[Endless Legend] The Cultists

This past weekend, I realized that I was in a bit of a rut in Endless Legend and playing the Broken Lords faction repeatedly since they’ve become my favorite so I decided to try something a bit different and play with the Cultist faction instead.  I’ve read a little about them and I’ve played them once before, but it’s been quite a while so I didn’t really remember much about them at 1st.  This time I paid attention and… they’ll always have the glaring weakness that they only are able to have 1 city so they’re very vulnerable to being attacked, and they seem to start a little slower than the other factions, but by the end of the game, well…. let me show you the screenshot of my city:

This is simply nuts!

Assuming you don’t already know, you can open it full-size by right-clicking it, selecting “Open in New Tab” and then editing the “?w=(somenumber)” off the end of the URL for it.  The really relevant stuff is in the top on the right — 53 population +103 workers from converted cities, 6353 food production, 1891 manufacturing, 5170 science, 2752 gold, and 7607 influence per turn, with all my workers being under the influence section.  That’s insane!  That’s a complete empire’s worth of output from my single-city.  You can also see down in the lower right that I’ve got 9 armies out in the field.  I should have a garrison in the city also, but I’d just emptied it and was about to build a new army again.  Yeah, maxed out Era 6 army in Palladium Gear + accessories and it would take 5 turns to build 8 units.  Any other Empire would need 4 to 7 turns per unit with all their population devoted to manufacturing.  Insane!

So how is this possible?  Well…. the way the Cultists work is this:

• They can only have the 1 city, but they can upgrade its districts to level 3 which gives them a very large bonus to production.
• After a minor faction village is pacified then they can spend influence to “convert” it to the cult.  Doing so gives you a worker in the capital and also allows you to extract the resources of the region in which the village it located.
• You can convert villages in any unclaimed region, and at a greater cost you can also convert villages inside the borders of other factions, though it ticks them off if you do, and they tend to attack them and then use them for themselves again
• You need to keep a lot of armies in the field to prevent other factions from attacking your converted villages — they can do so without declaring war on you, so you must be constantly vigilant.
• The villages themselves spawn units, but they’re the “bog standard” unit of the village, not like an upgraded one that you can build if you assimilate a minor faction, so they’re weak in your armies, and not really that big a roadblock for opposing factions to attack.

Something that also really helps is that early on in their faction quest they get an item that gives them +35% to attack, defense, and initiative (at least I think those are the 3 stats) and it also gives you the skill Regeneration 2 which means your units self-heal each turn in combat and much faster out of combat.  Your 1st unit is “support” so it’s also a healer, so if you have that trinket equipped your armies are *very* hard to kill.  I find I like to get to the size 6 army asap and then use 1 Preacher (support/ranged/healer), 3 Fanatics (cavalry/tanks), and 2 Nameless Guards (ranged) along with a Cultist hero (tank) for a nice balance.

If the market doesn’t have any Cultist heroes available, the Broken Lords heroes work pretty well too, they just don’t get the awesome bonus from the faction trinket.

Also very helpful is to unlock the marketplace as soon as you can and buy one of the Necrophage heroes that has the Slavery skill.  What this does is give you a large bonus to Food and Manufacturing for every worker you have in your city due to conversion of the minor faction villages, and that’s why the numbers for my city in the screenshot up top there are so insane.

So anyway…… there you have it.  Convert lots of villages, field lots of armies, get a city hero with Slavery hero to take even more advantage of the converted villages, and then just kill everyone else becuz you know… they’ve got it coming 😉

Happy gaming out there!

[FFXIV][Civ5][Endless Legend] A Month? Oops!

My new look

And here I’ve let a month go by without posting.  Mostly since I’ve been doing as noted in the last couple of posts — 1 expert run per day plus the Vath Tribe quests for 90 Lore tomes 5x per week in FFXIV.  On the bright side, I’ve gotten all of my gear except my weapon (and 1 ring) to i230 and I’ve even gotten enough Lore tomes to buy the 7 tokens I need for my weapon too, I just haven’t been bothering to run Alexander 8 Normal to get the weekly token that the weapon also needs 7 of……  I’ll get there eventually.  It’s not like I’m doing content where I need anything higher than i200 anyway.

Expanse Barding

I also went through and bought all the barding I could off the market board, so… more looks for my Chocobo.  I was kinda impressed that the Ice Barding looks like my Lore Casting outfit.  But then I went and decided to glamour the outfit so I wouldn’t look like “Generic Caster #9572.”

My new Cavalry Elbst

I’ve also completed the Sahagin Beast Tribe favor grind and bought my Cavalry Elbst.  It’s a lot of fun to ride when back in the no-fly zones.  I’m now working the last of the (non-crafting) Beat Tribes — the Sylphs.  I’m at Rank 3 and need about 6 more days of doing it to hit rank 4 for my Goobue mount.  But man…… these quests are frightfully annoying and that’s at 60 where I don’t have to dodge around mobs since I’m so high level they ignore me.  I cannot imagine having done these at 50 when everything would be chasing me all the time.  The 2 common quests to have to do a FATE which takes a half-hour to pop aren’t really that wonderful either.

Levin Barding

I popped into the Gold Saucer to check on the MGP price of the flying turtle mount, and somehow fell down the rabbit hole of Chocobo Racing.  I’ve got a Pedigree 3 mount now to rank 31, so soon will be able to retire it and breed up a Pedigree 4.  All so I can repeat the process and get a pedigree 5, then a 6…… but somehow I am finding it compelling to do now, where I didn’t before.  Go figure.

Tidal Barding

Since the daily stuff in FFXIV only needs me to log in 5 days a week, the other 2 days are seeing me playing a lot of Civ5 and Endless Legend.  Not much to say about them other than “they’re fun” and “I hit ‘Next Turn’ an awful lot.”  But hey… they’re fun, and that’s why I play them, so there you go.

Ice Barding

Happy gaming out there!

I liked the Ruin 3 spell effect from this angle, so I took the shot

[FFXIV][Endless Legend] Void Ark Down!

Bard Level 51 Appearance

This past weekend in FFXIV I made it to Rank 7 in the regard of the Vanu Vanu.  This is high enough to buy the Sanuwa mount, so yeah… that happened.  I also managed to get both my Bard and Machinist jobs to level 51, so they’re eligible to go in to Dusk Vigil now.  I ran it often enough during the tank leveling that I the level 51 i120 weapons for both classes, and the full left-side as well, except the helmet.  Only have 1 “Aiming” accessory on the right side, but I was also in full poetic which is also i120 anyway, so I really just swapped gear for the appearance and slightly better (but much nicer looking) weapons (i115 to i120 for Bard, and i110 to i120 on the MCH).

Running through the Void Ark. We may have had a few summoners along….

I finally ran the Void Ark.  3 of the 4 bosses were really easy.  1st one was almost a tank and spank, 2nd one I really don’t remember, so there couldn’t have been much to it.  3rd one sends out a lot of raidwide damage, so we actually wiped on it the 1st time, and on the 2nd time, the healers in my group of 8 still couldn’t keep us up (I was reduced to spamming my own Physick on myself at times, as well as combat-rezzing other players), but we had it down to less than 20% by then, so the other 2 groups were able to finish it off.  And then the 4th one felt almost like a tank-n-spank again, especially compared to the 3rd boss.  I got my Mhachi Farthing and upgraded my Summoner chest piece to i210 with that.  Since I don’t plan to run the raid again until next weekend, I also “blew my weekly loot roll” on an i200 Jacket of Aiming and won it, so that will be nice when I eventually get BRD and MCH to 60.  I also had enough of the … um…. log thingies that you buy with Centurio Seals to be able to upgrade a 2nd left-side piece, but I did a ring instead so that I can buy a 2nd i200 ring to replace my i190 Gordian one.  Except I haven’t run experts in so long, I don’t actually have enough Esoterics.  I jumped in the queue for a bit, but after 15 minutes it still said it was reserving an instance, much less assembling a party, so I decided not to worry about it.

That looks cool, I wonder what it is?

Instead I logged out and moved on to my “new hotness” that I’m still learning how to play.  A friend suggested Endless Legend to me, and said it’s similar to and maybe even better than Civ5.  High praise coming from him, and Steam had it for a mere $30, so.. I pulled the trigger.  I did their tutorial thing, which basically just showed you a few of the mechanics, then started a 2-played “Newbie” game.  The AI opponent went on an expansion spree early, so while I did just fine getting 3 regions settled, he had 5.  But I had better technology, so my armies walked all over his cities and I won that game with an expansion victory.

Oh, they’re teleport-y flying thingies!

I still felt really lost though so I looked up some guides, read some of their forums, etc.  And thus armed with that new knowledge I tried a 4-player Newbie game.  I got to the point where my tech victory was a foregone conclusion, so I pulled the plug on that one, since I still wanted to keep learning more about the game and strategies and whatnot, not hit “Next turn” another 60 times until I finally got all the technologies researched.  I started yet again, this time with a different race (Drakkens instead of Ardent Mages) to see how the play style differed.  Didn’t seem a huge difference in style, and since I was still newbie-level, I could have easily won the tech victory, but I decided to go for my racial victory instead which involved a lot of quests, which (oddly for the supposedly diplomatic race) had me conquer another race’s capital and install my own governor in it as part of it.  But anyway… yeah, I did the quests, and eventually was in process of building a wonder that would have won the game when it completed, but then the quests that I was doing had me power up some derelict spaceship and when it launched that gave me a victory instead, which seems odd since I thought the quests for victory lead to the wonder building, so…. I still have a lot to learn, it appears.

I caught this self-portrait during the cutscene after the Ark and liked how it turned out

Still and all…. usually if I’m playing Civ5, sure I’ll play later than I intended, but I’ll also be tired and looking a the clock the whole time while internally yelling at myself to just save the game and go to bed already.  Endless Legend…… I didn’t feel tired, so I didn’t look at the clock and when I finished that last game there…. 3:30 am.  Oops!  I’ll have to be more careful as I play this going forward.  I think I shall try the Cultists next, but not for a few days yet.  I’m still catching up on my sleep from that night, after all…..

Happy gaming out there!

Such power! Such might! How can a netherling do that?

My new “flying snake” mount. you know it’s mine and not a temporary quest mount becuz the shield behind me is in Idyllshire, not Sea of Clouds 😉