Video: Let's Play Return of the Elves

Loved the last Let's Play. Your voice is more soothing than Bailey's and NyQuil. Looking forward to this!

good to see ya back da..you put me on to this game and I'm loving it. Harbor now gives +50% gold. I would've built that first before a tax office since you had a ocean tile at the start. BTW I particularly love the length of your vidoes...so many lets play are like 10 mins bleh. Your are a great length.

Nice to see another one of you let's play series Das! Loved the one you did for Elemental, great to see them here too.

I like your lets play series and thank you yet again. Expect one of Beta 4 of Fallen Enchantress when it arrives as well

You pack your cities to close for my liking i don't like it when city grows and cant build anything cause there is no more space.
Other than that thank you for the videos they are really nice.

Yes, this is probably one of the main differences to the Civ concept of cities. There is no drawback in spamming them. In my first games I was also placing cities very carefully. Now, I just try to build as many as I can, although not always at minimum distance of 4 tiles. Soon, you will find that the huge number of cities provides you with enough gold and food or mana. Building cities asap is one of the keys to beat the game.

Just watched Video 2.

I would of taken the Human Settlers down to the south to get that donkey for trading post. You also said the humans don't have anything special but that is not correct. On those mana fields they could build Magic Garden +10 Food/Mana building. They are also the only race that can build silver weapons on silver. The humans also get the Treasure House building which is an extra +100% gold, making them really good at gold cities on resources that have high gold output. Each race really only has about 3 resource unique resource buildings and 1 of those is the red dragon eggs building for all but the elves.

As for those who say not to cluster cities so close because they don't have room to grow. A city takes about 75 turns to reach size 10. A size 5 city with radius 2 contains 18 hex for possible building, while a size 10 city contains 36 hexes. The max size a city can reach without buff spells is 14. Give how slow cities grow after size 10 it's likely to plan that most cities will only reach size 12 before the game is over.

There is often plenty of space if you pack the cities in as tight as you can. For the vast majority of cities you can easily get to size 9-10 with building space to spare. However depending on terrain you can often start running out of space fast.

When building your cities though it is best to expand outwards. This is because as soon as a city expands it's borders it claims that land so no other city can build there even if that city is in range. This means if you plan poorly and build out laying cities first then fill in the gaps in the middle of your empire last the outer cities will expand their borders leaving the inner cities with almost no land as they will be stuck with radius 1 buildable land.

Which brings me to the another point on the human settler location now that I think of it. Putting it in the middle of two cities that will grow faster than it will greatly reduce the amount of land it has access to.

since we are beating on Da I'd like to say his skipping of treasure makes me want to punch the monitor..and you should play monster race Da..they are the best imho.

Just finished Video 3.

Taking war with AI over paying. Nice move

The AI does have a little bit of an issue though in that it can only demand gold you actually have on hand. The way you get around this is query up a bunch of units in your capital. All of that gold is effectively put in reserve and AI can't make a demand for it. So instead it's demands will be much smaller and more reasonable.

On the war front the AI sucks on any map with water. 2-3 range units can easily hold the line so that they can't land troops. Those two archers should be able to hold off whatever comes easily.

Also that spell the AI is using is Fire Storm. You make it sound like it is that warlocks specific power when anyone can research and get it. He just starts with it and his AI is such that he uses it a lot.

I think this might of actually been in previous video but I just now remembered it. The flying ships are not unlocked through the harbor tech line the way undead airships are. Instead they are up the Elven Mana tech tree through the Chamber of Flight.

You mentioned you might use the Donkey's for melee fighters because the elves didn't have any, but that's not true. The elves actually have fairly good fighters. The Taishar Knights are very good. They may seem a bit over priced compared to other faction's fighter but they come with a heal ability which really makes up for that and they have really good resistances.

I am glad you are doing this and look forward to all your let's plays. Thanks!

Spyre2000 said:

The AI does have a little bit of an issue though in that it can only demand gold you actually have on hand. The way you get around this is query up a bunch of units in your capital. All of that gold is effectively put in reserve and AI can't make a demand for it. So instead it's demands will be much smaller and more reasonable.

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I think this is fixed now actually! I used to exploit that all the time, but now the AI just seems to rightfully declares war on you now if you're broke.

Also Das, you're a beast for playing an XL map. Even a large map is too much micromanagement for me.

unclean said:

Even a large map is too much micromanagement for me.

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The micromanagement in the game is not that bad, even on L and XL maps. Most of your cities should be specialized so it's simply building the next building in the line. There are 4 main city types, Gold, Food, Mana, and Units. The elves have a 5th type with R&D though. Once you realize this it takes very little time to query up all the building commands.

Most of the time spent on a turn is in moving all the units around. But that is the bulk of the game since it is heavily combat oriented.