Varn of the Illians - Serdoa and WK playing it cool

[WarriorKnight]

With disabling them you mean the spell Blind?

Blind is one of the ones I meant, but it could also include Rust, Dispel, Slow etc. Hit them with collateral and disabling spells, then send in summons and normal units, that's the main method for magic focused civs.

The fear I have is that even his 4 Str units will be fast enough to run around my units. Ice Eles are fine, but won't help to catch them if they simpy run away. Guess I will have to take much more time to carefully analyze potential paths for them and find small spaces to hold them back.

Well Priests are 2 movements, and Ice Elemental summons have another one for three. If your defending, you also get the advantage of roads. Your right though that you'll need to analyze the situation carefully if it ever comes up.

I am not sure saving Stasis for an attack is worth it. Sure Stasis coupled with our attack could potentially wreck someone. On the other hand, not having them get their first worker or tech before T20 seems to be quite a strong play as well - probably even stronger then using it on an attack. It pretty much should guarantee that we have the strongest economy for some time. Of course we do have to devote some hammers to the PoW, but apart from that we don't need to research anything we wouldn't research anyway. I am not sure but I feel that if we can leverage this spell we should at least be better able to defend ourselves against PZ-rushes, Hippus-rushes, CoE-rushes or Grigori-rushes (). Tbh I think hurting everyone a bit is better in the long run then hurting one civ massively.

The main advantage of saving it until you attack is that they can't create any units in response, and given that everyone builds/slaves/buys as many units as possible when they're losing a war makes it that much easier to attack. If your goal is to hurt everyone as much as possible then yes firing it early is the best thing you can do, but is it the best for you? Your still going to have 14 turns over everyone else regardless of when you fire it, the question is how are you going to best use it to your advantage?

I guess I thought about Gibbon simply because we get several techs we need for him (and AV) pretty surely anyway so it seemed to make sense. Though having to keep CoE with a spiritual leader is bad. Guess I'll let this idea die.

You should take some time to think a bit about what religion(s) you want to get this game. Since your SPI, you can afford to switch around a lot and pick up several different benefits of the different religions. Don't let beaker costs distract you, most of the religion techs are fairly cheap mid-game and most of the religions are often worth getting at some point.

[uberfish]

Speaking of bulbing: In my SP-games I realized that I had to get 67 GPP for my first great person but the second one showed 201 GPP. I thought that should be 134 and was wondering, is that changed in FFH and I did never notice it or did I stumble upon a bug?

It's changed, the formula is 67(2n-1) for quick speed

[Serdoa]

Ellimist/Mist - Varn Gosam of the Sidar

[COLOR="Grey"]Worldspell

"Into the Mist"[/COLOR] Makes all Sidar units invisible. I am not sure if this invisible units can be seen via Hawks but I think it can. So, Hunting should not be left unteched but Hawks are quite good anyway, so even that it won't be our first tech it will probably be teched when Sidar do have enough forces to make the spell worthwhile to cast.

[COLOR="grey"]Hero

Rathus Denmora[/COLOR] Available at Poisons, this hero costs 120 hammers, has 5 str, 2 Move and is basically a better version of a Sidar Ghost (their assassin replacement). It also seems to be made to kill off Heroes as it starts with the Nether Blade, equipment which gives +2 Death Combat and +80% vs. Heroes.


Unique Units

Divided Soul: A Hunter replacement which does have a special ability called "Sewer Soul". Using this creates an Severed Soul which is an invisible summon. This summon can use the ability "Call Form", teleporting the caster who created it onto its tile, killing the summon off in the process. So, basically you can walk into unknown land and if nothing fearsome is nearby, you can teleport yourself to that tile. I wonder if you could somehow abuse that to attack with some Hunters without giving the other one the possibility to react as he doesn't even sees you coming? Probably not and so more or less gimmicky.

Ghost: Assassins which can go invisible at will. I haven't tested if they can do that several times from the description in the Civilopedia though, I would guess they can go invisible every turn as long as they have not attacked that turn. Again, we should have Hawks hopefully when this unit comes into play.


Unique Buildings

Sidar Palace: The Palace provides Spirit, Enchantment and Shadow Mana, giving Adepts access to Courage, Enchanted Blade and Blur. Enchanted Blade is obviously nice for melee units, the other two are at best situational helpful I think.

More importantly, the Palace makes every specialist and settled GP give +1 of its normally mostly produced resource (so +1b for Sages, +1c for Bards), except for Priests which do not get boosted. Still, that is quite strong, the only issue I have is that the techs you need to make the specialist economy work are pretty spaced out in the tech tree and rather hard to come by, especially in a MP-game with so many rushers were simply teching away without military is probably no option.


[COLOR="grey"]Leader:

Varn Gosam (Cre/Spi/Ada)[/COLOR] Probably the strongest leader in the game. I am only not sure what exactly the idea is when pairing him with the Sidar. I guess it is getting Lvl6 units (Cha/Spi Ritualists?) produced as quickly as possible. With 20XP needed as a Cha leader that would mean that one either has to play for some buildings (especially FotT and some layers of the Altar) and use civics tailored to get more xp on his units so that those units start with 12+ xp or that you simply hope for Potency not taking too long to get your disciple or priests to 20xp. Again, it surely can work but you have to get even more techs, several which are not on your way to Taxation, Guilds or Arcane Lore.


All in all I think the Sidar are really interesting and a great civilization and I would have loved to play them. But they also need time to get going and I am not sure that the setup we have gives you 150+ turns before you actually are becoming strong. Though if they can live that long, then the might have a shot at this game.

[Kuro]

IIRC, Into The Mist invisibility cannot be seen by Hawks and disappears once they attack once.

[Serdoa]

Hm, guess I have to look into that and find out who can see through invisibility. Any idea? Rathas maybe?

Anyway, I have thought about how to start best for days now, tested several possibilities in different games with the following settings:

- Standard size
- Flat worldwrap
- Inland Sea maptyp
- Unrestricted Leaders
- No Archeron

I worldbuildered myself starting locations I feel are feasible (whenever I think of Mardoc I think of deserted lands, so mostly those were starting positions I would normally call weak -> only 1 food res, no commerce specials; nothing special but with some good tiles, basically something I feel Mardoc would call lush ) and came to the following conclusions:

1. If the start does have some food resources or riverside flat, non-plains tiles, Agriculture at the start is a given. If that is not the case, and our starts are nearly mirrored, then everything else falls apart. But as stated I assume the map will have some good tiles. Not many probably and certainly nothing I would call lush but whatever.

2. Given the above, teching Calendar next for Agrarianism seems a given as well. We have a happy cap of 6 at the start, if we can get 6 grassland farms down that are 6 "hammers" more each turn if we produce settlers or workers (no tiles start above 3 as output for food+hammers). Which is pretty much all we produce besides warriors at the start.

After that, it either is Ancient Chants -> Myst -> Crafting -> Mining -> Philo if we do have several hills (or more importantly not many plains forests or grassland hill forests) or simply Ancient Chants -> Myst -> Philo.

Alternatively and if we have the right land for it we could go Agri -> Ancient Chants -> Education and lay down cottages like crazy. That would delay the priests for 10-20 turns but the tech afterwards will be much faster. I have tested that with good but not great land and it was strong, especially with a switch to Financial at T70.

This all of course depends heavily on the starting spot. If we start with several Gold and Gems then Agri -> Crafting -> Mining first makes sense. If we only want to get the priests as early as possible then Agriculture and a straight beeline for Philosophy is the quickest route if we have at least a food res. I think that gimps us too much in the long run though, but I will be interested to hear everyones opinion as soon as we know which spot we will start on.

[Mardoc]

Your start:

[Serdoa]

Thanks Mardoc!

Ok, lets see, what do we have? First I do not see anything indicating that we should move (plains hill cap) and I don't think we will get much scouting done before we have to decide where to settle, as the warrior can't move anywhere to reveal more. The scout probably will move onto the hut after we settled, as I see again no point where he could move too to provide more info for settling. Also I somehow doubt that we get a plains hill cap (and the info that this is a small map) if there would be an incentive to move.

So, if we settle in place we get: Riverside grassland wheat, 2 floodplains, 2 riverside grasslands. Thats at least 5 tiles for Agrarianism + Silk with Plantation, so I would say we start with Agri -> Calendar. After that we have to think about if we go for Education. It is not only the question of a stronger economy though, there is another point to think about: We switch at T70 and if we do produce the priests EOT70 or later we could get them Commando (via Raiders) or C1 (via Agg). I am not sure that would be worth it but that depens on how the game evolves and who is how far away from us. I will test that in a worldbuilder-sim, but looking at this start we should be able to get the PoWs into play around T55 (going straight for them). With Education it should be more like T65-70. Will those 10-15 turns make a difference? And is it worth it to have only a so-so economy for it afterwards?

I will test, but right now I don't think going straight for PoWs is worth it. The question is now, is it better to tech to Edu and build cottages or do we forego Edu till we have the priests and try then to tech asap to CoL, switch T70 to Financial and work with Fin Aristofarms till T145? I fear teching to CoL could actually take quite some time though... anyway, enough thoughts for one post.

[WarriorKnight]

That's a fairly decent start. Plains hill cap, Lots of river, 2 floodplains, wheat and silk. I can't think of a decent reason to move anywhere else.

Agri -> Calendar is the obvious starting tech choice. After that, I'd probably head straight for Philosophy as Mysticism is pretty valuable too (also you'll need to be in God King to build the White Hand within a decent time frame).

As for worrying about the economy, Aristofarms will solve everything eventually, but Cartography for City States and Edu for cottages could help keep you afloat if you have troubles (CoL is about the same cost as Edu and Phi). You may not be able to rush at all if the Sheaim or the Hippus are your neighbours, while the Grigori and Clan have decent defenses (if you border the Sidar, definitely rush them if you can).

BTW, I'm fairly certain hawks can see Into the Mist units.

[Serdoa]

Have to go to bed and only played the save quickly but we already got [strike]kinda[/strike] lucky. See for yourself:

edit: image deleted as we restarted

[strike]Yeah indeed, we popped Hunting on T1 from a hut. It is not on our tech-path but please slap me if I therefore call that unfortunate or something similar [/strike]

[Ravus Sol]

Hello

You mind if I ded-lurk this? This has the same set up as the PBEM IV game so I can tell it's going to be a lot of fun.

Your hut luck is terrifying.