[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Chris Byler:
[*]The Raven Guard are pathetic.

At least they're affordable. Beats the Iceclads and Temple Guards, whose resource costs make them nigh-unaffordable.

[*]Maximum cold-2 for the theme (analogous to Blood of Humans). This is a serious limitation (it costs them points to hurt them economically, see the BoH threads for further analysis of this point), but I'm giving them some nice other toys. Also, less cold actually *helps* the raptors, which is thematic. And it makes the theme feel and play more differently from standard Caelum.

Caelum still prefers Cold-3 anyway, just as BoH prefers Heat-3 nonetheless: You just suffer the penalty of being one scale off in addition to losing out in the points. You want to harm the theme economically even MORE, while it already sucks now? You're out of your mind.

and their priests are probably the worst of any theme in the game (270 gold for a Holy-2 priest - ok, he's also a pretty good mage, but in terms of priest power for your money, awful).

Yeah, Raptor Caelum is by far the most religiously awful nation in the game: You have NO priest recruitable outside your capitol whatsoever, and your ONLY priest is a measly holy-2. Even Ulm can outpreach you, and that's just sad.

It seems that they should compensate with military might to rival Ulm's - but instead they have the same subpar military as base Caelum, possibly even worse (giving up the temple guard for the unimpressive Raven Guard and the crappy Raptor). And their climate still works against indies and mercs.

Well, they still retain both the excellent Archers, and Mammoth/Wingless combo. That can stomp an Ulmish army easily enough. Also, the inability to even *TAKE* Heart of Winter means that your climate is not actually going to work that strongly against Indies/Mercs. In practice, Raptor's pitiful priestly ability combined with inability to strongly force Cold means that your territory, especially at the edges where you actually fight, will often not even be in your dominion strongly, so will NOT actually be Cold-3, where you suffer the actual penalty.

I've put together a mod with all the above except the cold restriction (which can't currently be modded), but I don't have a place to host it. If there is any interest I will submit it to Illwinter or see if I can get it hosted somewhere.

Actually, the cold preferences of Caelum *CAN* be modded. This was done back when Caelum was bugged and preferred heat-3 instead of cold-3, and so Catquiet publicized his "Cold Caelum Mod" fixing this.