What race do you play and why?

[CitizenSnips]

The Malakim are the first race of my heart. I can't play those mods though where they auto-desertify their surroundings.

 

[zonk]

I've just started playing FfH as well -- and just wanted to toss out a big THANK YOU to everyone that put in what looks to have been a monumental amount of work... after the V disappointment, discovering FfH has gone a long way towards satiating my new Civ needs.

I read through the whole 14 page thread on how to play different races, and I've cheated my way through a long game to get a handle on the mechanics -- but now I'm looking for a race to take for a real test drive. I played my 'tutorial' as the Elohim - mainly because I could capture opposing cites and get a bit of a taste of multiple races.

I generally like to play as a builder - nothing makes me happier than to occupy a fertile valley with a couple of defensible choke points, plentiful resources, and then set about building super cities, while a few strong stacks are out and about exploring and picking fights of opportunity, whether with barbarians or even smaller Civs that don't pose an immediate invasion threat. The Erebus map script, in fact, has been quite a find in and of itself -- I love the mountain ranges and killing valleys that result.

I've been thinking about playing as the Kuriotates -- they seem born to play as builders (though - 3 cites? Does that scale to map size? I usually play huge maps and like 5 to 7 super cities)... Or is there another race best suited for this style of play?

 

[Pickly]

Here's a thread describing some builder civilizations:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=391710

Has enough information to get you started.

 

[Jarrema]

Number of Kurio's cities scales with map size, so on huge maps you will get more than 3 (5? 6? I do not play large maps)

 

[Doug Piranha]

The Calabim make a very good builder civ, with all their free hammers from the Governor's Manor, plus the ability to build productive cities in marginal terrain thanks to their Breeding Pits.

 

[Goodwill]

Elves (ljosofar and svaltafar) and lizards (mazatl) can support cities of enormous population sizes with forest happiness (elves+fellowship of leaves) or jungles (lizardmen). My current mazatl game has many cities with populations in the fifties for instance, and no unhappiness. Also consider unyielding order from tier three order priests giving four cities no unhappiness (eight if you have confessors upgraded to druids). With sidar you can permanently convert level six units into city specialists, but I prefer giant population cities for this instead and assigning citizens. More flexibility, doesn't cost you good units, and you get way more specialists. Plus you can pop great people like crazy this way anyway. Sidar are great late game though when they have enough wonders to pop fresh units with high exp through production, since from there on specialists aren't costing happiness- they're free. My favorite reason for playing kuriorates is for the airships actually, though if its a mod with austrin kurio airships get blown away by individual flying units instead. Anyway my vote for favorite builder is mazatl though I don't think they're in vanilla ffh.

 

[Goodwill]

Also come to think of it, if you try out mods, Austrin are an" interesting" builder civ. Their recon units can cast a found city spell that doesn't consume the unit. The "settler" needs to be built each time in a city before the ability is enabled. If you upgrade highlanders (axemen) to trackers then the trackers can fly all over the world settling new cities as they go, no astronomy needed to cross ocean. Plus flying units have lots of military advantages. If that wasn't interesting enough, you can do city swaps, sending all of a city's existing buildings to a new city. A couple high production cities can literally churn out buildings for all the other ones.