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

Below is a link to the Ashes of Erebus Discord, including download instructions.

[rachelcmaj]

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!

[mctavish]

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.

[TheCJRhodes]

Fall From Heaven 2 was my favorite way to play any of the Civ games. I fell in love with it while following along to an old SA Let’s Play thread, which was absolutely excellent.

The different religions, civs, characters, and events make every playthrough spicy, especially if you also install some of the smarter-AI and other cool mod-mods.

[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!

[nikolatasev]

This was the best mod ever. And probably the best 4X ever. The design choices were genius. Like the dwarves getting bonuses from the gold per city you get. If you make new cities it divides the treasury by more people, so get less bonuses. This means the dwarves are incentivized to play tall, not by hard limits but by flexible rules. If you find a crazy rich place with silver and gold - a new settlement would be definitely worth it.
Also, the surface dwarves using constructs - they don't gain experience, but they don't get crazy from the apocalypse.
And the argageddon counter was great. I wish we had more of this. The Demons and Angels spawning - each living good or evil unit that dies is reborn as their unit, and they can get crazy strong.
The only thing I disliked was the Flaming Zombies. They have massive collateral damage, are a starter unit, and I always had problems dealing with them.

[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!

[youmukonpaku]

@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.)

[tksodak]

LMAO that comment about AI art had me dying

[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.

[rosss]

this sold me im going to download see how it is

[dominicbell]

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.

[petermoody]

Thanks for this review! I had forgotten about this mod, but got really into the Civ2TOT Midgard scenario for a few months about a year ago, and this seems like a great thing to try next

[chinchin]

I've been playing this mod on and off for well over 15 years now and it's honestly one of my favorites. One of the things I wish modders would do is give the clan of ember their own religion that is mentioned in the lore yet was never implemented in any way.

[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.

[jdcp]

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.

[consistentbug]

5 months late but, fall from heaven 2 is basically a remake of a game called Master of Magic. Same light vs dark, city building, magic system, PvE etc. It's out on GOG and since you did a replay of Civ1 it won't be too jarring going into it. It's fun and got a unique way of combat for its time (basically what endless legend has now)

[mogshot]

actually closest to Fall From heaven 2 is likely Endless Legends and probably age of wonders now.

[jaythompson]

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.

[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.

[jasonquigley]

Just a point of information regarding the in-game artwork:

Most of that artwork was taken from other games or existing artwork. For example, at least half of the people shown are character portraits in the game Baldurs Gate 1/2 or Icewind Dale 1/2.

Don't forget, the mid 2000s weren't just a time before AI art, they were also a time of rampant Piracy and non-existent respect for copyright! Bitorrent was de rigeur.