[SPOILERS]- Crazy Keelyn is trippin’ Balz: Bobchillingworth of the Balseraphs

[Bobchillingworth]

Welcome, welcome one and all, as Bobchillingworth goes and breaks some Balz. Except other players, who should get the hell out.


Before the Content can commence, presented for you consideration:

[Bobchillingworth]

So, I’m playing as Keelyn of the Balseraphs. Who are the Balseraphs? Well, I’m glad I asked! The Balz are a civilization of clowns, madmen, sideshow freaks, magicians, creeps, goons, and weirdoes. Often all of the above. I strongly suggest anyone who has FFH downloaded to check out the background entries for Keelyn, Perpentarch, and the Balz as a civ- they’re all brilliantly written, and well worth twenty minutes of your time. If you don’t have FFH downloaded… go download it! Due to the unique sanity of the Balz, they can be prone to capricious and inexplicable behavior, so Dave & Hesmyrr, if I appear to be completely out of my skull, just remember that I’m probably maybe roleplaying


The Balz have several interesting UB and UU which I’ll get to in a bit, but first up is

[SIZE="5"]Keelyn [/SIZE][SIZE="4"](no last name given) [/SIZE]





Our charming leader & magical princess. The daughter of Perp himself and a Sheaim spy, Keelyn was raised as a child by imps and other summons from Hell. Possessed of tremendous arcane skills of her own and a tenuous grip on reality, Keelyn just wants to have fun… by breaking everyone else’s toys.

Her traits are:

Creative- Fairly weak in FFH, Creative gets no special bonuses over regular BTS. It allows me to save a few hammers on monuments early on, and I get cheaper theaters, carnivals, and libraries.

Summoner- The main power behind the Princess. Summoned units last for a turn longer and start with free Combat I. This can be extraordinarily powerful when combined with the Balz’ puppet UU, which I’ll get to shortly.


Entertainers by nature (or accident), the Balz have a number of special unique buildings which commonly provide additional happiness and/or culture.

The Freak Show is surprisingly enough created by the Freak UU, and gives +2 culture, +1 happy, and +1 Great Artist points a turn. Due to that last point, it’s important to show some discretion on where you construct them, since you risk slightly contaminating your GPP pool. In a nice bit of synergy with some of the Balseraph UU, you can add slaves to the Freak Show for a small culture and happy boost. It works almost identically to add captured animals to a carnival. The addable slave types are elves, orcs, and dwarfs, so I’ll potentially have two of them at my disposal.

The Hall of Mirrors is a 180 hammer building available with the Alteration tech. It adds +1 happy, and… I’m not sure if it does anything else. The FFH Wiki states that it creates an illusion of the strongest enemy unit within 1 tile of the city, which is a fairly powerful ability, especially if the enemy brings a hero to the fight. The FFH in-game Civilopedia only mentions the +1 happy bonus, though. I’ll want to test this out for myself eventually.

The Arena replaces the Training Yard building, and is necessary to build swordsmen and upper-tier melee units. Units in a city with an arena can compete in gladiatorial combat; they have a 50% chance of dying, which adds +1 happy to the city, or they’ll get some free exp. It’s a situational ability which allows you to throw away cheap warriors for happiness and potentially get an exp boost on your adepts, but which valuable or already highly-promoted units have no place in participating.



Balseraph units are dispersed throughout the tech tree. Sacrificing base strength for a neat special ability is a common theme. I’m unlikely to use all of them, but I’ll give them each at least a brief description (hopefully Serdoa has covered some of this in his PBEM II thread).




Freaks are the horrifying byproducts of the Balz experimenting with chaos mana and having terminally poor understanding of genetics. Freaks have base 3 strength, 1 move, can use metal weapons, cost 40 hammers (same as a swordsman) and start with the Mutated promotion, which typically gives them 1-5 random attributes. You need Festivals researched to build them. Freaks can be very powerful if they get the right promotions (heroic defense / strength, strong, blitz, etc) or utterly wretched if they’re cursed from birth (weak / diseased / plagued / withered). Since Chaos II allows you to mutate units anyway, I probably won’t be building many freaks except for freakshows. It may be worth it to make a few to get specific abilities like sentry, although it’s a crapshoot. Freaks can also upgrade down the melee, archery, or recon lines.




Courtesans are expensive late-game replacements for the Shadow national unit (limited to 4 per civ), available with Guilds. They have 10 attack, 8 defense, 2 moves, stealth, cost a whopping 160 hammers (they’re extraordinarily well-equipped hookers), and the special ability to enslave units they defeat. Not particularly remarkable or useful, and I doubt I’ll be using them much in this game.




Mimics are Balseraph replacements for the champions, the default tier-III melee unit. You get them with Iron Working. Mimics have base 5 strength (one less than a regular champ), 1 move, can use metal weapons, cost 80 hammers, and steal a promotion from whatever units they defeat. Mimics can become utterly absurd once they get on a roll- that blob of promotions pictured above is an actual unit I had from one SP game. Sadly, like many of the Balseraph’s toys mimics are better for fighting the AI than human players. Against players who don’t get the AI’s free promotions and won’t allow mimics to happily kill their troops in the open, the mimic’s low strength becomes a serious liability. I don’t intend to emphasize the melee line for this game, so I may well not build any of these guys. Damn they look cool, though.




Harlequins are the Balseraph ranger replacements. Available with the Animal Handling tech. Like the mimic, harlequins have one less strength than the unit they replace, 6 instead of the ranger’s 7. They have 2 moves and cost an alarming 100 hammers. Mimics can also capture animals like regular rangers. They have a really neat special ability, taunt, a spell which has a high chance of causing any unit within 1 tile of attacking the harlequin’s stack. Great for emptying out an AI’s cities of garrison troops after you soften them up with some collateral. Less great for fighting human players. Something to keep in mind, but Animal Handling is somewhat expensive and otherwise mostly useless. Low base strength means that they’re lackluster mage guards.




Taskmasters are Balseraph replacements for assassins. You get them with the Poisons tech. Taskmasters are thankfully no weaker than the unit they replace, with 6 strength (when factoring in the +1 poison combat), and 4 defense. They have 2 moves and cost a frightening 120 hammers. Taskmasters are like assassins in every way, being able to take recon-line promos and pick off the weakest units in a stack, but they also have a 25% chance of making a slave of any unit they defeat in combat. If I want those orc and dwarf slaves for my Freak Shows without having to run the slavery civic, these guys are the way to go. Decent chance I’ll eventually indulge in building a few (especially with two rival spellcasting leaders), but not a priority.




Saved the best for last. Puppets are what make Balseraph spellcasters so dangerous. Every arcane Balseraph unit, from the lowly adept to a mighty hero or archmage is able to summon a puppet every turn (unless they’re twincasters, in which case they can summon two). Puppets have all the promotions of their summoners, and can cast any spell except “create puppet”. They can also kill stuff, but at strength 2 that won’t be happening with any regularity. The real power of the puppets comes in conjunction with Keelyn’s Summoner trait- puppets last for two turns each. This effectively allows a Balseraph arcane unit to cast twice a turn once they have two puppets going. Extremely powerful if used correctly. Even death I adepts can summon hordes of skeletons thanks to puppetry. Astounding!

[Bobchillingworth]

The Balseraph hero is Loki, bane of the AI. Look at him, doesn’t he seem nice…?





Loki has a few neat abilities. First, he’s a spellcaster with Chaos I (Dance of Blades) and Mind I (Inspiration). Loki sadly cannot gain exp, so he’ll never be more than a dabbling spellcaster. He will retreat from any losing battle, as long as he isn’t in a city or totally surrounded, which is great since he’s only 2 strength. He also has 2 moves. Loki can explore other civ’s territory without OB, and is a phenomenal scout.

Where his infamy truly lies is in his special abilities, specifically Entertain. Loki can either entertain a city, which gives it a limited +1 happy and the caster a little bit of gold depending on the city’s size, or he can Disrupt the town, which will either add unhappy or instantly flip it to the Balz if it hasn’t accumulated any culture of its own yet. This is utterly crushing vs. the AI. Start up a deity game, start building Loki on turn 0, as soon as he completes run around and flip (and then abandon) every AI expansion, as soon as they found them. Congrats, you just beat FFH Deity.

Obviously Loki is much weaker vs. human players, who are intelligent enough to simply park a warrior in any cultureless city you approach and declare war before you can get inside. I won’t build him ASAP, but he will be valuable as an expensive scout (120 hammers). He’s also fun to kill off for the Shine of the Champion national wonder, and could help foster good relations with another player by Entertaining one of their cities.



The Balseraphs of course also have a worldspell, Revelry. It’s available from Festivals and gives you a free double-length golden age. This is exactly as powerful as it sounds, which is to say: very. One of the best spells, probably just short of the Illians, Eloheim, and maybe Hippus.

[Bobchillingworth]

So, what’s the grand plan in all this? Well, I’m fairly weak at the magic side of FFH. In the sense that I pretty much eschew it to the maximum extent possible. I have a long and well-document love affair with ritualists and Chalid, who traditionally serve all my collateral needs. I very much prefer to massacre foes with massed chariots or iron champs than screw around with spell casters. So this game is a chance for me to clean up my act a bit, while having a lot of silly fun in the process.


I’ve played a few test games with the Balz vs. the AI, and right now my initial plan is to attempt to rush someone with Gibbeon Goeta while building an early Nox Noctis. I use the term “rush” here somewhat loosely- I’m going to want at a minimum all the worker techs besides Hunting, Festivals (for markets / happy), and Code of Laws (for aristofarms) before I even start on the path to Esus. Unless I’m very isolated and the barbs are slacking, I’m likely to need Bronze Working as well. From my practice games I can usually get Gibbeon deployed and with the minimum 10 exp by turn 120, with 5-7 cities (small map size) and maybe a dozen warriors + a half dozen swordsmen, and Loki. I’ll be looking to Dave to help me cut this time down, since building the FFH economy is one of my weaker areas.



[SIZE="1"](isn’t he adorable?)[/SIZE]

Once Gibbeon is out, I’ll essentially have a twincasting archmage, and a dilemma- what spells to use? I start with Air, Mind, and Chaos mana. Air allows me to summon strength 9 air elementals- powerful in the field, great vs. Pyre Zombies, less great against even archers in towns. Mind mana would normally be the obvious choice; the 10% chance to lose Domination (permanently flip an enemy unit to your side- think Starcraft I Dark Archons) every turn doesn’t matter when it’s puppets doing all the casting. Alas both PZ and Golems are resistant to capture, and are in this game. I may still use it, it just loses a bit of its luster depending on who my neighbors are. A nice source of archers and hunters if there are a lot of goblin forts and ruins about.

So of the starting mana that leaves Chaos, with Wonder at Chaos III. Wonder produces 3-5 random effects a turn, so 6-10 with two puppets out. I could get cast something awesome like snowfall or pillar of fire or summon a Balor or Treant or whatever. Or I could get a bunch of lame spirit spells and vitalize the enemy’s fields. It’s all a huge gamble, and honestly that’s half the appeal. I’m strongly leaning towards this option- besides, in my tests I typically summoned at least a somewhat useful creature every time I used the spell. It’s not optimal by any means, but it’s certainly silly & irreverent enough to be in character for the Balz, and it should make for great lurker reading.

------------------------

After I get Gibbeon out, I’ll play clean-up a bit, getting Sanitation, Construction, and Knowledge of the Ether so that I can get some adept cooking. Then it’s time for the second part of my Grand Scheme- the Overlords. I almost never run the Overlords in SP. I have vocally dissed the overlords in Amelia’s thread. I have also been whooped twice now by Overlords players. I suspect that there may be some slight connection. Overlords gives me culture, a better heroic archmage to eventually replace Gibbeon, and most importantly, Stygian Guards. They will be my ideal mage protectors and muscle, resisting zombies, specters, and fighting toe-to-toe with Golems if I can get metal weapons and some promos on them.

How do I eventually intend to win the game? Hard to say. I’m very fond of writing that FFH games inevitably must end “in blood and tears”, and to a large extent this is indeed true. Even the “peaceful” Altar and Tower victories force the AI to declare on you. So simply murdering everyone under a horde of puppeteers and undead demonic abominations certainly has its charm. I’m very tempted to try for a reasonably peaceful cultural win though, putting my Creative trait and special culture buildings to good use. The Noctis will help a lot in this regard.


What are the weaknesses of this plan? Many. For starters, I’m going to be absurdly under-defended until at least I can get the Noctis up. Even then, I’m badly lacking in effective counters to golems, PZ, or an Orc horde until I’ve got mages with Maelstrom and Fireball. Bronze weapons and catapults will help some, but I’m trying to avoid Construction until I’ve researched Deception, if I can. My planned beeline to Gibbeon also means putting off adepts for a little while longer than strictly necessary, and puts a lot of weight on Just One Man. Honestly though, I think my defense problems are going to be present regardless of what I do, until I can really start building mages and stygians in earnest.



Well. That’s it for now. Later I’ll write an analysis of my opponents, but I’ve written about 5,000 words at this point, so it’s time for a break. I think it should be clear from my later paragraphs of who I’m really worried about, anyway.


Dave, Hesmyrr, anyone else- comments, suggestions, wild applause are all encouraged!

[Sciz]

Can I also reserve? It sounds fun

[Selrahc]

When I think Keelyn, I normally think twisted Alice in Wonderland.

[Bobchillingworth]

Can I also reserve? It sounds fun

No. But you can have 6,000 words of Raw, Unfettered CONTENT

[Selrahc]

The addable slave types are elves, orcs, and dwarfs, so I’ll potentially have two of them at my disposal.

If you get the chance, you can undercouncil your way into the slave market. Bought slaves have a random race.

So of the starting mana that leaves Chaos, with Wonder at Chaos III. Wonder produces 3-5 random effects a turn, so 6-10 with two puppets out.

Thinking too small there... Gibbon has twincast. All his puppets have twincast. 4 puppets casting 8 wonders is 24-40 random effects/turn.

Loki has a few neat abilities. First, he’s a spellcaster with Chaos I (Dance of Blades) and Mind I (Inspiration). Loki sadly cannot gain exp, so he’ll never be more than a dabbling spellcaster. He will retreat from any losing battle, as long as he isn’t in a city or totally surrounded, which is great since he’s only 2 strength. He also has 2 moves. Loki can explore other civ’s territory without OB, and is a phenomenal scout.

He can also summon puppets. Free S2 units might not seem that great.. but the Sidar might think differently.

EDIT:
Also
Hall of Mirrors does indeed duplicate units. It has weird interactions with items. You might end with dozens of copies of the etherblade or the pieces of barnaxus if the heroes are copied then killed.

[Hesmyrr]

Thought I had seen all probabilities of Wonder result listed somewhere on the site, turns out it was DaveV who posted them

•Casts up to 5 different spells, randomly
selected from a list of 66 possible
choices
•Possible Spells are:
Cast: Blaze, Bless, Blinding Light,
Bloom, Blur, Charm Person,
Contagion, Courage, Crush, Destroy
Undead, Dispel Magic, Earthquake,
Enchanted Blade, Entangle, Escape,
Fireball, Flaming Arrows, Floating
Eye, Haste, Hastur's Razor, Heal,
Hide, Loyalty, Maelstrom, Morale,
Mutation, Pillar of Fire, Poisoned
Blade, Revelation, Ring of Flames,
Rust, Sanctify, Scorch, Shadowwalk,
Slow, Snowfall, Spores, Spring,
Stoneskin, Tsunami, Valor, Vitalize,
Wither
Summon: Air Elemental, Aurealis,
Balor, Djinn, Earth Elemental, Host of
the Einherjar, Ice Elemental, Fire
Elemental, Kraken, Mistform, Pit
Beast, Sand Lion, Spectre, Tiger,
Treant, Water Elemental, Wraith
■No Summon is Permanent from
this Spell Selection
•The Non-Standard Spell Possibilities are:
Create a 3x3 square of Hell Terrain
centered on the Caster
Clear a 3x3 square of tiles centered on
the Caster of all Hell Terrain
Create Penguins on the Tile (Cannot
Happen in a City)
Create Mushrooms on the Tile
(Cannot Happen in a City)
Turn the Caster into a Baboon
(Graphical Only, lose Racial
Promotion)
Summon a Spiderkin

Interesting you'd go for a chaos 3 promotion, though I guess since you are planning on Mutation it isn't that much of an exp. investment. I hardly have gotten used to the magic in FFH yet but isn't the strength of most summons reliant on the bonus mana strength (which would be hard to utilize with all the randomness, besides the fact that there are no unit that benefits from multiple chaos mana in my memory)? And I would always refrain from using the spell on my lands due to the possibility of Hell Terrain generation. Still, agree it would be pretty hilarious so maybe if you are one of the clear leaders...

Surprised that Hall of Mirrors copy promotions too- thought it only copied the unit itself and not its exp. Is the illusion generated permanent?

[Bobchillingworth]

Thinking too small there... Gibbon has twincast. All his puppets have twincast. 4 puppets casting 8 wonders is 24-40 random effects/turn.

Yeah, this would be fantastic- issue is that it's even less of a "rush" if I'm waiting for him to get enough exp for Chaos I-III, then Combat I-V, then twincast. Even if he's getting 2 exp a turn, it's still going to take a while. Could beat up barbs, depends what the situation is. Could all be moot, of course. If I can grab the Frigus or Standing Stones before Gibbeon is out, I'll probably just give him Ice III or Earth III. Supposedly no plan survives contact with the enemy... I'm hoping mine can limp away only mostly mangled =)



Also, thanks for the list Hesmyrr! It could actually be worth casting wonder in my own lands to try to get some hell terrain- sheut stones, nightmares, gulgarms, and toads are all worth having, as long as I can keep it from spreading further.