You do not need to get lucky to use the Celestial Soldiers - you just need to empower any Celestial Master to air 2 or (preferably) to construct a Winged Helmet or a Bag of Wind, which requires construction 4.
Hardly onerous.
It
does mean that the use of Celestial Soldiers is more of a mid- and end- game tactic than an early-game tactic, but that is quite fine with me.
If you get lucky with magic sites (and T'ien C'hi is one of the best site-searching nations in the game), you can build entire armies around Celestial Soldiers in the mid-game. Cost-wise, there are few better summons in the game.
