Early Age Civs
 

Who do you think is among the best civs for early age?

I found abysia to be quite strong but i havn't played the game enough to really know. I only stick to the early age as the game is complex enough to learn.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Hinnom, Lanka, Niefelheim

Re: Early Age Civs
 

I think it's bit too early to say Hinnom's power level is over 9000.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Mictlan uber alles.
oO

Re: Early Age Civs
 

I'll say Niefelheim. My vote is biased because I don't play blood nations.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Tien, Lanka, Niefle, Hinnom, Mictlan, Vanheim.. more or less in that order.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Best for SP or MP? In SP (I don't play MP) Niefelheim is probably the strongest, but I avoid them because I hate water magic. Marverni is strong too (although the mages are ruinously expensive). Helheim is quite strong with very thuggable commanders. Atlantis is also strong.

-Max

P.S. Edratman has a point. Some nations are very strong if you micromanage them properly. I guess what I meant is that Niefelheim is the most straightforwardly-strong. Just take a good bless, build a few Jarls, and go kill your closest neighbor. Marverni has excellent (gemless) battlemagic--again, that's about hassle-free magic at least as much as powerful magic. Blood magic is potentially great on the battlefield, I just hate carrying around blood slaves. And I'm uncomfortable with sacrificing virgins--I usually take growth over death because I want to feel benevolent towards my subjects. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Anyway, Lanka has great troops and strong blood magic.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

You know what might be interesting? If some of the more experienced players around here contributed to a chart, based on their own perceptions of the different nations. Basically rating on 1-10 scale the strength of each nation in early, mid, and late game. Then again on a 1-10 scale for ease of playability, with LA Ermor being the only 10, and EA/LA Mictlan somewhere around a 2.

If anyone thinks that such a table would be abused to pick easy win races, I'm not so sure. Players who have been here very long already have a pretty good feel for the game. However, used properly, this chart would help struggling or beginning players pinpoint nations that cater to their competence or weakness. I know that I would have loved such a thing when I first started. Initially, I labelled some nations as nearly unplayable, such as Caelum, because I just didn't realize they require a solid understanding of the combat system to use effectively.

If that idea isn't shot down too handily by the old men of the forums, I may start another thread, and would even be willing to collate the data. Might even be arsed to learn enough about forum coding to make it look all purty. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Early Age Civs
 

i must just think of abysia as strong cause they keep owning me in sp games, i have no idea why. i keep beating all the other civs until they come along.

they seem to have very high armour and low defence, any tips on how to counter this? in my current game i am formoria(sp?) and i killed both agartha and ulm without losing a battle but now abysia is attacking me and i'm losing battles.

And to MaxWilson: i mean MP.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Sauromatia as strong?
the best archers in the game period strong death mages blood access and low level magic in spades. Sure they might not be giants but they have damn near everything else.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Is there something wrong with ThunderStrikes and Shadowblasts?

Re: Early Age Civs
 

A large part of it is probably their heat aura, tiring your troops and making them easier to crit. Depending on your pretender choice, you may have multiple options, but I'd guess if you are very far into the game, and they are very big, you won't have a lot of time to develop something new.

So summons who are immune to fire, magic items for melee commanders that give FR (hard for you to make, mostly), and heavy evocation barrages (if you have a pile of Sorceresses and/or Kings at your capital). Sometimes in SP if the comp gets unruly in what is still basically the "mid-game", your most viable option is a researcher rush to squash their main armies. It's unbelievable (when you first see it) what 20 battle mages spamming thunderbolt can do to 400 heavy infantry. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Early Age Civs
 

JimMorrison:

Yeah, I think experienced players pretty much know what nations are good. 1-10 is too much, 1-5 would be enough. But I surely wouldn't say LA Ermor is extremely easy to play. Or that EA/LA Mictlan is the hardest.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Well that's part of the point, that not everyone will agree. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif That's why rather than have opinions tossed around here and there, I thought why not collate and average out the different perspectives, to give these newcomers a more complete and accurate base to draw from?

And just to note, I am basing this more on SP, because that is where newer players will cut their teeth. As far as LA Ermor goes, they were my first win against all Mighty AI, and I just walked through the game with almost no complications whatever. EA/LA Mictlan have been very hard for me to pick up. Between no dominion spread from temples, and the thusly heavily enforced blood magic reliance, these nations require more thought and management for a newer player, than most other nations. Again, as I said, these are just my own perspectives on it, but having a central repository for these opinions could possibly help sharpen the learning curve for new players, keeping them interested in the game, and getting them ready to dive into MP more quickly.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

On the other hand, even for beginners, if you remember to blood hunt a little and sacrifice, with a good double bless Mictlan will roll over almost any AI opposition.
If you really didn't want to mess with blood, you could probably get by with just one priest sacrificing the capital blood slave income.

It's a good nation to learn how impressive sacreds can be.

If you're playing more competitively, both blood nations and LA Ermor become micromanagement hell in a decent sized game, so few experienced players would call either easy to play.
Both are quite powerful.

I like the poll idea though. Strength will be pretty easy, especially broken down into early/middle/late game.
Easy playability would be harder to grasp: Make it clear that you mean ease to learn or something similar. It may not be ratable. Is it easier to figure out how to equip thugs to fight different foes or to set up a blood economy or to manage communions?
It may be easier to list for each nation the things you'd have to master to do well with it.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

The 'chart' idea sounds potentially intresting. Speaking for myself however, (and I'm assuming here that people consider me a veteran, with a couple of MP wins under my belt, even though I still think of myself as relatively new. Must have something to do with how vast this game is. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif) I would only feel comfortable rating nations I played myself (not including those I played in SP when I was still very new.) And perhaps a couple I waged long wars against and thought about playing in MP. Which would amount to maybe a dozen nations.

At that rate compiling a comprehensive chart might be somewhat slow going. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Well, I would probably expand the chart to 5 ratings:

Early Game Strength
Mid Game Strength
Late Game Strength
Ease of Learning (SP)
Overall Ease of Use (MP)

I think the spread of these 5 attributes would give players a good road map for developing their gameplay as much as is possible before entering into MP. I'd also be tempted to list any path that the nation has national mages with higher than 3, and listing what their highest blood mage is.

Anyone else have any thoughts on a 1-10 scale vs a 1-5 scale? I suppose I can see the merits of either, so I will look for a little more input on the matter.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Highest blood mage is less important than cost of cheapest blood mage. If you've got enough hunters, blood's easy to boost. If all you've got is 500gp B3's, you'll never have enough slaves to matter.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

In my experience 1-5 scales tend to illicit better information than 1-10.

-Max

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Well I mostly just thought that highest trainable Blood would serve sort of as a benchmark for the relative perceived Blood power of that nation. Obviously a skilled player can start a blood economy out of nothing, but this chart is more intended to serve as a development aid for new players, not a quick reference for the more seasoned (though I am sure some will be curious as to the results).

Re: Early Age Civs
 

I think a category for 'Content Quantity' or something similar would make sense - add up the total number of national recruitable units, commanders, summons and spells each nation has. Some starting players want to pick a nation with less/more national stuff to play with. Different people have different reactions to seeing Bandar Log's Conjuration and Blood research trees.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

While you're at it, have the contributors rank themselves on a scale of 1-5 for experience. I'd mark myself 2, "pretty raw." http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

The forum "rankings" don't correlate well with skill at the game, nor does the amount of trivia you know about unit stats and bugs. Unfortunately. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

-Max

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Well that's why I am avoiding a ranking system that puts one nation above the other, and rather just an evaluation of the nation, and how you feel it plays.

In the same sense as Olympic scoring, it will average out well. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif


Sombre- On the other hand, it might also show that most people's ratings will show a strong correlation between number of unique units, and their Ease of Play.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

For a five-tier system, I suggest "weak, normal, good" with possibility of in-betweens. Example:

MA ULM, FORGES OF ULM

Early Game Strength: normal
Infantry of Ulm crushes independents, but mages/pretender are needed to stop rushes.

Mid Game Strength: weak
Magma evocations, Troll Kings, Black Lord thugs. Perhaps a Forge of the Ancients for a turn or two.

Late Game Strength: weak/normal
With Earth Boots, Earth Power and a third boost (few smiths innately, Blood Stones, empowerment,elemental staves) MA Ulm can Petrify, cast Army of X spells, Earthquake, Magma Eruption and has few casters for Rain of Stones. Mechanical Men, Enlivened Statues, Iron Dragons, Golems and Iron Angels are everywhere.

Ease of Learning (SP): normal
Ulmish troops are cheap and you'll have abundant gold. This means that you'll have to build more labs, forts, and temples (in that order) until you can spend everything you have. Recruit mages everywhere, and learn to use independent units (prot 15 heavy infantry, archers, mages). Rely on your 10gp infantry, at least early on. Use Black Knights and Black Lords as shock force. Recruit an army of arbalests before something impervious to melee appears.

Overall Ease of Use (MP): weak
To succeed, you need diplomacy and long-term strategy. To survive, you need to counter middle-game enemies with just Black Lord thugs and magma spells. You have to choose between middle/late game effectiveness (rainbow) and early/middle survivability (combat pretender). And you should start a blood economy for the Blood Stones. At least your PD is decent and all your smiths can use the same script.






I'd like to see something like this. Of course, first we have to define Early Game, Mid Game, Late Game, what "learning a nation" means and what Overall Ease of Use means.

I don't know what the early, middle and late game actually mean, but my educated guess divides them up like this:

Early: You fight against independents and perhaps national armies. There might be combat pretenders or recruitable thugs with few items or buffs.
Middle: You fight national armies and summoned units with powerful spells or thugs. First good thug/SC chassises are summoned and perhaps equipped.
Late: Thugs are everywhere. SCs are common. Uniques have been summoned, Tartarians are massed, armies of mages fight each other. Immunities are common. Teleportation is important.

For lategame, what's the baseline? Perhaps
strong astral and death: good
strong astral or death: normal/good
no astral or death: normal at best

That's the impression I have from reading the strategy threads. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif



Overall ease of use would need some guideline like this:

Good mages everywhere: +
recruitables for early expansion: +
good researchers: +
can innately forge important boosters: +
your mages are good in battle, whatever their randoms: +
... and a single script works for all of them: +

bloodhunting: -
needs blood sacrifice: -
reanimating priests: -
malign dominion, freespawn or pop-eating: -
weak PD: -
must sitesearch manually with several different mages: -

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Very very good input Endo, I very much agree with most of what you have suggested. Obviously, I won't be looking for quite so much detail, as the actual chart will be just that, a chart. Anyone can feel free to go into as much length and detail on any nation they wish, in their post, but ultimately the ratings are not meant to be a strategy guide, that's where someone would go after they narrow down their choice of nation through the statistics provided. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif


Regarding a 1-5 (or 1-3 as in Endo's last post), vs a 1-10, I think that the scale of 10 works better within the concept of averaging. Even going 1-10, I may feel compelled to add a decimal, but with 1-5 I would surely add a decimal place. Ultimately this just makes the number larger, I would be asking people to rate on 1-5, but then would extrapolate that to actually a rating between 10-50. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif One thing that I think is important, is that the chart is easy to visually scan for the particular facets that one is looking for in a new nation to play, so I really do think that a 1-10 scale will work better than a 10-50 scale, and also better than a table filled with text, especially if that table could end up with ratings like "weak/average", which might tend to make it wrap to the next line on these forums. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Early Age Civs
 

JiMMorrison, your plan sounds very good and I like your thinking about numerical rating.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

I think it's much easier for the REVIEWER to review on simple terms. It's up to the maker of the chart to make a good chart out of that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

"Very weak, weak, average, good, very good" would be better than the weak/average I used above. If I make a new thread where people can post their opinions of nations with this five-point scale, I think it could really catch on. I'll wait until you decide how, exactly, you would do the scoring.


Here's what I suggest. Just exploit the fact that 0 out of 10 is NEVER given. Even the worst games or movies will get 30 out of 100 or 2.5 out of ten or half a star out of 5. Five scores is still enough to calculate averages - 3 votes for strong and two for very strong gives nice 8.8 result.

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
Very weak | 2
Weak | 4
Average | 6
Strong | 8
Very strong| 10</pre><hr />

This way, the lowest score any nation is likely to get in any single score would be slightly under 4. Ease of Use of 2.7 or whatever for Early Mictlan would be suitably bad. If it actually had a score of 0.8 or something, it would turn people off instead of just warning them. "Worse than Descent to the Undermountain? I'm not going to touch that!" etc.


Also, if we get a good discussion rolling AND we get the short summaries about the nation, it'll be a great addition to the StrategyWiki. We'll take the averages out of the chart, and add the comments about the various stages of game, and we have a short strategy guide and review.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

But you would want to accept opinions only from people that played said nation or against in MP game till end-game.

Re: Early Age Civs
 

Well the caveat would be that I would prefer ratings from people who could at least rate say half the nations in one or more particular ages. This is to show a breadth of experience that enables one to reflect more adequately upon their experiences, rather than only being familiar with 3 nations, and rating them only relative to eachother (then it becomes another shallow "rankings" exercise).

As far the MP rating, I would definately prefer players who had at least completed 3-4 full games. Obviously it is best if some of those games they survived to the end, and even better if they've even won 1 or 2 of them. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

There would obviously need to be some sort of oversight, using the pseudo-Olympic model, anyone whose scores deviate significantly across the board from everyone else, would likely be disregarded. Not to say that people can't disagree, but if someone seems to "disagree" with everyone else on everything, they are likely insane or just like to cause trouble.


I suppose Endo, you make a fairly good case for taking the numbers away from the submitters, to give them a clearer sense of what they are stating. Ultimately, the more contributors we get, the less accurate their rating needs to be in order to get an average that IS accurate. Though I think if I do so, I will use the designations of "Sad, Weak, Capable, Strong, Glorious". http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif I don't know, maybe it's my sense of creativity that just prefers numbers for such things, words are so arbitrary, numbers always say what they mean. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif