[Spoilers] A Grand Ol' Adventure: Dain the Caswallawn of the Grigori

[Sciz]

yes yes yes

topic made, will discuss more when the final picks have been made

[Sciz]

Okay might as well get started with the writing. In this topic you will witness me having no idea what i'm doing, making dumb choices and being incredibly paranoid of everything and everyone. Even before the game even started I was totally lost, stumbling blindly around in the dark trying to find some good combination of civ and leader to play with.

So. I had no idea what to choose for this PBEM. I went back and forth between ridiculously many choices, and was completely incapable of deciding. First thought I had was to screw this unrestricted leader nonsense and play the Sheaim with Tebryn Arbandi as my leader. But after a while I abandoned that idea because someone in PBEM3 chose that, and I didn't want to be a copycat. Instead I started looking at civs no one else had chosen yet. None of which I had actually played before, except the Sidar. However, my first and only Sidar game was a trainwreck, it was my first FFH2 game and I had no idea what the hell I was doing and it left a bad impression on me. Still I was thinking of choosing Varn Gosam as the Sidar, switching creative to charismatic and pump out disciple units to get quick level 6 units and get shades. But I never liked the idea of sacrificing level 6 units, so I left the Sidar.

Next I thought of the Sheaim again, but with Kandros Fir as the leader. I was actually very close to choosing this, but at the last minute I changed my mind, and lo and behold, Selrahc chooses that exact combination Which has made me regret my own decision of not taking them, but whatever.

I went through a bunch of other civs and combination but I still had no clue what to choose. I did want to choose a civ that hadn't been used yet though, so I started looking at the Grigori. They're pretty odd. I'm still not really sure why I chose them, but I guess i'll find out. First I was thinking of using Tebryn with them, and making all my adventurers mages, and ultimately (if the game ever gets that far, which I doubt) having 4 hero archmages and 4 hero liches, all with twincast and death 3 and summon spellstaff. Wouldn't that be fun? It would. I tried that in a game, but realized not having philosophical's GPP boost is a severe loss, the creation of adventurers became really slow, even with pacifism.

So I needed a philosophical leader. My favorite choice would have been philosophical/summoner, since summoner lets summoned units stay a turn longer, which would be sweet as hell for my summoning hero liches/archmages, but that combination doesn't exist, and you cant pick summoner with adaptive, sadly. Or at least the wiki and manual says you can't. Not that it matters anyways, because the only adaptive leader with Philosophical as his "main", Cassiel, was already chosen when it was my turn. Cassiel would still have been my main choice though, because I really like financial, which I would have chosen, but I wasn't able to get him. So instead I chose Dain. Because... Uh... I don't know really. He hasn't been used before I guess. Arcane's exp gaining boost is kinda useless since my adventurers will get one exp every turn anyways but it at least gives my hero mages one extra promotion or something.

Then after I had chosen Dain, I realized I can't really go with deathmages, since Selrahc and his dastardly pyre zombies are immune to death damage

That's gonna severely lower my summoned wraiths power, they have 6 base but +3 death and affinity for death mana. They were going to be powerhouses, since I was gonna go overboard on death mana. They can still be powerful, but they'll be kinda useless against selrahc which sucks a lot. So maybe i'm gonna need to find some other element to summon. Problem with that is that without death I can't get liches. Maybe I'll get just one death node, enough to get death 3 on my first four adventurer archmages, and then just get lots of mana nodes of some other element for them to actually summon. Can't be fire either though, which was my second choice, since pyre zombies are strong against that too. Sigh. Even worse, I'll probably never even reach strength of will anyways, which will make this whole plan useless. As you can see I have no idea what i'm doing.

But done is done and I will have to take this as far as I can. Maybe I can summon Basium! Just for fun. Actually I don't even know if the Grigori can do that, because of the whole agnostic thing. Ugh. DaveV, with your infinite wisdom and great knowledge, do you have anything to say about my (lack of) plans?

Actually there's one thing I really want to know. Is it worth it to go aristocracy without financial? I almost always play financial because financial aristocracy is so great, 4c for every riverside farm. But without financial it feels so weak. 3c for riverside farms, 2c for non-riverside. Should I go cottages instead? I have no idea.

[DaveV]

DaveV, with your infinite wisdom and great knowledge, do you have anything to say about my (lack of) plans?

You obviously have me confused with one of the *good* players.

Yikes, where to start? I am, frankly, not a big fan of the Grigori. The lack of religion means you miss out on a lot of really good stuff. Dain is an interesting choice, but works completely against using your plan of turning your adventurers into archmages. Arcane doesn't give an extra you-pick promotion to your arcane units, but they start with Potency, which makes them gain experience faster. That is wasted on an adventurer, who is going to gain 1 XP per turn up to 100 XP.

If you're worried about a PZ rush, I'd suggest the mounted line for your adventurers. You can pick up useful units much more quickly than the adept line, and use hit-and-run tactics to thin out any PZ stacks. A lot is going to depend on the map, and how close the Sheaim are. It's going to be hard to crank out a large stack of PZs from a single city, and harder still to support them.

Don't base your early game strategy around tier 4 units; you need good tier 1 and tier 2 units to survive to the late game. In this game, you can only expand by taking barbarian or player cities, so you should concentrate on economy and strong, cheap units in the early game. Nothing beats bronze warriors in terms of bang for the buck. Since you can't settle for copper, it will make a huge difference whether you have copper in your first three rings. You'll also have to wait a long while to pick up any happy or health resources beyond those in your initial city. I'd suggest looking for a really good city site if you don't start with one, although the mapmaker presumably took the no-settlers rule into account.

For economy, I'd say you should go with God King in the early game, since you'll be running with a single city for quite a while. Aristograrianism is good for non-financial civs, but you need quite a few farms to make it pay off. Code of laws doesn't do anything for you while you're sitting on a single city, so I'd save that for mid game.

[Sciz]

Maybe I should just summon Hyborem and switch to him

Edit: Actually I might really do that. If it's possible for the Grigori anyways. I just finished playing my first Hyborem game and he's really fun to play with. Your cities get completely ridiculous towards the end, I ran scholarship and had like 30-40 scientist specialists in every city. Went 0% gold but still had insane beakers. Only problem is that i dunno how it works with hyborem being barbarians and us needing to capture barbarian cities to get our own. I know barbarians declare on him if his score is 50% higher than the second placed, but can I initiate war with the barbarians myself?

Also I wonder if killing barbarians gives manes

[Irgy]

can I initiate war with the barbarians myself?

I'm pretty sure you can. I don't know if there's an easy way to do it, but I'm remember once when I went to attack a spider I got the "does this mean war?" popup. I said no, and then it attacked the spider anyway (since it's hidden nationality). Didn't make much sense then or now, but there you go. Check it yourself first though, don't take my word for it

[DaveV]

Maybe I should just summon Hyborem and switch to him ... If it's possible for the Grigori anyways.

I'm pretty sure it's not: if you're an agnostic leader, you can't even research the necessary religious techs.

[Sciz]

Really? I thought you could research them but didn't benefit from them, making it useless to actually try. I'm gonna check that out tomorrow. If it's not possible, i'll just do whatever and see where this game takes me. I've never actually played the grigori (except for a short practice run with tebryn) so it will be fun anyways

[Irgy]

You can get "Corruption of Spirit" and the other religion-founding techs, but you need to be running the Ashen Veil state religion to research the "Infernal Pact" tech, which is the tech that summons Hyboream. They should appear red in the tech tree to show you cannot research them.

[Sciz]

Aw too bad. Well then. I think i'm actually gonna revert back to my archmage adventurer plan. I don't care if they'll take ages to reach if I even get them, and that they'll be mostly ineffective against one of my opponents. I'm gonna try to play a mostly defensive game anyways, trying to diplo my way from any attacks. The one main trouble is being next to the Sheaim of course. If I avoid them I should be fine early on.

Depending on the number of mana nodes I have nearby I might go for a tower of mastery victory, which is in line with my defensive approach. I can have my adventurer mages as backups if anyone invades. And adventurers won't have to wait until archmage to get effective. I mean with their hero exp gains, i'll have a 100 exp adventurer when I get to mages probably, so he'll be able to get all combat promotions + twincast (summons two units every summon) plus death 2 and whatever else I need. Hell I should probably have another adventurer at like 50 exp at that point and another growing every turn as well, so it should add up, and add to that bronze warriors or whatever and i should be fine unless pyre zombies come knocking. We'll see.

Really gonna need a bunch of mana nodes for this though, especially if I want to get the tower of mastery win. One metamagic node for sure, and then the tower of necromancy asap for a free death mana. Tower of divination is also good for the free tech of course. So anyways, this strategy obviously depends on how many mana nodes I get. If I have few, I don't really have a chance and might need to switch strategies, or maybe just try to trade my way to a tower or two. I need five mana nodes to actually be able to build all the towers, but with 5 I won't have many nodes to strengthen my spectres or whatever I choose to summon, so they won't be as efficient.

[DaveV]

You can't play a defensive game with no settlers, unless you're planning to run a two city empire for the whole game. You'll have to get out there and take over some of the barb cities, which means taking out some weak archers, warriors, and axemen (and maybe animals, goblins, or lizardmen).

Do you know that you don't have to wait until the adventurer reaches 100XP to upgrade him? He'll retain the hero promotion, and you can convert the XP into other promotions (combat 5->heroic strength!), then go out and start bonking heads.

Tower of mastery is going to be an awfully tough win in MP; the other players will dogpile you if it looks like you're going to win that way. Again, you should be planning for the short and medium term, and building a strong civilization. FfH has so many competing goals that you have to be careful not to jump on your horse and ride off in all directions.