Winter Wonderland: Selrahc's FFH 2 thread

[Maksim]

Excellent report, Selrahc! It will take a while to digest, but a few questions pop up straight away:

1) Do you have a dotmap for the north-east? Are you in a settler rush with Cull over there?

2) How do you intend to overcome your low happiness limit? Do you have a particular tech path for that, or some scheme to get more happiness resources from someone, or a civics switch to Nationhood or something else?

3) How are you going to promote your first few mages? What are the crucial spells to stop an invading army? What about going on the offense afterwards?

[Selrahc]

I'm not necessarily looking for pure frost mages. Just characters who have some sort of association with controlling ice, so Piers and Mia sound like they would do well enough to continue the theme.

[Maksim]

And a few more Ice-based names:

Marle from Chrono Trigger

Vanilla Ice from the 90's rap scene (listening to that song causes intense damage, you know)

Jack Frost from English folklore

<EDIT>: Also Louhi from the Finnish pantheon - she's no relation to Loki, and she does have the power to surround any ships in ice.

[Selrahc]

1) Do you have a dotmap for the north-east? Are you in a settler rush with Cull over there?

No real dotmap. I know where the next city is going though, up near the fur. I'm not in a settler race. The region is mine by agreement with the two people who would otherwise have a chance at settling it. Cull agreed to my proposed settling agreements when we were writing up the peace treaty, which gives me the entire region apart from the area which is currently held by that barb city. Since Sareln has also agreed to not settle that region, I can settle it at will.

2) How do you intend to overcome your low happiness limit? Do you have a particular tech path for that, or some scheme to get more happiness resources from someone, or a civics switch to Nationhood or something else?

There are two stand out buildings as far as overcoming happiness goes. The gambling house and the public baths. Both have minor downsides, but for the Illians it is well worth it. For the moment I'm due to get a fairly constant influx of happiness resources. I'm connecting up dye, trading for fine clothes, connecting up fur and being gifted sugar. All that should hold me over for a while. My happiness limit is about to expand quite nicely. By the time it becomes a serious constraint again I'll be ready with gambling houses and public baths.

3) How are you going to promote your first few mages? What are the crucial spells to stop an invading army? What about going on the offense afterwards?

The most crucial spell is summon ice elemental. That will be my workhorse spell, doing the job of killing the foe and stopping them from attacking. Slow is the second piece of the puzzle, and any attack stack consisting mainly of 1 movers will be held still. For 2 movers or faster though I'll need to instead use Sun 2. Blinding Light holds enemies still, and will give me time to move up reinforcements.


Thanks for the names. Keep them coming. =)

[Sciz]

If Mia and Piers count, so does Alex btw

also;

Nightchill - human ice mage from the Malazan series
Gothos - Ice mage ancient being from the Malazan series. Once he created a huge glacier just to stop a war

Also i'm wondering if The Lich King / Arthas from warcraft counts. He sits on the frozen throne and has a sword called frostmourne, but i've never played World of Warcraft or even Warcraft 3, so i don't know if he actually has ice/frost powers.

[Amelia]

Kel'Thuzad, the Lich from Warcraft. Liches in Warcraft uses Frost Nova and Frost armor, so i think you can see where it comes from. Sapphiron, a frost dragon, works as well.

Other names are Frost, an ice dragon from Dragonlance, Froslass, an Ice/Ghost Pokemon, Glaceon, the Ice evolution from Eevee, Abomasnow, an Ice Pokemon which starts a Hailstorm whenever it enters play...

Frostmourne, the Ice Sword, dozens of Ice pokemon (:P), Rylai (Crystal Maiden from DotA who uses Frostbite and Frost Nova), Kaldr, Ancient Apparition from DotA who again uses ice-based spells...

Damn i hit a stop. Can't think of any others for now, although i'm sure there are a lot ><

Edit: Celes from FF6 uses ice-magic as well when she joins (Although that changes with the stupid espers i guess).

[SleepingMoogle]

I can't believe Mr. Freeze (in all his Terminator-esque goodness) is still missing from the list.

[Mardoc]

Very interesting; us lurkers are certainly lucky that T150 coincided with some time in your schedule (Happy Thanksgiving!)

Sounds like you're pretty much on track; you might even end up with enough land to prevent anyone else from winning by Domination if your magical war plans are successful.

Any particular plans for dealing with fast movers? It seems like all of your potential threats are either Raiders or Horse themed, after all. It sounds like you're mainly relying on the size of your empire, like Russia's strategy - you'll just be so big that they can take part of it, but you'll eventually roll over them anyway.

For a couple more ice names: you might try Frozone, from The Incredibles, and a less creative one could be The Wizard of Winter, title of this song: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/36334/672127

You might also take a couple from the Dresden Files' Winter Court of the Sidhe, as long as you don't mind using, well, Winter elven names. That would include Mab, Maeve, Lea.

And, finally you could steal from Eskimo mythology: http://www.gods-heros-myth.com/eskimo.html

[Selrahc]

Thanks everyone for all the names. That should keep me covered for quite a while.

Very interesting; us lurkers are certainly lucky that T150 coincided with some time in your schedule (Happy Thanksgiving!)

Actually not anything to do with Thanksgiving since I'm one of those crazy Europeans. T150 did happen to fall on a weekend though, and one where I didn't really have any essays due in next week to distract me.

Sounds like you're pretty much on track; you might even end up with enough land to prevent anyone else from winning by Domination if your magical war plans are successful.

That's definitely a thought. It certainly won't hurt even if it doesn't quite give me a full safety net. I should probably try and work out just how much land % it would end up giving me..

Any particular plans for dealing with fast movers? It seems like all of your potential threats are either Raiders or Horse themed, after all. It sounds like you're mainly relying on the size of your empire, like Russia's strategy - you'll just be so big that they can take part of it, but you'll eventually roll over them anyway.

Basically... hope that they end up somewhere near mages. Once I've actually got a force I'm going to be splitting the mages up fairly uniformly across the empire, with a few mobility promoted detachments in central locations. The local forces will have the job of slowing and blinding the interlopers, to prevent much movement while awaiting reinforcements. The reinforcements will be moving quite quickly, since I'll have haste and movement 2 so I should be easily able to get to the frontline fast. By pinning them down with spells I want to make sure that the fighting stays in the border regions rather than spreading across the empire.

This is all only really applicable once I get some nicely promoted mages up and running though. For the moment my only defensive plan consists of slaving copper warriors by the bucket full and trying to get a counter attack going with the priests. Any attacker in the next few dozen turns will only be S6(Centaur or Horse Archers, Vampires with Copper) , so copper warriors should hopefully be good enough to stall them.

[Selrahc]

Won the Somnium! Getting 200 gold for free will be absolutely fantastic. I'll finally have a real event fund, and it gives me some funds with which to upgrade my adepts.