[Cainehill]

deccan said:
Cainehill's points are all valid and I admit that I have a tendency to value skill (which Caelum has) more than HPs and strength, which may be wrong. However, even if I downgrade Caelum's troops and priests to merely "average and competent" instead of "above average", it still seems to me that Caelum has no obvious, glaring weakness. For example, I would still say that Caelum's troops are still better than, say, Tien Chi's mediocre ones, and isn't the mediocrity of Tien Chi's national troops supposed to compensate for their versatile mages?

No, Tien Chi's Astral-1 mediocre mages counter-compensate for good troops in the default theme, and forced turmoil and lesser troops compensates for powerful mediocre flying mages in Spring and Autumn, who still have Astral-1 and tend to be gunned down by magic duel. Base T'ien C'hi has _GOOD_ troops - I've already written one post about this in the first section of this thread, I'm not going to repeat myself here.

Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

And Production-3 still only lets them get maybe ... 3 or 4 Temple Guards a turn, max, and still no way of getting them to where they'd be useful. It would let them get Iceclads everywhere, but Iceclads tend to be useless against anything 14 protection or higher, not to mention that they keel over from exhaustion too quick.