Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

Just 70% shock resistance is good enough for practical purposes. Some lightning damage passes, but too little to really hurt and part of it gets regenerated. Even to take out stock (unequipped) Niefel Jarl you need 5-6 seraphs and quite a bunch of other troops to have enough time to kill him (and a lot of those troops will die). Besides, seraphs are getting discouraged by inefficiency of the lightning bolts and stop casting them. Of course on defense it may not be that bad as they can probably spam enough phantasmal warriors to stall the jarl. Considering that those jarls appear at 1 per turn rate it's not very efficient way to counter - you just can't hold enough provinces. Then very soon (if not right away) those Jarls will start coming equipped with lucky pendant and air-Jarls can't even be defeated with that plan at all.

It never came to my mind to try non-cold-resistance Iron Crows vs Niefel Jarl. I've tried it with completely disastrous results for Caelum. Initial attack did very little - I guess they were passing defense, but not the armour (Jarl had lucky amulet though). Then all nearby crows just got frozen while Jarls was killing them one per turn. Couple of seraphs weren't doing much better and eventually they got tired too. Only seraphines were desperately trying to get through MR until the end. The end happened when most crows were frozen to death (I think many more than Jarl has slayed with a sword). Of course, those crows that were close enough has already passed from chill and they've died too few turns later. I haven't tried to do exact calculations but I think that in your calculations you were underestimating the effects of cold and shield. Crows have virtually no chance to damage through both armor and shield (total protection of around 40) so they have to overcome shield parry (which I believe is irreducible). As they get tired from cold they chances quickly drop, so they really have chance to do any damage in first couple of rounds (and even that didn't happen in a couple of tries I did) which Jarl can regenerate. After that everything is stacked for Jarl - by the time closest crows freeze to death the further ones has already passed out, so nobody even tries to attack him anymore. With more seraphs that battle could be won, but essentially Caelum needs to bring an army to defeat a single Jarl while Niefelheim can just spread those Jarls everywhere while they still have an army to threaten Caelum's strongholds.

I don't see how Caelum can resists - that Air-9 bless just totally destroys any strong sides Caelum might have had. I guess if you're desperate enough you could try to play Caelum with Heat 3(!!) which would make Jarls very vulnerable and negate their chill effect (in your dominion), but it would be very hard on money. Well, maybe taking luck instead of order and hoping for good events... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Your pretender would be the only one to search for fire sites and forge those items, so it doesn't really look promising. And I don't see 5 scouts defeating Niefel Jarl - they may stall him (by spamming) if he attacks, but the problem is that Caelum doesn't have any affordable way to defend their provinces. Affordable may not be a right word because they could afford to keep 4 seraphs with small PD per province, but they don't have capacity to produce those seraphs. Scouts (or anything else) with skull talismans would be too expensive in gems.

Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

I'll admit I didn't actually try the iron crows. The one Jarl I did manage to kill was done in by a group of lucky flagrents I got. And there is a huge difference between Jarl and Jarls. If you have 4 jarls together then the iron crows can only gang up 6 to 1 and would be slaughtered.

If you are up for a duel alexti we can give it a try. I'm curious to see if an Air-9 would really be as effective as you believe. I'm certainly open to being shown that it is.

Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

In all experiments there was only one Jarl vs Caelumians. Plural form came from several experiments. Sorry about confusion.

Sure, why not. What map and settings?

Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

We can mirror this last match.

60 provences random map (very little water) all other settings at default.

Indy -5
Magic -45

I can host the game altough I need to look into a service that assigns a name to my dynamic IP... because sometimes it changes 3-4 times in a day.

If you have a better hosting option I'm open for it. We can also apply the hunter of hereos nerf mod if you want.

Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

Sounds good to me. Unfortunately I don't have any better hosting option. Should we start in online mode to make first 20 or so turns?

I'm not sure about HoH nerf mod, it's up to you.

Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

Alex and I played our duel (actually two) yesterday. The Air 9 blessing did not prevent a significant problem to Caelum. Primarly because he couldn't get out enough Niefel Jarls to make use of it.

For general Caelum strategy that I used see this thread
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...o=&fpart=1

The hurricanes were particurarly effective.

For the first duel I used order3, sloth3, cold3, death3, misfortune 2 and magic 3. My pretender was a vampire queen which "interesting". She was great for expansion after hitting Alt-3 but was not as useful as I hoped vs his giants (at least until the final battle). While I knew that she would be easily killed by a Neifel Jarl I was hoping that she could kill his normal troops and perhaps be positioned in a way where a Jarl couldn't reach her. Most of the time this didn't work out in my favor but few times it did. Immortality was great in that I didn't have to "risk" anything to try it out (compared to a ghost king or other stat superior pretender).

The second game I went with the same settings except production3 and a sage pretender. I was going to beeline toward huricane and thunderstrike but some unlucky events delayed it a few rounds. The production 3 was actually a huge help because I was able to field twice the number of archers compared to sloth 3. That helped a lot in the early expansion and later having a great meat shield against his forces. The second game ended quickly after the hiring of 2 heavy mercanary armies, 100 archers and 5 eagle kings destroyed the majority of his forces in one big battle. The 60 heavy infantry mercs played a huge role.

So besides Neifelheim who can challenge the mighty Caelum. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Caellum vs Neifelheim
 

Yeah, those hurricanes are a game winner. There's nothing Niefelheim can do to prevent hurricanes as early as Caelum can cast them and they work on non-coastal provinves too. So after the capital is shutdown Niefel's can't recruite their Jarls anymore. In a second game I just tried to go for rush which might have worked if our starting locations weren't too far apart (mayba around 10 provinces apart). In the end I couldn't really attack Caelum lands because of supplies (and I took growth 2!) so I had to split my armies and try to build fort in the middle which slowed me down and let Caelum gather forces. I'm not sure what would happen with luckier start, Caelum can still summon hawks to slow down the siege, but at least he'd have to spend gems he'd spent on hurricanes otherwise, and it wouldn't be good for his income either...