Uncommonly Good: A Story of Elves

[Gaspar]

Enough foreshadowing, this is seems like a great time to start a new series:



So, we've discussed at length that the elves are a late game civ, that there's no reasonable reason to run anything other than Guardian of Nature late game, that we're going to need magic for collateral, that we need cottages for commerce. We've spent some time talking about our opponents and how their play will impact us, and how we can maybe hope to work with some of them. While there are still several topics to discuss, it seems to me now is a good time to discuss the primary focus of early game Ljosalfar, staying alive to get the chance to play with those late game toys.

So what tools does FFH innately give us to survive? Well, the first and most obvious of them is the Ljosalfar worldspell - March of the Trees. Let's dig a little deeper there:



So what does it do, exactly. Well, once fired, it turns all your forests (and ancient forests) into these guys:



They last for five turns, and then turn into a new forest on the tile wherever they settle, provided there's not already an improvement on the tile. If there is, you're stuck waiting for Bloom to reforest it. So two things should be obvious. One, this is a great defense against a rush. Even in our capital right now, you're talking about 6 treants. Once you've got a few cities up and running and forests have grown from new to normal, we could easily be summoning 15-20 treants on turn 50, and far more down the line. Nobody will have production that can match that, so the world spell will annihilate any threat that isn't really, really fast.

The second fact is that should be apparent is that you really don't want to use this spell. You lose, in the example above, 15-20 forests. If you actually have to use them to repel an invasion, the treants won't die on the tiles you want them to, not to mention you'll lose some, so you're going to lose a decent amount of production, not to mention food and happiness once FoL and GoN are part of the equation. So what you REALLY want here is for MotT to act as a threat to repel the invasion, not to actually have to fire the worldspell.

Let's say however, that diplomacy fails, and you have a stack of Pyre Zombies (or HAs, but we'll stick with PZ's, since there are better reasons for a Sheaim player to rush me than for the Hippus player. The Hippus player would be smarter to attack the Balseraphs or Grigori) on your borders. What alternatives do you have to literally throwing wood on the fire.

Well - the answers are not good, frankly. Ideally, you want to attack PZs with fast movers, who can get in and get out and not feel the effects of splash damage from the zombies. As Elves, we have little motivation to make an early march down the mounted line for Horsemen or Fyrdwell. The game wants you to go after Archery, but while Archers and Gilden have nice defensive strength, a sitting target has no answer for zombie collateral. Not to mention, the primary elvish strength of Archers is they're improved on the attack, they're no better on defense than base Archers.

Another option is Hunters. We'll have Hunting reasonably early as we go after the Fellowship, and Hunters are 2 movers. The Downside is you're looking at 5 STR PZ's, and Hunters max at STR 4. So even if you somehow have a terrain advantage, only relatively well promoted Hunters are going to be able to hurt a PZ. Its unlikely we will have such well promoted units to throw at a PZ stack.

The other standard answer is Bronze Warriors, lots of them. The plus side - they're dirt cheap. The minus side - we have to research BW, which is not part of the short term tech plan. Additionally, PZ will have odds on Bronze warriors, so we'll need to throw lots at them, and each one that dies decreases the chances of future warriorpults succeeding, as the splash damage from the explosion will hurt the nearby units.

Longer term - there are solutions. Rangers work pretty well as a mobile unit, STR 7 2-movers and if we're talking about zone defense, their city attack penalty won't come into play. They have no easy counter at that stage of the game, so they can stage 2 tiles away and the splash damage won't hurt the main stack. Unfortunately, Animal Handling is a relative expensive tech. Mages with Life 2 - Destroy Undead will do just that, and we get free Life I on all our Adepts. Unfortunately, you're talking T130-140 at the earliest before mages are getting any play, and thats with being really dedicated. More likely we won't see Mages until the 160-170 range. Bowyers gives you Longbowmen, who can use metal weapons. Unfortunately Bowyers is also an expensive tech, and its off the beaten path. Or at least our intended path.

So it seems to me that basically beelining Way of the Forests is our only reasonable non-diplomatic solution to a PZ invasion. But gentlemen, I'd love to hear an alternative. I'd also be interested in an early rush attack plan, if we happen to find them close before they have PZs.

Future installments of this series will delve into ways of countering threats posed by other civilizations.

[Man Behind the Mask]

Thoughts on the turn first…

Two scout start and double forest moves have helped cover the early ground, and we’ve found the conifer line. Also very nice to see the banana down at a potential jungle location. Could you check out the number of land tiles, Gaspar, so we can ponder how many cities we should be thinking about?

Apologies that all of my C&D comments are phrased as questions. Do we know that the Balseraphs settled with all land tiles? They’re the only other creative (for quick border pop), and we’re equal top in land area.

[Gaspar]

For the record, my paranoia truly knows no bounds. Whilst being unable to sleep this evening, I rolled another 20 ErebusContinent starts with the civs in this game to get a sense of whether my "The Sheaim are coming, the Sheaim are coming" paranoia was valid or just the consequence of spending too much time preparing posts for this thread. There's little scientific about it, I just rolled the start, popped open the WB, assessed the layout and recorded where the players fell, then generated a new map. I didn't take notes on the specific positioning of the Ljosalfar in regards to the world, since that question has resolved itself (I assume everyone is comfortable with the idea that we are in the NE corner of the map, yes?)

The maps seemed to break down into one of two common distributions of the 6 opponents on a Standard-sized ErebusContinent map. By far the most common was this (obviously this a rough approximation, they weren't this clean) :

x--x--x
-------
x--x--x

I saw that configuration 10 times.

The other common configuration was this:

x-----x
--x-x--
x-----x

I saw that configuration 6 times.

The other 4 were a bit more blobby and random and I didn't see a distinct enough pattern between them to have it be worth recounting here.

Across all configurations, the Ljosalfar landed in the top of the map 15 of 20 times, 11 in the NE corner and 4 in the NW corner. The other 5 were sort of all over the place, though we never landed in the SW corner.

As far as the neighboring Civs were concerned, we saw every Civ as one of the two closest neighbors at least 3x, so these things are definitely a bit more random than I was initially giving them credit for being. The Sheaim were the most common neighbor, falling as one of the two civs able to borrow a cup of sugar 12 times. We also bordered the Elohim 10 times, the Hippus 8 times, the Grigori 7 times and the Balseraphs 3 times.

So what conclusions do I draw from this data? Mostly I think I'm jumping at shadows a bit. There's enough of a random distribution that just about anyone could be nearby. That jungle to the south, assuming it extends a bit, actually should serve as a bit of a buffer, as its likely to be animal/barb filled, which should slow any would be attacker down. Clearly, getting eyes on the immediate east is a priority, the last thing we want to see is a big stretch of plains for horsies to trample through. Anyway, I think it would be good to at least spend some quality time discussing the best ways to counter the two rush Civs in the early game, plus some thoughts on dealing with the barb threat and when we can expect to see it. This is supposed to serve as a bit of a tutorial game, so if nothing else, I can refine some of my strategies for dealing with the nasties were most likely to see, even if those threats never present themselves. Also, I think its pretty clear that decent diplomacy is the place where I'll be most able to defer a rush attempt, so we'll want to meet some folks and get the friendship growing. And pray that we got the Elohim-Grigori cocktail instead of the Hippus-Sheaim one.

[Man Behind the Mask]

And now the conversation topic…

One of the changes from BTS is removal of the “spear beats chariot but loses to axe” factor. The fact that there is rarely a direct counter to a specific unit creates a bigger challenge and also removes the incentives for a mixed stack. There is very much a sense of picking the best unit available and building as many as you can as quickly as possible. Life mages are the only hard counter to pyre zombies.

One unit you have overlooked is the Fawn, which will come at the same time as religion. These are actually pretty crap (inferior to Hunters in every way), but do give you the second move, don’t require a hunting lodge and upgrade to the much more impressive Satyr.

I actually think diplo is going to be the key here if our hypothetical scenario comes true. Fortunately, if we can settle the site, then the fire mana actually gives us good leverage in diplo. I hope most Sheaim players will bite your hand off (in the non-zombie way ) for a long NAP that includes a fire mana trade. We just need to get past the point where the PZs are something to worry about. Then you can go and take the AV shrine for those ritualists.

There seems to be some confusion about March of the Trees. I found a tiny bit of time to do a quick test game, but I don’t think it clarifies the situation at all. In my test, the forests where the treants spawn are all replaced by new forests. That means you lose the defensive bonus and the ancient food, but the hammer is still there. So that won’t be such a productivity disaster. However, when they all expired after five turns, there were no new forests created, which very much surprised me. More investigations required!

I actually see MotT as most valuable in the context of Tower/Altar victories. Even when the whole world declares on you with 10 turns remaining, nobody is going to easily match 150+ tier 3 units appearing from nowhere.

[Man Behind the Mask]

Crosspost (agreeing with each other!)

Thanks for doing the mapwork. My laptop takes about five minutes to generate a map, so I gave up and went for the single two-civs-duel-map test instead.

Your tests were fairly inconclusive, which is a positive for the mapscript and hopefully for our game . The jungle does potentially mean lizards, I believe, and they can be pretty annoying!

[Ravus Sol]

Oh don't stop the paranoia now Gasper! It's been very amusing to read! Keep it up untill the very end!

[Mardoc]

You know, this is going to be cliched, but I think the best counter to PZ's we have (assuming a tech pace and path that gets us there in time) is actually Priests of Leaves. With our free Spiritual mobility, we can stay 2+ squares away even outside of forests, and continually send in Tigers to beat up on the stack. With our Potency priests, it shouldn't be too hard to get some Empowered Tigers, too, who might even have odds on the Zombies (and who cares if they die, there's more where that came from!). Fighting inside our borders, we don't have to worry about war weariness, so the main question is whether we can do enough damage before the stack gets to a city.

Finally, if worst comes to worst, Str 5 Priests with promotions are likely to have odds on the Zombies. It might not be hammer efficient, but maybe averaged out with the Tiger damage it will be close enough. Oh, and if we do take damage, say in a skirmish at the borders that kills 4-5 Zombies, they're still Priests - we can run away and heal and try again.

Against the Hippus - well, the main counter is to have lots of forests, which again calls for Priests of Leaves. Here we might add some archers if possible in cities and chokepoints and the like. But the main advantage of Hippus is speed, and we can absolutely deny that to them. Admittedly, Warcry would still leave them making two squares/turn through forest, but we can at least match that. The nice thing about withstanding the Warcry rush is that by its very nature, it's fading in threat over time; once it wears off, Horsemen in the forest are going to be extremely vulnerable to nearly anything in our arsenal - Tigers, Priests, Hunters, Archers - start with equal strength, add in our Forest attack bonus and their lack of terrain benefit, and we're in good shape.

The potential problem here is that a horseman rush is going to happen earlier than a PZ rush - earlier/cheaper tech, faster transit from their borders to ours - but Hunters and Archers ought to be able to handle them, I think, and Priests would make it a slaughter.

A warcried Warrior rush - um, again, Forests to slow them and make the warcry wear off? Aside from that, we'd pretty much have to rely on logistics - a warrior in a city is approximately equal to a Warcried warrior, but on our turf, we ought to be able to outnumber the Hippus.

The nicest thing about Priests, though is that they're both a floor wax AND a dessert topping! Er, wait, wrong context. I mean, that they're both a strong military option and an economic benefit. Rushing to Priests of Leaves won't really hurt us economically like most early armies, since they can be useful out of war too. They're also useful later in the game, as medics if nothing else (although with our expected rate of XP-gain, it'll be quite a while before they're truly outclassed), unlike, say, Horsemen. Ok, Pyre Zombies are going to be universally useful in war, but even there they're no use in peace.

On the question of an early rush coming from us...that's tricky. Probably the best bet would be Archers + Silveric. He's one of the first heroes in the game, after all, and heroes are capable of cracking things like cities. If we're going to Silveric anyway, then we might as well use Archers. The trouble is, well, most rushes don't work, even if you're the Doviello or Clan. Ljosalfar aren't well suited to the role, I don't think.

Now, when it comes to paranoia and Ravus' enjoyment - well, maybe you're going to prove prescient, in the wrong direction:

Yeah, it was fortuitous that I was able to make that my capital simply by moving my settler SE-SE. It was also convenient that Ravus accidentally gave me Beastmasters instead of Scouts and I've already found Sheaim borders.

[Gaspar]

I'll touch base on everyone's (quite welcome) comments on defending against PZs and other assorted nasties soon, but first we have a turn to play, and I know my ones of adoring fans can't wait to hear the details.

Basically nothing to report other than basic exploration, but we've confirmed the edge of the world, we found marble, and we have 2 huts to pop next turn.

Cheech:



Chong:



Demos:



FFH PBEM III spoiler

I'd say our land looks remarkably similar to Nyk's in PBEM III. Here's hoping for the Elohim buffer as well.

Any thoughts, lads?

[Mardoc]

Any thoughts, lads?

Nay, Cap'n, nary a one!










Well, except that I look with covetous eyes on most of what's been revealed . And that it probably makes sense to send the southern scout more toward the south after grabbing the hut.

[Man Behind the Mask]

Two huts! The tension builds….

I’d be happy to see the scout swing south if you want, especially as we’d want to spot any units before they think about popping the Pyre. Main argument for beelining west would be if we were considering two-moving an empty capital. Of course that might not be a topic we want to dwell on for too long, given our own defenses

I feel a little like a committee member at the Iraq Inquiry, so I’ll repeat a couple of questions:
Does the recon "better results from villages" also apply to lairs/dungeons etc? [I suspect not]
Could we please get a check on the number of land tiles?

Once you’ve got a little more uncovered, I’d loved a zoomed out shot to show the whole surrounding area (maybe with tile yields on to distinguish jungle and ancient forests more easily).