Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

Hey! I am new to the game and was wondering what a good build for a T'ien C'hi pretender was. I am currently using the Mother of the Sea (or whatever she is called) with 7 Water and Astral, 3 Order, 1 Death, 3 Misfortune (her good luck outweighs this quite nicely.) Thanks in advance!

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

I think 2 paths of 7 each are not very efficient, id try to get at least one up to 9 for better bless or dont set the magic too high and go for scales.

Im not sure if you mean the "Lady of Fortune" (the one with luck and astral/water)or The "Mother of Rivers" (the one with the matching name) but on both it is possible to get W9 bless, and on Lady of Fortune you can even get a W9S9 Bless but you would have to imprison her.

Tien Chi has lots of Sacred Summons, so a Bless might work.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

I know the idea is generally looked down upon, but for SP a rainbow works well (as many 4's as possible without killing your scales). I went 3turmoil/3luck/2heat/1death/1sloth/1drain/sleeping I think. Very tough and slow early but I got my initial surroundings then straightlined it to my opponents to make a strong border.

After that I took the rest of the indys within the border, did some heavy site searching and took the magical lead (with 4 in almost everything I was able to produce enough boosters between summons and construction to cast/build pretty much everything). It was easy after that.

Which era
 

Which era of Tien Chi are you trying? It's a neat idea to combine a luck Pretender with misfortune, however i generally combine luck and a luck Pretender to really max luck out.

For a thematic, if not necessarily efficient, Early Era Pretender, i like the Sage with 4E-4A-4W-4N-4F-4S, sleeping, as this gives your Warriors of the Five Elements, well, five elemental bonuses.

For SP only, in the Middle Era, i like taking the Luck Goddess with 4S-2W, and really max out the scales, taking 3-Order,2-Productivity,2-Growth,2-Luck, and 2-Drain as the only negative scale.

In Multiplayer, i'd consider a Pretender having 3 or 4 Fire a necessity, as it gives you easy access to fire arrows to help out your already good ranged archers. A Phoenix with 9F and maybe 4~6A, in any era would be helpful to both your mages and your summonable sacreds.

Re: Which era
 

Try to take sloth before death with Tien Chi. Also a generic w9 dragon with dom 4, order3, sloth 3, growth 1, magic 1, misfortune is a pretty standard build across the build for Tien Chi. THough MA Tien Chi, you might want to go imprisoned oracle uber scales instead.

Re: Which era
 

Early era. Any tips for starting out?

Re: Which era
 

It depends on whether you're going bless or not. But as a rule of thumb, composite archers will form the bulk of your army. Starting tips tend to run the same for every nation actually. An excellent starting guide for beginners is found here :

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...o=&fpart=1

Or alternatively you can click my link on my sig for how I tend to play magic nations.

Essentially you'll be eyeing soft targets first in a ring around your capital so you can add more reinforcements to your expanding army every turn. Also make it a habit to recruit mages non stop. That is how you win the game, by having more mages than the other player. Try to not mix archers with fast non shielded infantry (for example, W5e's with the exception of the occasional decoy), because your archers will shoot them up if they engage in melee too much. Your meatshields are mostly for purpose as hold and shield to block troops from reaching your archer line. EA early-mid game is literally all about archers and blesses. Also I tend to take a solo expansion pretender, usually a dragon chassis to get even more of a jump start into expansion. Script it to fire closest x5 and attack closest and you'll be able to take out a majority of the regular indies. Later on you get nice summons to buff out the holes in your melee lineup, in the form of water demons, as well as using construction boosters to beef your mages. The flying celestial masters are really good evo casters but I get slightly annoyed at S&A being almost pigeonholed to taking growth 3 for any serious long term games. Also look into alteration 6 for frozen heart so your non cap mages can do something other than wank off. =\

Re: Which era
 

Don't Celestial Masters come with a chance for a Nature random? So at least some part of you CM crew will not have old age problems.

I'd also throw a few chariots in the mix as well at least in the early game, at least as a flanking force vs. some of the weaker indies. C'tis chariots are better and almost as good (if not in some ways better) than heavy cavarly, as they get a length-3 bite attack, but Tien Chi chariots have better morale.

Re: Which era
 

W9 bless makes your sacred troops tough as nails, as they already have reasonably high defense (and Quickness really lets them rip through enemy ranks).

Re: Which era
 

I avoid negative scales with T'ien Ch'i, but if I must (if the map is small enough I don't think imprisoning is smart), I'll take drain. T'ien Ch'i research is pretty good anyway and the weakened magic helps resist magic duel spells. I suppose with the upgrade and characters that lower the risk of bad random events chaos and misfortune aren't as devastating as before, though it still hurts income.

I personally like the Celestial General, he's a good get out there kick *** and spread dominion pretender, and the only major thing is he has A-5, for air helmets. With the updated system I might do the same thing with fire magic. Then he'd really rain down death.

MA T'ien Ch'i bless I'm not a really big fan of. It only applies to Red Guard, mages I don't want on the front lines and some summons. Enough magic to fill in the holes with recruitable mages and high dominion win the day more often than not.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

LA T'ien Ch'i has no need of a pretender! T'ien Ch'i KILL! T'ien Ch'i CRUSH PUNY NATIONS! HA! HA!

Really, given that you have such magic versitility and an awesome sacred, and mighty army, insane PD.... your pretender should boost your nation.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

I play MA T'ien C'hi a lot. This probably is terrible MP advice, but it works for me in SP.

I use a sleeping crone with rainbow 4's in E,A,S,D and N. I think I have 5 candles and 1 magic. This ensures that I forge all the boosts required to upgrade the recruitable rainbow mages into potent battle mages/forgers and also Cast Forge,Gift of Health and Natures Bounty with appropiate boosts on the Crone.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

for access to avery magic i think you could use:

F3 (burning skull + Flaming helm)

A4 (minimum for helm and Bag)

W2 (ring of water + Armor of the sea)

E2 (earth boots + probably blood stone)

D2 (skull staff + ring of sorcery + skull helm)

N2 (staff of nature +1 + amulet of nature+1 + ring of sorcery + 2 handed staff of nature +2)

S4 (neat to have big here, i think you need S6 to ring of wizardy wich you get with the astral cap and the amulet and later get to S9 to wish. minimum S3)

B2 (could be B1 since you couldnt use blood without blood slaves anyway. with blood 2 you can get to blood 4 with both amulets, sorcery and wizardy)


I dont remember how much you need yo get each of the 2 staff of elemental magic. it was 4F 4W and 4A 4E
its in page 282 of the manual.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

I've been studying pretender design for MA T'ien Ch'i, and this is my advice:
- You have healers. This means you want a living, awake, out-of-the-box, supercombatant pretender, non-undead. There are merits to either the Cyclops or the Wyrm - the Wyrm is much cheaper.
- Order is great. You get national bonuses for Order on top of that, so take Order.
- You also get bonuses for Fortune - specifically, you get very efficient bad-event prevention out of the minister of rituals, and you get a number of really cool unit-triggered events. So take Fortune.
- Your army is effective without being too resource intensive, and your mages (with the exception of the geomancer, who is kinda useless anyway, at least as far as I can tell) are not old, so you take Sloth and Death.
- You have every magic path except death and blood covered, so you don't really need magic on your pretender.

So, you can afford:
A domstr 10 Awake Wyrm, with 3 Order, 3 Sloth, 2 Death, 3 Luck and 1 Magic. For long games, consider 2 Drain and 1 Growth, instead.
A domstr 10 Awake Cyclops, with a 4th point of earth magic, 3 Order, 3 Sloth, 2 Death, 3 Luck and 2 Drain. Note that this guy gives your communion mages a bit of recuperation, which is not entirely shabby.

Attack blind with these units, when they get afflictions, send them home to be healed! Build up a massive force of archers, you can cast flaming arrows and wind guide as a mid game strategy.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

if you can prevent bad events then you could use bad luck

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

Preventing bad events is good for Fortune, OR Misfortune, or Turmoil - in particular, while taking Fortune makes substantially more of your events good, you also get more bad events just because you get more bad events total.

In the case of T'ien Ch'i, this is completely overbalanced by the nation-specific events which, as far as I can tell, require Fortune and possibly Order as well to get - but a systematic study of events would help a lot.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

Don't take Death with TC. Ever. Their Cm's are old as are their imperial alchemists (if I recall). If anything I would take Growth 3 if you can afford it somehow. (most likely not) I wouldn't bother with fortune either, misfortune is probably better since you can cancel out a few of the bad ones hopefully. The real loss is the butt kicking immortals.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

I am in 2 MP games with EA TC. I have to say that other players tend to look upon EA TC as easy prey because of the human troops vs all of the EA exotic troops. In both games I was attacked early by rushers. In the first game I went with an awake Dom 6, S6,W4 Lady of luck. Scales:Order3,sloth1,growth1,Misfor2,magic1. Just as I was being rushed I had CONST 4 researched and the Pretender fully outfitted. The Pretender was able to hold off the rush. The high Astral is really proving awesome in the late game. An all around good pretender for early,mid and late game.

In the second game I was rushed strongly by an E9 Cyclops/Abssyia. I went with a Lich D9N4. This bless is hard to expand with-- you really need creative scripting to avoid losses. This bless really shined against the heavy armor of Abyssia though. I researched Evoc early. The 2AN of the blesseds shredded even the high armor of the Abyssians and Cyclops.

I think you really need to have a plan vs early rushers due to the percieved weakness of early TC.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

KtB - that's simply false, with the new patch, the MA guys are old considerably less than half the time, and the alchemists almost never. Early or Late era you'd be crazy to take death.

The immortals are great, and so are the additional income ("calendar") events which are quite common if you take the requisite fortune.

Re: Good Pretender for T\'ien C\'hi?
 

I have quite poor luck then, my CM's always tends to be old or near old stage. Unless you mean a new new patch (not sure when the latest patch came out) Same with the alchemists. Considering national mages are soo good and geomancers not bad, I prefer to pass on death. Fortune is a bit iffier cause like I said, immortals are really good.