TBS The Fall From Heaven Thread [Civ 4 mod] - 2016 Edition™ - 2022 Update!

[Matalarata]

Svartalfar.

Svartalfar are without any doubt my favourite civ, you pretty much nailed it above but I'll add my two cents.
Mages are fine and dandy and Illusionist is a bonus more than an hindrance once you start to play around it but don't underestimate nixkins, they can be an ultra effective defensive/offensive force. Even if unable to take cities they pretty muck wreak havok in the enemy infrastructure and make you filthy rich in the process. Also, your racial spell is awesome, you can use it early to stop an annoying neighbour from growing OR cast it later on and give hidden nationality to dozens of nixkins, infinite gold from raiding and no need to declare war! You should always be raiding, never build high tier units, promote them from low tier ones and use your FoL boosted production to go for selected wonders, great economy to support a bazillion units and a couple of science monster cities.

Go for esus early and try to remain the council leader as long as you can but never adopt it as a religion, FoL is just too good for you and your recon line is already OP, you have your world spell to give HN (even if Mask is a great little ability). Do promote an assassin as soon as you can. I'm under the impression that the "Acheron's chosen" event triggers much more often for the Svart, I've never actually checked but I think it's triggered by the most powerful assassin (marksman) unit present in the whole game world and your sinister trait influences it. Not sure...

Yeah a pity for MoM. I loved global spells...

 

[baturinsky]

What spell/spheres do you recommend? My favorites are:

Fire - fireballs win wars. Especially good against cities and stacks on defensive positions.
Mind and Growth - city buffs for adepts to earn their stay before they grow to mages and between wars. There is also Spirit 2 city buff spell, but 4 culture and 1 happiness for level 2 spell is comparatively expensive.
Meta - for repurposing mana nodes

And also a little related pro-tip: it's better to vassalise civ than completely wipe them, because if they have their palace, it's 2-3 mana sources that you can borrow.

 

[baturinsky]

And as for favorite civs - mine would probably be Amurites - if there were an easy way to tell all those differently specialised mages apart.

 

[Matalarata]

Well, I agree on fireball being an easy solution to your lack of siege equipment and massed enemy chaff, however you have a lot of options when it comes to city taking, blur+shadow walk and mistofrms being my preferred ones. Also nixkins are easy to beat but hard to kill, couple this with assassins/summons/black mirror shenannigans and fireballs lose a lot of their appeal. Massed troops aren't a problem for you, if you're running FoL (and why you shouldn't really...) since forest + treants will slow them down nicely and your stacks of immortal nixkins can whittle them down with impunity, before going back to making you money.

I usually go for fireballs if I somewhat rushed arcane line (not really doable on higher difficulties, you need defenses) and a strong opponent comes knockin'. Fireballs are multi-purpose but you need to invest many promotions to make them worthwile, I usually try and have double shadow mana (nox noctis + palace usually but I'll build a node if n.n. is taken) to give shadow I to all my adepts, having blur everywhere is just too good imho. Then I go for infrastructure mana, unless I manage to have exactly what I need at the right moment I concour that Meta is mandatory, but just for upgrading a mage or two, then it gets swapped for something else. Mind is gud but also is spirit! I feel growth is a bit redundant, a drop in the sea for your mega cities, maybe it could be worth it if you switch to Esus. But why... really? Also, try Air instead of fire, maelstrom is a great spell, it gets shadowed by other direct damage spells BUT those other option are usually limited in number or unique. While you can have droves of angry semi-naked lightning chicks...

 

[baturinsky]

When I try to launch Mastr of Mana (installed as suggested above), I get a million of errors like these, same as when I launch RIFE

Is my Civ4 version wrong? But FFH2 works perfectly...

 

[baturinsky]

Svartalfar's world spell is more fun than I expected. "No, we don't know who was those guys that razed your city defences. Why is this city now ours? Err... referendum!" Got me a nice peninsula with the only Mithril on the map out of this. That idiot had a windmill on it, so he is clearly not fit to own it.

 

[oscar]

First time I've played in years. Got Luchiurp, settled too close to the Grigori who came and knocked me around a lot and quit.

Tried again as Clan of Embers and doing much better. Rantine alone after a few levels is stronger than most civs entire armies and easily gets 99.9% chance of victory even against axemen. Kicked Doviello's ass and now taking on Khazad whose earth thane guys and hero should at least be able to put up a semblance of a fight behind walls.

 

[baturinsky]

First time I've played in years. Got Luchiurp, settled too close to the Grigori who came and knocked me around a lot and quit.

Tried again as Clan of Embers and doing much better. Rantine alone after a few levels is stronger than most civs entire armies and easily gets 99.9% chance of victory even against axemen. Kicked Doviello's ass and now taking on Khazad whose earth thane guys and hero should at least be able to put up a semblance of a fight behind walls.

AI is quite aggressive early game, especially if it senses you have inferior army. If you could survive until construction with Luchiurp, you'd be able to dominate with your hero and wooded golems.

 

[Matalarata]

What baturinsky said. In the beginning (50 turns or so) warrior spam is the only thing keeping you alive, unless you are somewhat isolated from the rest of the world and even then you're sometimes forced to sacrifice a number of warriors to a particularly nasty monster nest.

Also the Luchiurp are strong, one of the strongest races actually, but not exactly newb friendly. You need a good grasp on the tech tree to play them well imho.

 

[baturinsky]

When I try to launch Mastr of Mana (installed as suggested above), I get a million of errors like these, same as when I launch RIFE

Is my Civ4 version wrong? But FFH2 works perfectly...

And, yay, I have fixed the problem. Game is using dumbfuck Windows XML parser, which was asking Windows locale whether dot or comma is used as the decimal symbol.
I have changed locale settings, and game loaded without a hitch.

From Ashes of Erebus mod (modmodmodmod of RiFE)

 

[Turisas]

Fucking furries.

 

[baturinsky]

Can't say I like Ashes of Erebus. Lots of changes, but I doubt it's good changes. For example, trade routes are generating food and hammers now, instead of, well, trade. There is much more buildings now, but effect of most is reduced.

What's worst, AI is dumb, compared to FFH2+Extramodmod. In latter, AI is aggressive, and if it wages a war, it comes with an adequate stack of death. And they are actively and effectively fighting each other.
In AoE I was declared on once, AI has sent none, except a couple of recon units that was likely there by pure coincidence. And AI are not fighting with each other either.

 

[Matalarata]

Bad mod, with a bad kitchen sink development, if you ask me. That particular civ was an ongoing joke about the lead modder, dunno the details but he had an avatar with a golden eye. Someone shopped the hamster to have a gold eye too, he loved it and adopted it as new avatar. Then, some time later, the hamstalfar were coded. Iirc they play very similar to the Ljosalfar.

Anyway Base FFH2 was always better imho, wildmana/MoM was the promising modmod. Basically because, at least initially, the AI was the deciding factor in design. Each time a new feature was proposed the question was: Looks cool, can the AI use it? The answer to said question meant the feature was tried or discarded. Then Setij (or whatever the lead/main modder of MoM was named) went crazy and decided that nothing was right in basic Civ, he started thinkering with the combat system, introduced lots of bug and definitively bleed away what little player base was left. Before disappearing from the net completely. At least that's what I know. I'd love to have a bit of insight on the matter actually, first iterations of MoM were good.

 

[baturinsky]

I'm trying to get into MoM now. It's definitely interesting, but too confusing. Very few hammer-increasing buildings and improvements. If I understand right, most improbements usually give you resources for unit upgrades. But these are extremelly expensive. Like, 300 turns worth output of one plantation just to give your unit +1 power, that will wear out after several fights.

On the other hand AI is aggressive, maybe too much. I have lost my first game early because of stack of 20+ archers incoming.

 

[baturinsky]

So, my experience with modmodmodmods

Rise from Erebus + Ashes of Erebus - meh. Added new civs and lots of additions and changes here and there. But there is no system to that, so changes are rarely to the good, and quite often to the bad. Gui is particularly crap. What's worse, AI is dumb. I have not see them fight with each other, they develop slowly, and one time I was declared on, enemy has not even bothered to send an army my way.

Master of Mana + Master of Mana Xtended 3 - great. Master of Magic meets Alpha Centauri. Very different economy, very different magic. Support spells (such as Blur) work as auras, so you only need to have a one adept per 6 or so troops to get full bonus of all support spells you have learned. Summoned units and priestlikes also have their own sets of auras. Town-buffing spells are global enchantments, that work like in MoM (lots of mana upfront, some mana for upkeep). Lots of terraforming spells. I was a little disappointed, though, that serious terraforming spells like earth->ocean is not working outside your borders. Also, city does not seem to became coastal when you sink a square besides it.

And what's especially good, is that AI is adequate. They expand, fight with each other, and can use doomstacks, even overseas. I had very annoying war with Svaltalfar - they have parked their doomstack just outside my borders and atacked on the same turn they declare. Just like I do And if they see that one city is defended, they move to another and attack it instead.

Master of Mana 2.11 + Master of Mana Xtended 4.1 - very different from previous. Pretty much everything is overhauled, especially economy. In Xtended3 many buildings and improvements was giving special resources - lumber, herbs, stone and metal. They were mostly luxury stuff (not in game luxury meaning) - you could buff your units with them, rush building with stone etc. But in Xtended4 they are mandatory for most improvements and buildings. Also, improvements cost gold and resources to build too. Even farms costs a hefty sum of gold and stone now. So, most of time you can't build shit, because you don't have resources. It's quite annoying, but it makes game much more deep, and you have to think hard on each turn much earlier.

There are total of FOUR tech trees - standard scientific, magic earned with magresearch, religious learned with faith, and new one - cultural, learned with guess what.

On the minus side, AI seems to don't know how to think hard enough, so they do very poorly, compared to Ex3 or vanilla FFH2. On the other hand, barbarians are buffed through the roof. As a result, you have to train superhighlevel units to siege barbarian forts, and then you can just stomp with said superunits over any AI civ you meet. Funny thing is, one of my two superterminators is a measly Devout (Elohim scout), which was with me from the urn 1 and just has gradually grown to a monster she is now.

But even without AI doing anything, game is a very fun builder, and if you have fog of war anywhere on map you will keep finding there things to kill.

Some screens from 3.0

With auras, equipment, mutations and whatnot units tend to have tons of effects on them.

Dwarf attacked me from the sea. But they had no chance against endgame heroes and national units

And one from 4.1

Just to show how expensive building improvements is.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Have they streamlined it at all? I remember getting really frustrated with FfH and its various modmods because the endgame just got ridiculously bogged down, with turns taking a truly painful amount of time - even relative to TBS standards. After a bit of digging around it seems like this is at least in part due to the AI's tendency to madly spam trash units and then just leave them lying around (every turn the AI has to cycle through every single unit and decide what to do with it). Has there been any improvement at all? Because it seriously diminishes my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent mod.

I swear, DosBox running Master of Magic on like 3000 cycles is less sluggish than this game at the end.

 

[baturinsky]

Have they streamlined it at all? I remember getting really frustrated with FfH and its various modmods because the endgame just got ridiculously bogged down, with turns taking a truly painful amount of time - even relative to TBS standards. After a bit of digging around it seems like this is at least in part due to the AI's tendency to madly spam trash units and then just leave them lying around (every turn the AI has to cycle through every single unit and decide what to do with it). Has there been any improvement at all? Because it seriously diminishes my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent mod.

I swear, DosBox running Master of Magic on like 3000 cycles is less sluggish than this game at the end.

In those modmods I tried, AI is making turns near instantly even late game.

On another note, developer of MoM Ex4.1 has awakened from year long hibernation and is actively working on it again. You can give him suggestions/bugreports/questions etc here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=548898

 

[black_imp]

Well, since i happened upon this, i might as well answer to a few things.
first things first, i'm one of the team members of AoE (and was around for both FF and Rife too). The kitchen sink stuff is mostly a remnant from the rife era when we had too many designers for one game . Since the start of AoE, we have mostly been trying to clean stuff up. Three civs that were among the weakest ( Dural, Frozen, Hamstalfar) have been moved to modules, so can be disabled easily if needed (some people still like them, which is why we haven't completely cut them). dural might get a rework at some point, the others unlikely. One more was removed due to being completely unbalanced (The Jotnar, overpowered for players, but AI was unable to use them). Steps have been taken to see if they can be reworked.

The reports i've seen here on AI don't really match what i've seen or other reports i got, apart from the AI declaring less wars, which i intend to adress by removing some of the diplomatic modifiers that were added and tend to limit bad relations. The really lacking part of the AI was on magic use and i've started implementing changes based on the MNAI mod to improve that.

In terms of half-baked features, Guilds should be removed soon, Master buildings reworked in some way, Mekara will likely go the Module way. The building and tech tree organization is something i'm working on but it takes time to have something interesting. IDW doesn't really bring anything to the game so i'm considering cutting it.

Some of you mentioned GUI issues, could you maybe expand on that ?

 

[baturinsky]

Some of you mentioned GUI issues, could you maybe expand on that ?

Mostly, GUI things overlapping each other, pedia and civic screens being harder to use than FfH.
I had to reinstall windows, so don't have it right now.

 

[Matalarata]

black_imp, if you're referring to my post above, I've exactly 0 experience with AoE. I was speaking about old Rife mainly, sorry for being vague.
Also, welcome to the codex and enjoy your stay. My personal suggestion (not referred to anything you posted) is to immediately grow a thick skin, usually modders are... tested first, around here.

 

[black_imp]

Mostly, GUI things overlapping each other, pedia and civic screens being harder to use than FfH.
I had to reinstall windows, so don't have it right now.

it might have something to do with resolution of the game, i'll have to test.

black_imp, if you're referring to my post above, I've exactly 0 experience with AoE. I was speaking about old Rife mainly, sorry for being vague.
Also, welcome to the codex and enjoy your stay. My personal suggestion (not referred to anything you posted) is to immediately grow a thick skin, usually modders are... tested first, around here.

I've been at it for at least a dozen years on several games, so i'm used to having occasionally difficult people to deal with, but thanks for the advice.

 

[Eyestabber]

HEY GUYS!

It looks like esvath and Carnival Bizarre (the dudes behind MoM Xtended) are back with a new version of the mod:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=548898"

Anyone willing to try? :D

Maybe they fixed the mentally retarded AI? I remember a game in Xtended 4.1 on which Tatsunke never founded his first city. Ever.

 

[covr]

So, how do you all find latest Xtended 5.3? I've played one game on easy (Prince), just to check how the game has changed. AI wasn't very dumb, but also wasn't very smart. Every enemy at some time had tried to conquer me, there were some serious doomstacks in play. However they were having too little magic units, I believe that 1 out of 30 was a mage/adept. And the armageddon counter stopped at 6 on the turn near 400, which was strange (2 good civs, 2 neutral, 2 evil).

calling Eyestabber and baturinsky

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Reading this thread and seeing people badmouth the Kuriotates made me want to play as them and see if they could be done a bit more horizontally than normal. With Extramodmod I discovered an interesting civic balance change: Mercantilism (which was pretty ass in vanilla compared to the other civics in its line) now provides 2 free specialists. With Liberty, which also provides a free specialist, and Guilds, which allows unlimited sages and merchants, even a size 1 city can run 4 sages/merchants. So basically I played them fairly normally at first, just building the real cities while choosing the industrious trait to build the Great Library, the Guild of the Nine, and as many of the wonders that improve all your cities at once that I could. As I started to get closer to Mercantilism I mass produced settlers (easy due to expansive trait) and founded as many settlements as possible.

The key here is that settlements don't cost any maintenance. All of a sudden I had a ton of these things everywhere costing me nothing and bringing in ~24 beakers per turn. I was able to research Engineering in one turn immediately after switching to Guilds because I had so much science. And with the Guild of the Nine, every settlement becomes a recruiting ground to hire mercenaries, whose cost barely matters because my research is almost wholly independent of the science slider and Kuriotate econ is already great. Now my giant mercenary army led by a gold dragon is rampaging through the world, instantly replenishing all losses at each new captured city. feelsgoodman.jpg

This is the only time playing as anyone other than Lanun that I've had such a massive tech lead on Emperor. It's not the most overpowered thing I've done in FFH2, but it's one of the most fun.

 

[Northstar]

Erebus in the Balance does indeed attempt to implement some balance changes, but their version of "Balance" HEAVILY favors warlike nations like the Clan of Embers and thus indirectly weakens relatively peaceful builder-civs like the Elohim, Kuriotates, and Ljsofar by doing far less to strengthen them... Great for aggressive, fast-paced gameplay, but if you have any kind of attachment to playing as the "good guys" (Kael, like the designers of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri had a bit of a soft spot for builders and pacifists, and created a game balance that gives them a fighting chance- indeed the Armageddon Counter itself was originally a kind of negative feedback for warmongering by harshly penalizing Evil civs) then you're better off with just More Naval AI...

Plus, the current modmod maintainer for EitB is kind of a jerk, unlike Kael, who was a complete gentleman and a good person- which I think reflects in his favorite civ being the Clan of Embers (violent brutes) and his favoring Evil warmongers in the game balance...

For a little context, Kael was such a good person and complete gentleman he rarely said an unkind word about anyone unless severely provoked, as I hear, and his "Donate" button for Fall From Heaven 2 actually leads to a donation page for UNICEF and a blurb about how making our world better would best honor his work.

The modmod maintainer for EitB, by contrast, gladly cusses out people he doesn't like, hints at how people ought to give him donation money, walked the fine edge between cheating and unconventional strategy in a couple of his PBEM's, hacked player passwords whenever he felt one was falling behind in PBEM turnaround time, and ignores any design suggestions for EitB he doesn't like.

My brief exposure to the modmod maintainer for EitB left a foul taste in my mouth (as foul as orcs must smell!) that I shall not soon forget, whereas Kael is the sort of person who left everyone he met with a sort of warm tingly feeling afterwards. Even now his "Donate" button for FFH2 leading to UNICEF continues to do good in the world long after he ceased developing his amazing game mod...


In short, EitB is kind of an acquired taste. It doesn't remain as true to FFH2's original spirit or lore as you might think, changes the game balance to unduly favor extremely aggressive tactics even more than in vanilla FFH2, and the modmod maintainer was still a jerk worth boycotting the work of, last I checked...