Just some comments after a few nights of gaming. Playing direct connect with a friend, playing random each game. He had a good early game with Khazad (sp, whoever the dwarves are), so he picked them each game after one of the early ones.
Using a small pangaea map with 5 civs, prince difficulty after a few noble starts, smartmap generation.
He's more experienced in Civ4 than me, due to playing it a bit more over the last year than I did, though both of us have played tons of Civ over the years.
In any case, here's how it went:
Early game - died to animals. Died to orcs. Died to goblins. Spiders, Giants. Lost cities, settlers, scouts, warriors, hunters, &c &c
So we tried that again, and still died horribly - a large number of forests meant that even playing hyper cautiously (advance one space into open terrain with a 2 move unit, then move back if an enemy was spotted), and protecting units that were to fight (trying for forested hills behind rivers all the time
) we still lost many, many units to early exploration (or even travel to settle a new spot!)
In combination with the very slow rate of early tech and buildup (usually ~50 turns before we'd even get a second city + worker out), this made for a fairly frustrating learning experience. Poking around on the forums for some info helped out a bit, and ratcheting up the caution level even higher allowed us to survive (mostly) the early game hordes of beasts and orcs, but what happened after we passed that hurdle was that one of the two of us would still suffer misfortune at the hands of barbarians or start location, and it would become clear after 100-150 turns that we'd have to restart.
I don't mind the slower tech rate in general, but it has a few annoying side effects, particularly in concert with the nasty early barbarians/animals. For one, goody huts that provide techs gave a HUGE advantage to the player who found even one key tech early on, and if one of us got multiples, he'd usually shoot out well into the lead. The other is that losing a settler (or, more rarely, a worker) can be really painful during the early stages of the game.
The other annoying issue was that the early game played out mostly the same each time, so it started to turn into 50-100 turns of tedium as we waited to get into a more interesting midgame, carefully maneuvering our forces and patiently waiting for techs to develop our fledgling cities.
Repeating that process several times a night was getting pretty tiresome, so our next game(s), we're probably going to up the speed to Fast.
Neither of us particularly wants to due the accelerated game, but both of us would like to actually check out the mid and late game units
In any case, I'll update this periodically with our experiences. We're both new players, so perhaps the feedback might be useful.
--
Great work on the tooltips/civopedia (even unfinished as it is)/unit upgrade info, there's plenty of raw data presentation built into the game, which is nice.
It'd be nice if the info (and then some) from the Civs manual in this forum went into the game. There were a LOT of very important tips there that are not at all apparent in-game with each Civ, and some of them were absolutely critical for picking out an appropriate early game buildup strategy.
Somewhere down the line, a few tutorials and a few sample mini-scenarios that explore the different aspects of FFH would be very welcome for new players. Demonstrating civ differences, religious differences, spells, animal capturing, and so on. There's a lot to soak in, and finding it scattered about in various disparate threads is a bit offputting. I'd imagine the wiki will fulfill a good portion of this eventually, but it'd be nice to have some sort of introduction built into the game, to ease the transition - there's a lot of game here!
More as we play more
Using a small pangaea map with 5 civs, prince difficulty after a few noble starts, smartmap generation.
He's more experienced in Civ4 than me, due to playing it a bit more over the last year than I did, though both of us have played tons of Civ over the years.
In any case, here's how it went:
Early game - died to animals. Died to orcs. Died to goblins. Spiders, Giants. Lost cities, settlers, scouts, warriors, hunters, &c &c
So we tried that again, and still died horribly - a large number of forests meant that even playing hyper cautiously (advance one space into open terrain with a 2 move unit, then move back if an enemy was spotted), and protecting units that were to fight (trying for forested hills behind rivers all the time
) we still lost many, many units to early exploration (or even travel to settle a new spot!)In combination with the very slow rate of early tech and buildup (usually ~50 turns before we'd even get a second city + worker out), this made for a fairly frustrating learning experience. Poking around on the forums for some info helped out a bit, and ratcheting up the caution level even higher allowed us to survive (mostly) the early game hordes of beasts and orcs, but what happened after we passed that hurdle was that one of the two of us would still suffer misfortune at the hands of barbarians or start location, and it would become clear after 100-150 turns that we'd have to restart.
I don't mind the slower tech rate in general, but it has a few annoying side effects, particularly in concert with the nasty early barbarians/animals. For one, goody huts that provide techs gave a HUGE advantage to the player who found even one key tech early on, and if one of us got multiples, he'd usually shoot out well into the lead. The other is that losing a settler (or, more rarely, a worker) can be really painful during the early stages of the game.
The other annoying issue was that the early game played out mostly the same each time, so it started to turn into 50-100 turns of tedium as we waited to get into a more interesting midgame, carefully maneuvering our forces and patiently waiting for techs to develop our fledgling cities.
Repeating that process several times a night was getting pretty tiresome, so our next game(s), we're probably going to up the speed to Fast.
Neither of us particularly wants to due the accelerated game, but both of us would like to actually check out the mid and late game units
In any case, I'll update this periodically with our experiences. We're both new players, so perhaps the feedback might be useful.
--
Great work on the tooltips/civopedia (even unfinished as it is)/unit upgrade info, there's plenty of raw data presentation built into the game, which is nice.
It'd be nice if the info (and then some) from the Civs manual in this forum went into the game. There were a LOT of very important tips there that are not at all apparent in-game with each Civ, and some of them were absolutely critical for picking out an appropriate early game buildup strategy.
Somewhere down the line, a few tutorials and a few sample mini-scenarios that explore the different aspects of FFH would be very welcome for new players. Demonstrating civ differences, religious differences, spells, animal capturing, and so on. There's a lot to soak in, and finding it scattered about in various disparate threads is a bit offputting. I'd imagine the wiki will fulfill a good portion of this eventually, but it'd be nice to have some sort of introduction built into the game, to ease the transition - there's a lot of game here!
More as we play more
I know I like the variety, and I'm a sucker for fantasy mods for civ (I've probably played them more than the base game over the years), and this one has quite a beat of meat on it, with the potential for even more depth down the road.
