Alex and I played our duel (actually two) yesterday. The Air 9 blessing did not prevent a significant problem to Caelum. Primarly because he couldn't get out enough Niefel Jarls to make use of it.
For general Caelum strategy that I used see this thread
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1
The hurricanes were particurarly effective.
For the first duel I used order3, sloth3, cold3, death3, misfortune 2 and magic 3. My pretender was a vampire queen which "interesting". She was great for expansion after hitting Alt-3 but was not as useful as I hoped vs his giants (at least until the final battle). While I knew that she would be easily killed by a Neifel Jarl I was hoping that she could kill his normal troops and perhaps be positioned in a way where a Jarl couldn't reach her. Most of the time this didn't work out in my favor but few times it did. Immortality was great in that I didn't have to "risk" anything to try it out (compared to a ghost king or other stat superior pretender).
The second game I went with the same settings except production3 and a sage pretender. I was going to beeline toward huricane and thunderstrike but some unlucky events delayed it a few rounds. The production 3 was actually a huge help because I was able to field twice the number of archers compared to sloth 3. That helped a lot in the early expansion and later having a great meat shield against his forces. The second game ended quickly after the hiring of 2 heavy mercanary armies, 100 archers and 5 eagle kings destroyed the majority of his forces in one big battle. The 60 heavy infantry mercs played a huge role.
So besides Neifelheim who can challenge the mighty Caelum.
