I'm in the middle of a game as Basium on a huge inland sea that started with 20 civs. Raging barbs, aggressive AI, living world, double bonuses, double counter, no lairs were the settings.

As of right now, the civ I started as (Beeri Brawl) just recently got destroyed by barbarians even with my attempt to help him. Just before that, in a ten turn period, falamar, both tebryn arbandi and os-gabella, both alexis and flauros, rhoanna, were also destroyed by barbs.

That doesn't even include the people who were killed by barbs before that slaughterfest.

Hyborem doesn't seem to be doing anything militarily, and oddly I keep getting forced into peace with him occasionally.

 

[Sarisin]

... The raging bards option ramped up the difficulty of the first hundred turns, ....

I had to smile when I read this.

I know it is just a typo, but the thought of a stack of angry old guys with parchment shields wielding quill pens as weapons approaching my capital city sure is scary.

 

[Blackclove]

Raging bards would be pretty dangerous actually - imagine the flip rate.

Just to give an update on the game that started this whole thread, I've played a bunch more turns and now have Groves and hence Druids. Pentarch seems to have blinked; the armageddon counter has stopped at 42, giving us breathing room to get Life magic and start beating back the hell terrain.

I decided to go after the barbarian lich. I built a huge stack of doom to attack the lichlord, containing Gilden the elven archer (fully promoted), the Baron (not very highly promoted), Bambur (super-promoted), several macemen and Kilmorph soldiers, two druids and their treants, and a priest of Kilmorph with spiritual hammer. More importantly, I had Moe the Hill Giant to bombard the walls.

We approached the gates of the city and lay siege. Every turn the lich was summoning two earth elementals, but I kept the druids casting entangle to avoid any serious counterattacks. The heroes could kill elementals if they dared to step out of the city. After the walls were down, my army charged in and attacked. We crushed four elementals, four orcish axemen, a wolf rider, and a chariot. Most of my supporting army was destroyed, but much to my amazement, no heroes had died; Moe even won a 21% attack on the chariot! I had lost one of my valuable druids, but the moment of truth was upon us -- Gilden Silveric, Elf Hero, had only to attack the lich and slay him... he charged and... retreated, too afraid to attack! AAAH!

The next turn we realized we would never be able to survive. Two more elementals had shown up and one had attacked Gilden, who lived but was wounded. The other killed Moe. We ran as fast as we could, summoning a treant who died the next turn, but Gilden, Bambur and the Baron had escaped to fight another day, along with my last druid.

Seething, we set about rebuilding. Without Moe, we knew if we were to kill the lich we would need to do it quickly. Fortunately, the Baron was up to movement of 4, and my two other druids had arrived, along with other reinforcements from the rear. Several years later, we marched again, with the baron leading the charge. Surprise was our weapon. Our fastest units charged the city, with the Baron attacking to kill the only defender besides the lich. The rest of the heroes attacked next turn, killing the two elementals. My druids were too afraid to attack, but luck was in our favor -- Gilden attacked and gave his life, but it was enough damage that the Baron, even wounded, could take the city.

A major turning point had passed. We claimed more barbarian cities, and suddenly turned on the clan, taking many of their weakly-defended cities and spreading the Runes of Kilmorph. That's where we stand; only the dragon remains on our continent as a serious enemy.

Pentarch better beware.