Fall from Heaven II is a dark fantasy mod for Civilization IV. The Age of Ice has ended, what is left of the once great empires of man have formed into small tribes, ready to rebuild and retake that which was lost. Fall from Heaven II requires Civilization IV Beyond the Sword patch 3.17 to play.
Read all the hype, so I had to go for it. Even on "quick setting" bring a lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again, wow you built a barracks (training yard)! Too slow for this lover of almost every classic turn based game ever made. (FX-6300, 8GB RAM, R9 270, 512GB SSD, so not a slow computer). I felt like I spent 98% of the many hours I played with several different races and settings just waiting to hit "next turn" again. (I REALLY tried to find something to like!)
Balance was horrid with barbarian units with 5-8 promotions running around when I have maybe 4-5 cities. "Hero" barbarians pop up way before it's possible to have units that can counter effectively. Barbarian cities capable of pumping out 2-4x the units you can produce city for city will appear all around you before you get 10 techs into the tech tree. Scouts, hhahhahhahha, dead without micromanaging and luck (if you aren't an AI player, because AI explore units can dodge 50 Giants and Griffins while trekking across vast continents, it's amazing.......). At least barbarians rarely plundered anything in any play-through so that's a bonus.
Buildings are too expensive for the effects and most decent buildings with worthwhile effects have a negative "balance" to them as well, which is unnecessary as the game moves at almost glacial speed as it is without introducing civilization drag.
Governmental choices suffer from the same "balance" issue. You can't have a useful positive bonus without an equally disastrous negative bonus. I find I rarely use more than 3-6 governmental choices across all categories, unless you have specific racial bonuses that make others more useful.
Resources just made my head hurt in the way they were used/tied into the buildings and units, I didn't enjoy resource management or claiming at all.
Initial city placement is commonly within 1-4 squares of one or more "lairs" and one or more competing cultures.
The dungeons and graveyard looting are a nice touch, except that 90% it is something negative and often enough so bad it makes you cringe to hit he button to explore or loot them.
Graphics remind me of Civ:ToT where it seems the artists think heavy shading makes everything look better, it just makes me squint and want to adjust my monitor brightness/contrast. Some races units all look almost exactly alike, especially in the unit thumbnails.
Many civopeida entries are empty or overfull of useless information without telling the player anything helpful.
Do I feel like I could win this game against the AI? Definitely. Do I feel like I would enjoy any of it? The 2% I actually did something other then wait to hit end turn again? Doubtful.
Civ4 fans should try Legends of Revolution, Final Frontier Plus, and the Star Trek Mod as they are all move much faster and are far more entertaining than Fall Asleep While Hitting Next Turn II.
I can tell this team put a lot of work into the mod, I appreciate that. I can tell there are a lot of real fans of the mod and I respect that. Unfortunately play-by-mail progress that is often crushed by ridiculous "barbarian" forces just as I finally start getting my kingdom started, is not fun to me.
I will try playing this and Sword of the Stars at the same time on my two screens so that I have something fun to do while I wait for the FfH2 game to advance, and I will see if I can find a way to like it.
******Update*******
Put in another 4-5 hours, found games regularly crash in an unrecoverable fashion after turn 175-200 or so, making the glacial pace of the game even worse! When the game crashes it also corrupts a few of your vanilla BTS files, so make sure you do a repair or reinstall. I HIGHLY recommend you avoid this buggy, slow, terribly balanced boondoggle of a mod.