[Cainehill]

Boron said:

How do you come to this conclusion ? Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

Like some other people, I'm getting very tired of answering your questions when you're too lazy to look for yourself, since it's fairly obvious that, if you ever played T'ien C'hi, you didn't bother to use their troops.

How are their troops better?

Archers : Composite Bow (damage 12, range 35) instead of Short Bow (dam 10, range 30) does more meaningful damage and has slightly better range. The Imperial Archers have almost as good a precision (11 vice 12) as Caelum's, have better armor, and far better morale (12 vice 10). And TC also has Imperial Crossbows, to do armor piercing damage against high protection units. The only real edge Caelum has is - flying.

Infantry : Caelum's flying infantry mostly suck. They have a top damage of 14, from the troops with the Ice Blade. (Frankly, I suspect a bug - an "Ice Lance" should do more damage than an "Ice Blade", but it's 3 and 5 respectively.) They also have relatively poor morale (except for the Iceclad and Storm Guard, which are _very_ resource intensive).

TC's infantry have a very nice top base damage of 20, from both glaive-bearing troops. (Glaive - damage 10, length 4, a great weapon.) They also have pike wielders, for a length 6 weapon for repels. And spear wielders with tower shields, great against archers, better than the round shields most of Caelum's troops have (exception being the Iceclad / Storm Guards that, did I mention, are incredibly resource heavy?) And TC's Imperial Footmen have morale 12 - quite nice.

Then TC has the Imperial Guard, with very high morale (13), good protection, 15, decent attack (11) and good damage (17 with their falchions), combined with that nice tower shield.

And solid cavalry, including _great_ blessable heavy cavalry in the Red Guard.

On the other paw, Caelum's troops can affect vampires and such. This doesn't really have much of an effect until mid to late game, when flying infantry can take down some vampires or even swarm ethereal SCs before they cast their buff spells. And they fly.

But with the exception of two troops that are tough to acquire in any numbers, the bulk of Caelum's troops are flimsy and not terribly good against other mortal armies, like most independents.

That's why Caelum has great, cheap, mages. Because the bulk of their troops aren't very good at all, while TC has perfectly solid troops - it's only their mages that could use an upgrade.