Caelum Starting Strategy

[incognito]

Trying to start playing Caelum, and wanted to get a straw poll from the board experts on how best to start. Here are my questions:

a) choice of pretender. I have toyed with the idea of the vamp queen, but she feels quite expensive and focuses on death/blood vs air/water. While I can add air/water, it gets expensive. What are folks thoughts - magic pretender vs combat pretender for the caelum? Which makes more sense? What paths to add if magic?
b) dominion mix - I have seen several folks recommend order 3/prod 1/cold 3. I also considered upping prod to 3 and adding anti-magic 3 with a no magic pretender with exceptionally high dominion & restless worshippers (could you actually beat someone by wiping their dominion from the map, even with tons of troops left around? is this realistic?) Which mix makes sense? Lastly, what is the advantage of Fire 3 ie taking advantage of the bug? Not sure why this is such a good thing for Caelum vs cold 3, but earlier posters seemed to think it needed to be fixed because it gave Caelum an unfair advantage.
c) Castle choice - I read somewhere to take quick build castles to match the caelum paratroop approach. What are folks thoughts on this vs better admin/defense castles? IF quick build, is wizards tower worth it?
d) early game troop mix. To understand the troop mix, I played a couple of early games with the bird-men. First I went anti-elephants and just used archer, spiked horn (both are what you start with), added some storm guard, and recruited high seraphs. This worked fairly well and allowed me to take several provinces quickly with minimal losses. My larger question was about the effectiveness of this approach if I ran up against anything beyond militia/archerss ie enemy players or AI. Elephants seem good, but I soured on them when the second independent I attacked had a spectre lord who turned them to his side and used them to trample my archers They are also darned expensive and almost preclude adding mages/priests at the same time for at least a few turns.
e) first few moves - is the general wisdom to attack a neighboring province on the very first turn or let your forces build for a turn first and get scouting reports? A bad defeat on that turn can really prove to be a setback, but the missed opportunity for the additional income/resources seems high, since it improves your trajectory for the game. Given the 70% chance of weak independent neighbors, the odds seem in your favor. Thoughts?

Thanks for the help

[Teraswaerto]

Originally posted by incognito:

a) choice of pretender. I have toyed with the idea of the vamp queen, but she feels quite expensive and focuses on death/blood vs air/water. While I can add air/water, it gets expensive. What are folks thoughts - magic pretender vs combat pretender for the caelum? Which makes more sense? What paths to add if magic?

It's usually good to take paths your national mages don't have on your pretender. It gives you more options with magic.

Elephants seem good, but I soured on them when the second independent I attacked had a spectre lord who turned them to his side and used them to trample my archers

When routing mammoths and elephants will trample anything that gets in their way. So that's probably what happened. I don't think any independents can cast domination spells.

[ January 22, 2004, 16:05: Message edited by: Teraswaerto ]

[Gandalf Parker]

Other than the fact that the patch broke the cold bonus for Caelum you might check this thread..
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...=000563#000000

[incognito]

I had read that thread and found the information valuable, but it did not address many of my more specific questions ie combat pretender vs mage pretender for Caelum, choice of dominions (any threads on different approaches here would be great), fire vs ice (manual and game suggest both have same impact ie lower supplies, etc - what is the advantage of cold 3 for Caelum. Do they not suffer the cold penalties? Until the patch is this true for fire 3 instead or just a typo in the description), all dominion/no magic strategy, and first few turns recommendations (I consider these the most valuable turns in the game).

As far as mind control, I am pretty sure it was a spectre lord independent with an army of longdead and he was definitely controlling my elephants. I had positioned elephants at the top of the map and archers at the bottom. The elephants immediately began to battle each other (when he took the first one), and then subsequently charged down the map to stomp the archers (when he controlled the other two). Brutal to watch and disheartening to see in only your second province, but that is the fun of the game I suppose.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[General Tacticus]

Originally posted by incognito:
fire vs ice (manual and game suggest both have same impact ie lower supplies, etc - what is the advantage of cold 3 for Caelum. Do they not suffer the cold penalties? Until the patch is this true for fire 3 instead or just a typo in the description

It's not that Caelum doesn't suffer the cold penalties, it's that for Caelum Cold 3 is the normal, pleasant weather. So at Cold 3 they suffer no penalties, at Cold 2 they are penalized for being 1 step too hot... and at Heat 3 they are 6 steps too hot, so they get penalized for all these 6 steps (whereas a "normal" race would never face more than a 3 step penalty).

Well, that was pre-patch. After the patch, and unless you use the mod that correct it, they like heat 3, and for cold 3 would get a 6 step penalty for being too cold...


Hope that helps. Sadly, I have no good answer to your other questions...

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by incognito:
As far as mind control, I am pretty sure it was a spectre lord independent with an army of longdead and he was definitely controlling my elephants.

Unless he cast enslave mind, master enslave, charm, or hellbind heart you are seeing the effect of a morale failure, and not someone controlling your elephants.