Bay 12 Games Forum

Sword of the Stars. Pretty much the only way to take over enemy planets is to first kill all inhabitans with nukes or biological weapons. (Yes, you can force planetary surrender bla bla later on, but most of the game, genocide is the ONLY option.)

I prefer the mass driver way. Kinetic kill for the win. You could also use shuttles, I think, but as I've never tried, can't confirm.

There's also the Masters Of Orion series. In MoO2, besides nuking from orbit, if you invade you can choose between exterminating the native populace or integrating them. MoO3 also counts, if you're a weird, deranged and perverted person who actually like it (like me), as while you lost the option to exterminate the population after landing, your standard practice is to glass any planet you want to take from anyone else, specially if the owner is neutral to you, as due to a quirky of how the AI is programmed they consider a much, much worse offense to invade the planet than to simply nuke it from orbit and recolonizing it.

Just an FYI, I think you have the Elohim confused with the Bannor. The Bannor are the militant, rigid lawful good guys. The Elohim are the sort of diplomatic neutral good guys (whose main power is that they can conquer an enemy city and continue to produce the other faction's units there). Sheaim and Elohim in a game together can get interesting because each side has a ritual they can build (repeatedly) to raise or lower the Armageddon Counter.

I think I did indeed got the two confused when describing them.

There was a spiderman game for the DS, I forget which. Other than that I don't remember any truly bad game I've played, so either I never played, or if I did I must have excised it from my memory to flee from the trauma. I actually like Master of Orion 3 (sure, there are better 4X's, but if you play in the right mind set, of not giving a shit for the micro, and just play around on the macro, it can actually be pretty fun, if not very deep) for example. If I found a game I hated that much, and was not because it was actually literally unplayable and broken (let's say, like that race game where the trucks can't go foward, the devs forgot to put any AI, etc.), the game must be really, really bad.

The game is starting now, huge Erebus map, normal speed, acient era, temperate climate (at least for start, let's fix that), medium sea level, 10 computers oponents, making sure the Sheaim (the devil worshipers), the Elohim (the militant "good" faction, following the order, a fanatical and extremely militant religion with focus on discipline and obedience), and a random neutral leader (just to have at least a neutral leader, instead of all good or all evil). I'll not enable permanent alliances (a change from my usual games), but I'll enable All Features, so I can show them all of. I would enable last days to increase urgency, but as I'm evil I would be extremely crippled by it, as I would be one of the first to suffer with hell terrain, and I don't worship the demons.

I'll be play Auric Ulvin, of the Illians, at noble difficulty because I hate cheating computers. I'll edit this post with the episode when I finish it.

Proper play:

Starting area, plus starting area with a little exploration and place where I'll put the town. Nothing much to say. Cold terrain is actually good for me, so no complains there, and the deer is nice. Without techs I'm not able to know if there's any metal around, so that's a big question. I have one scout and one warrior. I built one extra scout and one extra warrior, so I can explore more and have extra defenses against barbarians (a real, present and permanent threat in FoH2)
Tech. I'll start with crafting, go to ancient chants (for monuments, so I can get culture at a city I can possibly create.

Our present civic options. All of them are at a single type of option, so are mutually exclusive. We are using Natiohood, as it's the standard for Illians.

Exploration. You might notice I can see the good/neutral elves (the L-something. They're generally good with one neutral leader possibility. They're also imperialistic and ultra expansive. Expect them to be in one of the first places in points. Also, if you never played FoH2, you may find strange the amount of mountains there are around. The Erebus map (the standard map for the game) does tend to do so, creating walls of mountains. It so seems that my only way out is at that one square with a watch tower, at east, but it'll have to be confirmed with further exploration.

A little more exploration. Found one of the unique features. Odio's Prison. I'll see if I can transcribe (or if someone wants to do it for me I'll be more than grateful) the description, but on effects, it basically gives +25% combat to any unit near it (2-3 squares of distance max). Also found Raw Mana. Raw Mana is awesome, as it allow me to create a mana of my choice when I get the tech for it, which allows me to casts the spells of that school, with the proper unit and proper upgrades for that unit. Some kinds of mana also gives small general bonuses.

VOLCANO! We have struck magma! I don't think it have any real effect though, except maybe a small unrest penalty.

Tech! Nothing particularly important though. Starting Ancient Chants.

More exploration, plus killed the scout killed a wolf. Gave him hills promotion. Seems this way is closed.

Event. If I had order as state religion, I could start a golden age now. There's one event for most/all religions. So, unless you're playing Cassiel, you'll get yours some day. If you ARE playing Cassiel, tell the gods to screw a goat and go away. You are awesome, your adventurers are awesome, and you want all gods to [lost in translation] and [lost in translation], as they truly deserve for screwing with the mortal races.

More exploration, I seem to have found the way out my mountain cage. Also, nice a village. The previous two I had found only had a small handful of gold, so I didn't care to call attention to them, but who knows what this might brings.

They gave me a tech, nice! Or to be precise, it would be very nice if I were not about 2 freaking turns from completing it myself. Still, saved me a couple turns. Going to farming, because food is good.

Oops, lost a scout to a bear.

Oops, lost another scout to another bear. Also, more exploration. It seems there's only a single way out the mountain valley we're in.

A view of known resources, a view of our influence range, and a general view of the map, with the overall way out (as we know till now), and where the elven influence range seems to be, both marked.

The game will be picking up speed with more turns, and more options will be given, but for now: Suggestions of names for the Capital, and future cities? Any other suggestion you want to make? If no one makes a good point (for now I'll try to play my best (which is not actually very good). I'll surrender to your will a little later in the game, after we're established and I don't have to take and edit over 40 screen shots for the episode.

On more technical aspects, is the image size and quality good enough? If not, should they be bigger, smaller, just change quality, don't crop them? Is photobucket a decent enough host, or should I use another? Anything else I should consider?

This Let's Play will start later tomorrow if I'm not too drunk. If I am, it'll start when I wake up tomorrow. But for now, Let's Drink With Friends. I'll edit the first post with links to the the "episode" posts as I make them.

The system being inhabited is quite bad news. Unless you meant uninhabited, which is good. You don't want to find aliens so soon.

I'm also pretty you can make mass drivers unerring shoot from any body to any other body in the system, as long the destination also have a mass driver, as it sadly doesn't let you use the MD purposefully as a kinetic kill WMD. Distance is no issue either, you could make it a binary system it shooting from a planet in one start to other in another start, all that would happen is that it would take a while before the minerals start first arriving.

probably. I doubt there is anything that can break a permanent alliance. But I didn't test... I disabled them for that game, and I didn't want to summon basium ( although I kept that as a plan in case things started going badly)

I'm pretty sure that even if you were the one that summoned Basium, if you go Ashen Veil, he will declare war against you. Don't quote me on this though.

So, I trust we'll be seeing a lot of Ice and Entropy with the Illians?

I certainly hope so.

I'm setting the new tentative start date for this Friday, after my tests in microeconomics and probability.