Civ 4's Dark Fantasy Masterpiece: Fall From Heaven 2

[@rachelcmaj7]

your point about modding in the 2000s is spot on! one of the things that drew me to civ 4 as a kid was the ease of both downloading and installing mods, and also the ease of actually altering xml/python lead me to foster a deep fascination with how computers and games work. civ 4, and the things it brought with it, will likely never be seen again in gaming and especially not from civ, so it's always going to hold a deep place in my heart. great vid!

[@suedeciviii7142]

The fact I could dick around with the editor in Civ 3 did the same for me!

[@mctavish800]

i've been playing this mod since the original FFH2 was released and i fully agree with your review, this mod is awesome and so are the people still working on it! i just wanna point out that the scenario that comes included with Civ 4 is a prequel to FFH2, Ashes from Erebus is definetly my most favorite modmod aswell and it also feels the most complete by far (and balanced) there's also another one called magister modmod wich is also still being developed but adds a lot more lore related features + the naval mod you were talking about and re-does the magic system to be more lore friendly aswell, its kinda unbalanced but if you ever wanted to know what some of the things that could have been in a Fall from Heaven 3 mod would have look like this is your mod. im still of the opinion that this alongside some of the doom/hl2 mods, is pretty much in the top 3 or even outright the best mod ever created for a game, the amount of work, love and collaboration between modders and community members that made it possible is something that you simply couldn't replicate today, and that's a shame, but im very glad i got to experience it.

[@youmukonpaku3168]

@2:00ish - the packin was in Beyond the Sword. While I believe Kael was still involved with designing it (he went on to design the game currently known as Fallen Enchantress, which...of all the 4x games that exist, it's one of them) it doesn't seem to actually use any of the FFH mod's technology. This is why it only has the unit summoning spells, and it's pretty much a demonstration of Civ IV being used to run an RPG, rather than the magic 4X FFH is. It's a prequel to the main game, depicting the defeat of the god of winter and thus the end of the Age of Ice (the thing the full mod tells you about in the opening text we all skip right before it tells us we haven't figured out roads or mining yet.)

[@ShadowOfCicero]

Fallen Enchantress was the soft reboot of Elemental: War of Magic. Kael was first given creative control to fix THAT game after the release was completely botched. (So botched in fact that anyone that could prove they bought Elemental in the first three months got Fallen Enchantress for free.) So from that perspective, he made an OK game.

[@BasedPeter]

Man, that notification snapped me back into my early teens. I remember playing around with the Civ 4 mods one summer vacation when we had no internet and I saw this one, as well as the space one, Final Frontier I think it was called? and also that one extremely creepy one where you piloted mech suits in the future and fought monsters and it starts with this like 5 minute lore video on you and your friends on this abandoned planet. Wild stuff!

[@suedeciviii7142]

Yup! They were all packaged together with one of the expansion packs for Civ 4.

[@therexbellator]

FFH has been on my to-do list for years now. I've been on a fantasy kick lately thanks to Baldur's Gate 3 so I think I'll take this opportunity to give it a try for real. Thanks Suede!

[@LordJazzly]

Ooh! If you're playing 4X games with fantasy settings or elements, Age of Wonders 3 has one of my favourite expansion phases of all the 4X games I've played. Cities are important production and research hubs, and it's good to have more of them, but the raw resources for building units and casting the spells you've researched mainly come from map sites. To claim these, you've got two options - build more cities, or build forts. Cities are better long-term and claim more land, but they cost pops to build, and population is what determines a city's ability to claim map tiles (so building settlers shrinks your city borders); forts are cheaper, quicker to get out there, are built by your road-building unit, and instantly claim a decent chunk of map - but they can't grow or produce anything, and if you want them to, you need to found a city on top of them (which gives you a free wall upgrade in your new city, as a bit of a compensation for spending more gold overall). Just having two different expansion options, and income generators on-map, gives it a better tall/wide trade-off than probably 90% of 4X games I've played, since there are choices to make early on, each of which give different advantages, but ultimately you want to be both tall and wide.

[@phijkchu_chansey6239]

LMAO that comment about AI art had me dying

[@arirahikkala]

Look up Icewind Dale II's character portraits, you might be surprised by how many of them look familiar because they were "unknowingly contributed" to FFH2. As was a lot of other art. Doesn't make the game any less valuable, but it does make Suede's comparison pretty ugly.

[@1503010]

@@arirahikkala guilty as charged. My 15yo ass ripped some symbols from age of wonders 2 and created some fantasy civs which were included in the first version of the mod (as in first pages of the FFH1 thread on civfanatics). When I downloaded Civ4 during lockdown, I was surprised to not only find the mod included in the game but also some of ‘my’ contributions

[@franslair2199]

@@arirahikkala yeah it used to be basically the norm that you just lifted art from other games or from artists' online portfolio without as much as an attribution, much less asking for permission.

[@TheAsharedhett]

Great video! I would actually adore it if you tried Realism Invictus for Civ 4, which you would likely find just as appreciable from a gameplay and quality standpoint, though it is about enhancing the historical feel rather than being a fantasy world.

[@jaythompson5102]

I playes this mod so much around a decade ago. Coop play is so fun. Fav unit was the lunatic i used to drop them into continents i hadnt explored fully yet and let then go ham.

[@TheDuder2003]

My favorite fantasy 4X strategy game!

[@rosss07]

this sold me im going to download see how it is

[@suedeciviii7142]

Let me know what faction you check out first!

[@rosss07]

@@suedeciviii7142 will do but first I have to get the dlc haha

[@pappyball21]

Great review thank you!

[@jdcp8976]

Very good, Fall from Heaven was my favorite mod (and preferred way to play CIV4 or basically any strategy game cause this one is my favorite and imo the best one) until I played Realism Invictus. You should do a video about that one! I really like war games like HoI and for tactical combat stuff I always like them over CIV4, but it was the refined mechanics of Realism Invictus what truly made me feel like I had finally achieved the perfect game to simulate wars.

[@bradberkely7448]

This is awesome. Never got into the modding scene but i might try this one

[@dominicbell4912]

Yeah i've prob spent more time playing Fall from heaven 2 and the submods more than any other civ game. Its so cool its been kept going now as Ashes of erebus. My fav feature is each nation is a completely diff way of playing the game.

[@suedeciviii7142]

Yes! I'm a big fan of asymmetric gameplay when it's done well.

[@BlakesSanctum]

Great video, although it's a shame you didn't mention or look at the Master of Mana modmod as that's still going strong as it apparently pushes FFH2 in a more magical direction closer to good old Master of Magic. Oh and hey if you're a Civ 3 man through and through who loves scifi & fanatasy mods like me then you should cover Drift's Master of Myrror 1 or 2 mods for Civ3. I helped restore his lost files a few years back and plan to do my own video eventually too. Oh and what's the name of your fantasy Civ3 mod you mentioned? Curious to see if it's one I already know about or not.

[@suedeciviii7142]

What I'm getting is that I should just posted the entire modmod chart

[@BlakesSanctum]

@@suedeciviii7142 haha possibly as it would have covered all bases I guess (in fact I better make sure I do that when I do my video lol), however it's more the omission of MoM that's a shame as most of the other modmods are pretty small and have been inactive for a while now.. really it's only the bigger Ashes Erebus and Master of Magic spinoffs that still seem to be still going strong.

[@suedeciviii7142]

@@BlakesSanctum Genuine ignorance, not a snub, I swear! Oh, fyi, I may at some point actually play Master of Magic.

[@sanyaskillpro]

This was my favorite modmod when i played. The magic system is so much better. Also units, buildings and items requiring a specific resource adds an additional layer to strategy.

[@Sneedstein]

The cool thing about this mod is that the lead dev got hired buy a studio to make his own fantasy 4x game, sadly it’s okay.

[@suedeciviii7142]

Kael is a legend and I'm glad he got at least some opportunity to develop a game.

[@LeonLayer]

@@suedeciviii7142 Do you know how he continued after FE? (Kael was the bast part in this I believe; brad wardell also medled in the design a lot and it didn'e seem to have bettered the outcome)

[@blimperator]

@@LeonLayer he worked as game designer and lead game designer on several stardock games, was VP of something for a while, and is now working at Amplitude

[@franslair2199]

He was hired to fix elemental: war of magic, FE is significantly better

[@Draregkoeliekalie]

I loved FE, but the AIs inability to develop its troops made it such an easy game

[@MagicNash89]

Friendship ended with CIV3...

[@ArianoPaluda]

A lot of the leaderheads are taken from icewind dale character pics

[@suedeciviii7142]

Damn, you're right! Never heard of that game

[@evilparkin]

Have they fixed the random late-game crashes? That was my main issue with base FFH2 years ago - you'd get ~300 turns deep into a game, and then it would just stop working. Some bugs with AI and spells or something. You mentioned the lack of documentation - there was a whole 200+ page manual made 10+ years back for the base FFH2 as i recall. Not sure about a manual for the latest updates, I haven't checked it in years. Keen to get back into it now! Thanks for the reminder.

[@suedeciviii7142]

I had no issues with crashes when I played

[@matteosberna735]

Wonderful mods! But are the descriptions when a great person is born from a mod mod? I don't remember them being in Fall from Heaven II

[@LemonCake101]

Tides of Crimson for Civ 3 when?

[@ajunjahi]

Thanks! Gonna try out FFH2 some day.. Any thoughts on the Caveman 2 Cosmos mod?

[@VittamarFasuthAkbin]

last time I checked it, it felt very bloated. I suggest checking "A new Dawn" out, which has a much leaner approach

[@blueberrymuffintime1375]

seems very similar to the first age of wonders

[@jessel3621]

"Civ 4 limits expansion" lol. I mean it does but not that hard.

[@johncalabro8710]

Civ 5 is still my favorite. Hey Sude have you played the Civ 5 mod Vox populi ? It fixes up a lot of Civ 5 problems

[@suedeciviii7142]

I haven't played Civ 5 in years, or any mods for it

[@johncalabro8710]

@@suedeciviii7142 If you need any help I recommend either Marbozir, JumboPixel or PC J Law KZbin guides or let's play. If you ever could do a Co op game it would be cool (I know it is probably impossible but getting one of them Marbozir or PC on for a quick let's play. I think Civ 5 is the best Civ for multiplayer weirdly., I love doing Co op games with my Brother on Deity. I think Civ 3 and Civ 4 is the best for single player.

[@johncalabro8710]

@@suedeciviii7142 I also just check I have a 1000 hours on Civ 5. Man I would hate to know how much time I spent on Civ 3, I almost fail high school due to that game

[@kane_lives]

Bro, your video's bitrate is too low, it's not easy on the eyes to read in-game text. I upvoted, but you should take a look at your video recording settings.

[@suedeciviii7142]

I was under the impression that it was my graphics card (Civ 6 was having the same issue, that's why I've pivoted to older games), but do you know of any settings in OBS that could be causing this?

[@kane_lives]

@@suedeciviii7142 What is the Bitrate of your recording? It's in Output -> Recording -> Encoder settings of your OBS.

[@suedeciviii7142]

5000 Kbps. Is that right?

[@kane_lives]

@@suedeciviii7142 That's too low, try 8-10k. Just record the same in-game screen for 5 seconds each with 5k then 8k then 10k. You should be able to tell the difference.

[@suedeciviii7142]

@@kane_lives Thank you, very helpful. I just assumed it was my graphics card, but this is a 20 year old game, it would be outrageous if I couldn't capture it

[@psyoenda]

What’s ur first civ game?

[@BrockSamson18]

Civ 3. It's why I watch this channel so much!

[@suedeciviii7142]

The one I started with? Civ 2.

[@martinbuhrer3893]

The first one. Sid Meier's Civilization.

[@Gigantotherium]

Civilization 2: Test of Time. I still wish I could play it today, the pre-packaged mods with it especially took up so many hours of my elementary and middle school life.

[@ShadowOfCicero]

A friend introduced me to the series via 3. The first one I owned was 2.

[@addikt]

You should cover Rise & Fall of Mankind for Civ 4. I think that's the 2nd most popular mod between FFH. I didn't like FFH because when I play Civ, I want to play Civ set in a real world, not a fantasy setting.

[@montivdg]

Is this mod playable on Steam multiplayer?

[@blimperator]

yes it is

[@suedeciviii7142]

It is, yes. In fact, let me know if you'd like to get involved in an upcoming organized game.

[@KarmasAB123]

First!