Uncommonly Good: A Story of Elves

[Mardoc]

Quiet in here, just looking to promote some discussion. Clearly I need to make a few more silly posts.

I'll bite - why is the Fish site the clear winner for workboat scouting? I would have thought that the cotton/pigs and the Remnants sites would both also be best as coastal - at least the Remnants with that tasty clam, but the cotton site will have trouble filling a 2nd ring without overlapping the capital or being coastal. Both of those would do a much better job of containing the Sheaim. Whereas there's nothing competing for the north where the Fish are but bears and spiders.

Mostly I keep waiting for the "substantial post to come shortly" before I comment, though

Also, once I get the PBEM8 map to a first draft stage, please come help balance it.

Yeah, I was looking at dotmap possibilities and I just see a lot of...food. Yeah...

And this is why we're going Education right after Mysticism . Hunting can be a good tech for happiness if we're lucky with bears and such - make that bear dance for all eternity in recompense for Bahamet II.

[Gaspar]

I'll bite - why is the Fish site the clear winner for workboat scouting? I would have thought that the cotton/pigs and the Remnants sites would both also be best as coastal - at least the Remnants with that tasty clam, but the cotton site will have trouble filling a 2nd ring without overlapping the capital or being coastal. Both of those would do a much better job of containing the Sheaim. Whereas there's nothing competing for the north where the Fish are but bears and spiders.

Mostly I keep waiting for the "substantial post to come shortly" before I comment, though

Fair enough - I keep getting distracted. As far as coastal or not, yeah, the Remnants site probably just makes sense for city 2. I'd feel a bit better about that if there weren't a lizard spawning ruins right there. Will need a minimum of a 3 warrior escort and we'll have to camp a unit on it or pop it right away. Also pretty much no forests there either. Still, the Remnants + Clams alone will make it a solid production site. It'll be a 5H tile at Education, plus the higher happy cap for the site. Maybe we should balance our lack of happiness resources by only settling cities with Unique Features in the BFC.

The downside of course is that I prefer the first ring to be just that, a ring grown organically out of the capital's borders. Settling the RoP site means the two sites won't be connected by culture, and we'll have to settle a foodless in between spot to connect them. That's less of an issue once we're running FoL and have some blooming priests, but it does mean that linking site will always grow poorly. This all assumes we're not going to be able to settle the Pyre site without fist-fighting Nicolae for it.

The real trick? The best spot for the city in my estimation is actually *on* the ruins. I should have had Cheech pop it moons ago when he had the chance.

Also, once I get the PBEM8 map to a first draft stage, please come help balance it.

Was planning on it.

And this is why we're going Education right after Mysticism . Hunting can be a good tech for happiness if we're lucky with bears and such - make that bear dance for all eternity in recompense for Bahamet II.

Agreed, though ultimately, neither of these factors are as good as, say, some wines or incense at the capital, to speak nothing of gems. I guess technically we had gold at the original cap, but jungled gold doesn't really qualify even as interesting decision for elves - beelining BW is just a bad choice in almost all situations.

[Gaspar]

And Rip van Rawkking Goodguy has finally sent along the save, so we have exciting turn number 22. Hold onto your seats, friends, sure to be non-stop action here.

Rawkking gained 19 points (land + pop?) Nicolae gained 17 (land?) and Brain gained 5 (pop). We surged into the lead with 2nd ring land points plus a pop. OMG WE'RE WINNING!!!!1111

Those who normally follow my threads will note that I don't normally pay anything remotely close to this much attention to the "C&D." I put that in quotes, because its not really C&D so much as idle speculation. The question is, why am I doing it here? Well, its simple: Early game FFH2 is only interesting if you're under attack from barbs. Otherwise on the fun scale: Watching paint dry >> Early game FFH2. So, yeah.

I sent my new warrior, now re-christened Sacrificial Lamb towards the coast in the hopes of popping a dungeon, getting a wraith and making things more interesting. Losing is fun, right? Here he is, hangin' with the pigs:



The capital still has one size before it reaches happy cap, but I'm really in no rush to get there, so I'm working the only available commerce tiles, 1F1H1C to get Mysticism in ever so slightly faster. 9 turns at current tech rate. I'm going to probably be working a bunch of garbage like that when not training settlers/workers until Education comes in, as commerce is definitely a greater limiting factor than food at this point. Here's a shot of that sad tile configuration:



Here's the EOT demos. Nothing all that interesting, though I shudder for the neighbor of whomever has 42k soldier points, as Mardoc and I discussed in the chat up there.



I've got a dotmap post coming later on.

[NobleHelium]

42k? That has to be a dwarf/lizardman event. Maybe like two of them.

Anyway, I thought about the Remnants site. Long term it would be a strong site obviously, and we definitely want it. But really all it gets is production, which we don't really need right now, since we'd only be able to use it for a fast Elder Council and then warrior spam. And really, it's way too far away. We'd be basically managing two isolated city-states. I think a coastal site is good though, for the annoying reason that coastal tiles are two commerce and do not require worker turns. I think that is why you say the fish site is our best bet, and I mostly agree. It gets corn which we can improve without researching AH, and we can get a work boat out while still growing. And we popped Fishing from a hut, right? See, that wasn't so useless after all.

The alternative is a coastal placement near the cotton. This has the advantage of being able to work coast tiles as well, but we'd either have to slow grow on the cotton or research AH. So yes, I'm in agreement that the fish spot is the best out of our really crappy options. The one advantage the cotton or Remnants spots gets over the fish spot is the ease of getting a trade route for two additional commerce. In fact, both would already be connected since we have Fishing for river routes, and both river systems are in fact one system in terms of trade routes, because they both border the same tile (the Tomb of Sucellus tile), and trade route is calculated by tile and not by edge.

[Ravus Sol]

I completely forgot that you guys popped fishing way back on turn 2! That does make it possible for an epic voyage of a lone workboat around the world...

[Gaspar]

I completely forgot that you guys popped fishing way back on turn 2! That does make it possible for an epic voyage of a lone workboat around the world...

Possible, but unlikely. Fishing was probably an extra fortuitous hut pop, since there's pretty much zero chance we'd have been able to research it anytime early and we're going to have to plant like its BTS with the seafood in the area.

Speaking of which, I bring you the first in a new series...





So, its T22, which has to be about the latest I've ever started a dotmap. Of course, I don't usually dotmap my SP games, and this is my first FFH MP game, so... yeah, I guess its not surprising after all. Anyway, we'll split this into two segments. First, the west:



Red Dot is the Remnants site. It's probably the optimal second city location, except that the reason its a circle instead of a filled dot is because there is a ruins currently on the tile, no doubt manned by a Lizardman or two. That makes settling there tricky, as it we'll need to take out that Lizard and pop the ruins before settling. I suppose that means I should probably just churn out another three warriors and head there next. You'll also notice the barrow NNW of the potential city center. Ravus certainly gave us a trade off - a powerful unique feature, but we're going to have to work to work it. I'd rather have had Yggdrassil, but RoP is probably the second best Unique Feature to settle near. The city gets fed with clams and cows, gets marble, has plenty of flatland for farmage if that's your thing, and gets 4 additional hills which can be mined. Absolute powerhouse of a city once all the requisite techs are in, we get the baddies cleared, and get some trees planted. Thats a lot of steps between now and powerhouse, however.

Between the capital and Red Dot, the Orange/Yellow conundrum. Orange Dot is a crap filler city if I ever saw one. It gets no food, a single Ivory resource, and a ton of jungled tiles. Still, there's enough riverside land to farm for sustenance pre-Ancient Foresting, and plenty of hills to work off for balanced production. It will poor early, mediocre late.

Yellow Dot, on the other hand, has a lot more going for it. It also gets Bananas and the Pyre of the Seraphic, giving us a source of fire mana, which is likely to be our favored form of collateral if we use mages for collateral. The problem here is 3-fold. First, we don't know what if anything is in 4 of the 5 tiles of fog which would be in BFC. We can guess jungle, but we don't actually know. Second, this city gets absolutely nothing to start with. While the orange city gets 4 tiles of riverside grassland, 1 plains grassland and a pair of grassland hills to work with, yellow gets 1 riverside grassland tile and 1 grassland hill. Everything else needs to be chopped or burnt. So this city will be horrible before BW, but pretty solid late. There's also the Sheaim factor, as the Pyre and the Banana are actually closer to their capital than ours.

That last bit makes these a priority settle. While the land in the north is far lusher and elf-like than that of the south, we need to seal a border between us and Nicolae. I think these two probably have to be the first two we settler, and when we do the north part of this series, I think a city east of the capital probably has to take priority over the north. We can backfill to our hearts content, nobody's getting through Spiders and Mountains and Bears (Oh my!) to settle our backlines, but this area in the south is very much contested. As said earlier, leaving this area to Nicolae so he can improve it and then we can Bloom it later might make more sense than any other course of action. We might have to talk turkey about an offensive vs the Sheaim quite soon, because a lot of our strengths on defense are negated on offense.

Anyway, chapter one of Adventures in Dotmapping is in the books. I'll leave it for thoughts from the team before moving on to part two, the north. Probably be a while before part three, Sheaim-lands.

[Man Behind the Mask]

I’m back, and horrified to find that one of the other threads has more than half the number of posts that we do. General chat first, before dotmapping in another post to help with that issue. Time to get quoting, and not just the numerous times Gaspar has promised something substantial “later”!

**

...it's looking like Cultists will do an excellent job of controlling access to our part of the continent from the west.

Mardoc’s call on the value of OO for sealing off a private landmass is becoming even more prescient with the suggestion of seaside settling plans.

**

You've played/lurked more of these than me, whats a reasonable time for a second city? my internal timer tells me i should be training a settler

Got some info gathered at the same time as I was looking at T50 tech rates. Sample of 19 civs from PBEMs 2, 3 & 5: at Turn 50 there was only one civ who had three cities, and they also had the biggest second city (size 5); at the opposite end, there were four who were still on one city; and, second cities were generally size 2-4. So the internal timer was mostly right, but FFH evidence suggests there’s still some time before you’re behind the norm.

**

Easy come, easy go.

Very sad to see the death of Bahamet. For all his dancing prowess, maybe he should have just fortified on a forested hill and waited for the bear to come to him. We’ll never know.

**

Nicolae’s Email

I’ve already commented on the map info. If this is some kind of ring/disc/donut arrangement, then a Remnants site on the coast becomes more attractive to control the central sea.

There might be a levelled spider immediately south of our capital. The Sheaim scout is visible on the minimap Turn 14, but then isn’t heard from again. I’m surprised that the lizard “moved away” from their city, but if that baddy is also lurking to the south then that points us away from a city near the Pyre.

That could partially explain why he's been playing hammer heavy food poor, too, especially if he hasn't dared to keep his worker in the countryside.

Pointing against this is the fact rival worst GNP is 15. I suspect he got the worker out to at least improve the wines tile he mentioned in his first email. It’s a little disappointing that his Pop2 capital is only teching 2bpt slower than our pop5, and his resource bonus is on his expected tech beeline.

**

And finally, two pieces of meta-gaming thought to add to the possible discussions:
Kyan is taking this seriously enough that he wanted to pull out of his BTS PBEM. Based on his civ and skill, that is a bit of a concern. If I was a betting man, I’d say the C&D points to the Balseraphs as being on the opposite coast of the continent, so we may have to wait a long time for contact, and won’t be able to do much to influence their progress.
FFH2PBEM 8 has been set up as no huts/lairs etc. While I’d like to hope that our Fishing tech and now-dead adventurer were the tipping point in terms of randomness, I suspect that other crazy unbalancing stuff has been going on out there.

[Gaspar]

And finally, two pieces of meta-gaming thought to add to the possible discussions:
Kyan is taking this seriously enough that he wanted to pull out of his BTS PBEM. Based on his civ and skill, that is a bit of a concern. If I was a betting man, I’d say the C&D points to the Balseraphs as being on the opposite coast of the continent, so we may have to wait a long time for contact, and won’t be able to do much to influence their progress.
FFH2PBEM 8 has been set up as no huts/lairs etc. While I’d like to hope that our Fishing tech and now-dead adventurer were the tipping point in terms of randomness, I suspect that other crazy unbalancing stuff has been going on out there.

Lot of good stuff here, but I just wanted to touch on the last two points.

Kyan is hyper-competitive. I suspected from the outset he didn't have the stomach for PBEM17 because all the players there were his equal or better. What's gone on since makes it pretty obvious he hasn't thrown in any towels. Still, he was always going to be the biggest threat, he's too good at Civ not to be considered that. Still, this is part of why I want earlier contact. He's just going to make the diplo puppet-strings dance if we're not wading in the same pool.

On crazy stuff, well someone's on 42k soldier points, that's crazy. And someone's already gotten a pair of techs from huts/lairs whatever. To me, you shouldn't turn this stuff off, fair or not, its a huge part of what makes FFH2, FFH2. If we think its fun to watch someone (not us) fight off a mistform, its also got to be ok when they pop CoL from a dungeon. I'm suspecting I'm in the minority here, but that's my feeling. If you want a more finely balanced game, the BTS forum in northwards.

My gut tells me we'll see less and less unique features, Acheron's, Orthuses, Lairs, Barrows, Ruins and Unique Features as time goes on as a community. I hope I'm wrong, though.

[Mardoc]

Red Dot is the Remnants site. It's probably the optimal second city location, except that the reason its a circle instead of a filled dot is because there is a ruins currently on the tile, no doubt manned by a Lizardman or two. That makes settling there tricky, as it we'll need to take out that Lizard and pop the ruins before settling.

I suppose that means I should probably just churn out another three warriors and head there next. You'll also notice the barrow NNW of the potential city center. Ravus certainly gave us a trade off - a powerful unique feature, but we're going to have to work to work it. I'd rather have had Yggdrassil, but RoP is probably the second best Unique Feature to settle near. The city gets fed with clams and cows, gets marble, has plenty of flatland for farmage if that's your thing, and gets 4 additional hills which can be mined. Absolute powerhouse of a city once all the requisite techs are in, we get the baddies cleared, and get some trees planted. Thats a lot of steps between now and powerhouse, however.

Agreed, on all counts. If you'd rather just play defense/XP farm, you could move it one north. Remember, Lizardmen get a -20% Str when attacking cities and Warriors a +25%, adding up to more security. 1N is weaker, as it trades grassland and riverside land for peaks and plains hills, but it would found earlier.

Frankly, I don't think I'd go with only 3 warriors - that should be enough if the ruins is only guarded by one lizard, but if there are two, we'd have issues.

Between the capital and Red Dot, the Orange/Yellow conundrum. Orange Dot is a crap filler city if I ever saw one. It gets no food, a single Ivory resource, and a ton of jungled tiles. Still, there's enough riverside land to farm for sustenance pre-Ancient Foresting, and plenty of hills to work off for balanced production. It will poor early, mediocre late.

Yes. With the caveat that as Elves, given enough time, anything can be a strong site. Ancient Forest Towns everywhere adds up to quite a bit of strength. It's just the question of how long we're willing to wait for the site to be worthwhile.

Which...makes it unfortunate that this probably has to be one of our early sites. I agree on the value for territory claiming and security of the site, but man is it going to suck until we've got some axes and some Priests of Leaves to wrangle the jungle into forest.

Yellow Dot, on the other hand, has a lot more going for it. It also gets Bananas and the Pyre of the Seraphic, giving us a source of fire mana, which is likely to be our favored form of collateral if we use mages for collateral. The problem here is 3-fold. First, we don't know what if anything is in 4 of the 5 tiles of fog which would be in BFC. We can guess jungle, but we don't actually know. Second, this city gets absolutely nothing to start with. While the orange city gets 4 tiles of riverside grassland, 1 plains grassland and a pair of grassland hills to work with, yellow gets 1 riverside grassland tile and 1 grassland hill. Everything else needs to be chopped or burnt. So this city will be horrible before BW, but pretty solid late. There's also the Sheaim factor, as the Pyre and the Banana are actually closer to their capital than ours.

Yeah, and of course we don't have the ability to chop or burn anything at all just yet, and won't for quite some time. On the other hand - well, 7 workable tiles ought to be enough for a while. By the time we have the happiness cap raised enough to want to grow, we probably will have jungle removal tech.

Along those lines - I'm not all that convinced that Yellow is in fact better than Orange - about all it has that Orange doesn't is the bananas and the fog. We don't necessarily want the Pyre in BFC, so long as it's inside our culture somehow; we're Creative, so unless Nicolae sticks it in his BFC at about the same time we do we've got a good chance to take it and keep it for a long time. And we're not expecting him to, ahem, stick around for a long time. A prior claim and some culture built up there ought to let us keep it long enough, I would think.

But frankly, I expect Priests of Leaves to come in about the same time as jungle clearing tech, so we can turn either site into a pretty decent city at about the same time. With Orange contributing at least something before that.

That last bit makes these a priority settle. While the land in the north is far lusher and elf-like than that of the south, we need to seal a border between us and Nicolae. I think these two probably have to be the first two we settler, and when we do the north part of this series, I think a city east of the capital probably has to take priority over the north. We can backfill to our hearts content, nobody's getting through Spiders and Mountains and Bears (Oh my!) to settle our backlines, but this area in the south is very much contested. As said earlier, leaving this area to Nicolae so he can improve it and then we can Bloom it later might make more sense than any other course of action. We might have to talk turkey about an offensive vs the Sheaim quite soon, because a lot of our strengths on defense are negated on offense.

Anyway, chapter one of Adventures in Dotmapping is in the books. I'll leave it for thoughts from the team before moving on to part two, the north. Probably be a while before part three, Sheaim-lands.

Yeah, overall I agree. This is where the long NAP will come in handy , we can afford somewhat suboptimal cities to seal him off, confident that we don't need a short-term powerhouse civ, we can instead grow well beyond him.

Anyway, back to mapmaking for PBEM8. I should have the map up today sometime for initial comments.

[Man Behind the Mask]

Good to see that we’re back to episodic content, with poorly photoshopped title banners. That means I go back into stream of consciousness, in the hopes that somebody can pick something useful out of the ramblings. Mardoc beat me to commenting with this post mostly written, so there may already be better ideas than those presented here.

Dotmapping with elves presents some different challenges to BTS because: 1. You can theoretically add 1F to every tile by the late game (and 1H where there’s no forest); 2 The health/happiness (= big cities) gleaned from hugging trees makes overlap less desirable than usual; and 3. This is FFH so you want sites to be fairly defensible.

I’m glad you’ve broken the city placement process down into bitesize parts, because hitting everything at once would have been a bit painful. Even now, I’m looking at what you’ve got and struggling to come up with a helpful repsonse. One big unanswered question is what lies south of the capital. If it’s more peaks we need to work around, then it would be good to know sooner. Similarly, I still yearn for something interesting in the sea east of the gold. Maybe the next warrior can satisfy my curiosity without risking his life?

I think it’s clear that there are two good city sites in the screenshot. One has Ivory, bananas, a unique mana feature, and some grassland tiles (but is riddled with jungle). The other has cow, Remnants and marble, plus some other stuff depending on where you put the city. What I’m most wrestling with is what to do with all the other tiles that are not blatantly part of a nice city. The biggest issue here is we’re only playing with a thin corridor between the mountain range (including a pile of plains hills) and the jungle. I note that Gaspar’s map subtly sidesteps the issue of making something workable to the north of the two “dots”. I’m going to dodge that too

You’re map fits neatly together, and trades one outstanding site for a fairly mediocre one in between. Pyre third ring means we’ll probably lose it to a concerted effort, but the banana could be taken by another city south of the capital. While it’s difficult to criticize this with what we’ve got, there are some things I don’t like. I’m not happy about the TWO barb spawns at potentially our second site. I’m uncomfortable that neither spot is on a hill, but have hills adjacent. I don’t like that they are in a straight line presenting a potentially wide front to our possible enemy.

I’ve had to draw over your map for my more speculative efforts, so please excuse the many overlapping lines. Here is a way to go if we wanted to be a little aggressive in boxing in Nicolae. Three cities on hills, including a good old-fashioned “pink” that is a bit of a stretch. The Remnants purple site moves a little closer and includes some more green riverside for farms/commerce. The pigs/clams turquoise site seals the border and gets us something on that coast. Pink dot is frustratingly a little far away from the capital, but does claim the hill, leave the most workable tiles pre-jungle-removal, and present a focal point for any Sheaim attack. The big downside with this arrangement is the dead space along the river. Pink could move to yellow (maybe better?) or N or NE to fit with purple, but loses the hill.



I’m not convinced I’ve done any better, but this way you can feel more confident about why you’re right.