[Spoilers] A more civilized age - Arendel of the Ljosalfar (Uberfish)

[uberfish]

Warrior #5 finishes, one warrior will take a quick peek near Pool of Tears if not chased off by the local wildlife, a stack of two will head back down near Sepulcher

Begin worker which will finish in 4 turns at the same time as Education

Existing worker moves once and puts one turn into the Ivory road, first tile to be cottaged will be the Plains Forest

No barbarian sightings yet.

[uberfish]

And we're back in action after the Christmas break

Warrior scouting: The area near Pool of Tears turns out to have a rice special as well as access to the mana node and the ivory, so a decent 5th or 6th city site where the NW green dot in the previous map is. Mist already denied interest in this site, but in the name of both good neighbourliness and for mutual security reasons, I don't want to found my first expansion in the direction of Mist early and flood holy city culture everywhere. I don't want to lose this NW warrior in view of the possible Gargoyle threat so I'm just pulling him back for now to have a 3 warrior garrison. I'll explore to the SW with a stack of 2 which increases the odds of surviving wild animals or at least getting an experienced unit in return for an animal kill.

One tile of the Ivory road is complete.

A bunch of score increases happened including Creative 3rd ring, analysis might follow later.

Ilios 158.
Perpentach 148.
Arendel 147 (5 pop = 36, 35 land = 50, 4 tech = 44, 1 wonder = 17)
Sciz 146
Flauros 143
Mahala 116
Amelia 105.

Impressively (although the information is of little practical value), Mist was able to tell me how many points I was getting from land before I was even credited by the points; apparently the demographics screen updates faster than the score. All very obscure.

[uberfish]

Military:

NW warrior - returned to within cultural borders
SW 2 warriors - fought the lion that was prowling around the SW area, first warrior won and gained 6 xp. I'll promote him to combat I/shock and return him to the capital as a defender.
There are still no hostile barbarians or gargoyles in sight.

Economy:

Finished another road tile
Education + 2nd worker due end of next turn

[Maksim]

SW 2 warriors - fought the lion that was prowling around the SW area, first warrior won and gained 6 xp. I'll promote him to combat I/shock and return him to the capital as a defender.

Why Shock, out of curiosity? I generally tend to promote with simple Combat promotions, as I'm mostly bothered by pesky 2-move Lizardmen, rather than orcish warriors.

Or is this your insurance against the Doviello?

[uberfish]

Why Shock, out of curiosity? I generally tend to promote with simple Combat promotions, as I'm mostly bothered by pesky 2-move Lizardmen, rather than orcish warriors.

Or is this your insurance against the Doviello?

There aren't any lizard ruins around. Partly it's insurance against other players (Doviello obviously, but Calabim could send a few warriors to try and take over Sepulcher site if it turns out to be a good early settle) and partly having a unit with good odds against pillaging barbarian warriors is useful.

[uberfish]

A quiet turn repositioning units. Education and 2nd worker finishes EOT, the first worker is ready to start cottage on the plains forest immediately. In general when there is a decent food surplus around (which is most of the time in FFH) you want to start cottaging on plains first for hammer output.

Power/GNP graphs are holding steady, but increases in rival land area on the demo-screen indicate that several players have founded a second city before I even start my settler. This slow start is due to a combination of starting with 2 scouts, moving around for 2 turns at the beginning, bypassing Calendar/Agrarianism because of the lack of resources, and going for 2 workers before settler to compensate the slow elven work rate.

However, I know that a lot of the land I intend to expand into in the short term won't be contested since I have a formal settling agreement with Mist, an informal one with vampires, and a mountain range between me and Sciz making it inconvenient at best for him to settle SW.

So strategically I want to get hunters after city #2, settle a 6-city core and then look towards producing Priests of Leaves and other military.

[uberfish]

Education research is complete. I decide to take the free revolt to Apprenticeship (+2 XP, -10% unit production rate) now, because if I have to produce any emergency warriors, they might as well start with Combat I for that extra 20% edge. In FFH, you can only revolt every 10 turns as opposed to every 5 in the base game, so taking the revolt early gives me a bit more flexibility later. It will take 10-11 turns to get the first Settler out anyway, after which I can drop Pacifism at any time to produce military units faster.

Anyway, worker #1 arrives in time to build the first cottage, and worker #2 takes one step and builds half a road on the way. The way the Elven forest movement bonus works, 1-move units get charged 0.5 movement points from moving into a forest but 2-move units get charged 1 anyway. So it's still unfortunately necessary to build roads so that the faster units can run from one end of the empire to another.

I needed to give some thought to my road network planning because there are two Raider civs in the game, Perpentach can get it as a random trait, and Malakim have adaptive and can switch to it at any point, so here's the current plan:



(Position of the SW city is still unclear, pending scouting.)

Losing my capital when I've committed to making it my commerce centre with the early Academy strategy is an automatic game loss, since it'll be the best defended location in my empire I might as well make it the transport hub too. The plan here is to be able to reinforce cities from the capital, while making it difficult/impossible for raider units to threaten 2 border cities at once using my own road network.

This city plan will get the following resources:

- all 3 grains (good for the Deruptus Brewery which I'll want to build in my capital as each unique grain gives 10% commerce) and sheep
- ivory, gems, wine, sugar (4 luxuries that require different techs and have the worst possible commerce output for their class... but that's why I went gambling with the Pyre)
- fire mana, 2 open nodes, maybe death mana too (FFH's way of shouting at me to go for Arcane techs in the midgame)
- 8 floodplains

So overall things look decent apart from a lack of natural forestation and commerce specials. A focus on cottages, Aristofarms when the eastern site is settled and getting Priesthood in a timely manner should be the answer to these problems.

[uberfish]

Nothing to report except that power graphs show that Calabim have lost a unit. Apart from that, the graphs have been stable for a while.

I notice there's been some activity in the other player threads, new lurkers I guess?

[uberfish]

Exploring party spotted a hut 5SW of the capital, other than that nothing to report.

Sciz built a new warrior after a long period of no military, suggesting that he's just done with a settler.

[uberfish]

Looks like I will pick up the hut uncontested, also the first cottage is complete. On quick speed, it'll take 6 turns to grow.