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hm i didn't play caelum much and have not an as long expierience in dominions as you zen and stormbinder but i think stormbinder is really right about caelum .
until turn 20-30 you have a very hard time to defend against a good caelum player i think .
that all their troops have magic weapons is brutal.
earlygame some caelum fliers can kill almost every sc pretender who needs to buff first and has little protection .
[...]
so i think stormbinder and cohen are really true claiming caelum is too strong .
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And I think that anytime that Cohen and Stormbinder agree on something, they're 100% wrong.
You talk about Caelum's magic weapons being a problem in the early game. How is that a problem? The
only thing magic weapons do is allow a unit to hit ethereal units normally. How many ethereal independents are there? For that matter, how many ethereal pretenders? (
Oh no! Caelum can give Vampire Queens a problem! Boo hoo!)
Okay - Caelum can give _some_ SCs and pretenders a hard time. But only if the SC / pretender is all on his lonesome, and even
then most SCs or Pretenders will slaughter Caelum's flyers, causing them to rout PDQ. If they have troops with them, even quicker.
Similarly, Caelum's flyers aren't much good against indies, at least no more so than regular archers. The melee flyers rush up, get hit a few times, and rush right out, routing in a heart beat. They're
frail and they don't have terribly good morale.
If you want to use the Storm Guards and Iceclads, you
aren't going to be taking any Sloth 3 - those puppies cost almost 3 times as much for resources as gold, meaning that you probably want to take productivity if intending to use them much. Similarly, the sacred Temple Guard is very resource intensive, and it
can't fly.
In addition, they're all size 3 except for the non-flyers - have too many of them in a province and they start starving, even picking up diseases the same turn they moved in sometimes.
Then if you use Mammoths, temple guards, wingless, you're not flying and not mobile.
And as other people have pointed out - False Horror and Orb Lightning aren't low level spells. Nations with death magic can do just about as well with small Groups of mages casting Raise Skeletons / Raise Dead, and they can get the spell
much quicker - research level 3 instead of 6 / 5.
Vanheim and LoT Man can also take many indies with not much more than their mage commanders, and Vanheim doesn't even need to use their top-tier mage to do it.
Frankly, I think people are currently whining and complaining about Caelum because they've gotten smacked around by the nation, often when played by Norfleet. And if Norfleet was cheating in most of his games, then bloody hail, Caelum romping _then_ doesn't really signify much in real terms, does it?
Instead of going on about how Caelum is overpowered, try
playing it a few times. It ain't that great for real early expansion, and has numerous weaknesses and issues. Probably half the nations are better / quicker for early expansion (first 10-20 turns), and some can get just as many or more pretender points from their scales - Vanheim, the aquatics, Jotunheim, Pangaea, and most definately Abysia.