Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[alexti]

The Panther said:

I fail to see how a competent Caelum player will lose any seraphs. 40 false horrors on the second move, then 80 on the third. Too much fear for anything but perhaps undead. Even enemy fliers can only kill a few of the archers who are close by.

How many seraphs are going to live through turn 1? It's pretty hard to defend them. If you're attacking the army that siege your fort, the opponents move first, so you have no chance to defend seraphs at all. Pretty much any mass-destruction will decimate them. If you're defender you have better chances because you can cast some protection spells on your mages first. Though most of them are difficult for Caelum, so pretender needs to be constructed to keep this scenario in mind. Even with that there're few problems. Do you cast global protection or local area? Global protection is costly and harder to cast and enemy's attack may be a fake. If you cast on local area you need to put mages close together which will make them more vulnerable to opponent's local area damage spells. Even if you get it right, enemy may cast some global damage spells, which may not kill seraphs right away, but it may hurt them overtime while killing false horrors en-masse. And if the opponent brings some determined troops (undead, vine men/ogres etc), false horrors don't do any good. Lighting is not very good either vs cheap undead/vine men. Particularly nasty opponent will cast few swarms as well. And opponent has an option of lifting the siege and raining some nasties on your concentrated forces next turn.

So this idea of concentrating all seraphs together seems quite risky. Besides, to be a defender one have to sit with this force in the fortress (which makes it vulnerable to remote mass-destruction spells) and contradicts with raiding plans.

While being one of the top nations, Caelum is not straight-forward to play. They need to branch out their development to have some capable armies that don't rely on seraphs too much. Some kind of balance between defenses and raiding is needed.

[Cainehill]

alexti said:
While being one of the top nations, Caelum is not straight-forward to play. They need to branch out their development to have some capable armies that don't rely on seraphs too much. Some kind of balance between defenses and raiding is needed.

Exactly - same with Pythium and Arco, etc. The top tier nations (for anything but a tiny map blitz, where simple nations like Ulm or New Era Pangaea shine) tend to be complicated and require more thought and strategy.

A little bit of a boost for defense (PD, etc) might be nice to see, likewise a little bit of a nerf for raiders, so that they can't _always_ move before being counterattacked. (Vanheim was a huge PITA in one of my Caelum games; took 10-15 turns to deal with his raiders. Only another 5 or 10 to finish his nation after that though. )

[deccan]

Graeme Dice said:
Rain of stones for Arco and Vanheim. Raise skeletons for C'tis. Howl for Man and Pangaea.

Hmm, I was the Jotunheim player Panther referred to. Howl is a good idea. I wish I had thought of it.

I tried some things which I detailed in the Newbie Slugfest thread. Mostly, I've found that having mindless tanks doesn't work too well unless you have good mages able to kill the false horrors / mages. The mindless stuff (vine ogres, skeletons) can actually be killed by false horrors fairly reliably because of the horrors' very good combat stats and ethereality. Making chaff to tank horrors costs gems too while making false horrors doesn't cost any. And I've had my mages get scared away by false horrors (even without any horrors attacking them), thus causing the mindless chaff to dissolve.

I also watched some of Ulm's battles. I expected "Blade Wind" to work against the horrors, but they missed most of the time.

How about some more concrete advice? Panther never did need to go there far, but it seems to me that if I ever did build a significant force of mindless stuff, mages, etc., Caelum could just pop in a seraph to cast Wrathful Skies and blow things up. And just how could one defend against an air queen set to cast Wrathful Skies before attacking? *Sigh*

[PDF]

Looks like the thread degenerated into Yet Another "Caelum overpowered" thread
From my experience Caelum is unbalanced from turn 6 to at least 50, because of :
- Good cheap mages everywhere
- Mammoths against indies
- Lightning spells quite early, then effective Ghost/False summons
- And ability to shift front in one wing buffet - The same army can take out an enemy army, then fly to another point, make a raid, come back, giving Caelum a power multiplied bu its number of enemies eventually

A typical Caelian army is my games is like 12 Seraphs, 30-40 archers, and 20-25 infantry. Archers can take out light troops using Wind Guide (BTW, main use of WG is indeed to give +5 prec to the Seraphs, an exploit IMO), Inf main use is to buy time when the enemy try to get to contact and/or disrupt the archers.
Supply is not a real issue, a simple couple Bags done by Nature A Seraphs, Sage, Druid etc solve it even if fighting in deserts.
A Storm+WS+Air blessing strategy give different layout, but is rarer.
Such an army uses only national standard troop end is possible from turn 15 on, quite before summons become common, and no comparably priced army stands much of a chance against. I've seen TC, Marignon, Ermor, Arco, Machaka all been beaten neatly, even when allied...

There are surely ways to counter Caelum, but the only effective one I've seen is to gangup against in MP. Sure it rebalances things, but not from a design standpoint !

[Chazar]

PDF said:
Such an army uses only national standard troop...

Cool! And I always thought people complained about the uselessness of national troops!

[PDF]

Chazar said:

Cool! And I always thought people complained about the uselessness of national troops!

Still early game armies have to use national troops , and anyway you got to use national mages for all the game.
The trick with Caelum is that this combo is effective, but mostly due to the mages; the main usefullness of the troops is to have chaff, but this on eis flying along the mages !

[alexti]

PDF said:
Looks like the thread degenerated into Yet Another "Caelum overpowered" thread
From my experience Caelum is unbalanced from turn 6 to at least 50, because of :
- Good cheap mages everywhere
- Mammoths against indies
- Lightning spells quite early, then effective Ghost/False summons
- And ability to shift front in one wing buffet - The same army can take out an enemy army, then fly to another point, make a raid, come back, giving Caelum a power multiplied bu its number of enemies eventually

A typical Caelian army is my games is like 12 Seraphs, 30-40 archers, and 20-25 infantry. Archers can take out light troops using Wind Guide (BTW, main use of WG is indeed to give +5 prec to the Seraphs, an exploit IMO), Inf main use is to buy time when the enemy try to get to contact and/or disrupt the archers.

You're making good points why Caelum is very powerful early on (I may only disagree about Mammoths - too expensive and not reusable), but that advantage won't Last until turn 50. I think it's more like until turn 25-30 (standard research). Nothing good will happen to such army if it gets into the rain of stones Effectively, enemy's pretender alone can stop this kind of army. And with cloud trapeze available it will mean that such army can not be used in the open anymore. Caelum will still have their superior raiding ability (with lone seraphs), but it brings back the defense problem).

[PDF]

Alexti,
I agree with you, things change when global battlefields spells come into play - in my experience it's rather after turn 40 (but I'm in peaceful Old Europe, so maybe .. ).
But when this happens Caelum gets no special drawback - their mages won't survive RoS (does Mistform not protect ?), but neither will most other mages and troops : if Caelians have SG/IC/TC they won't be scratched.
Same goes for most global BF spells, once they're in summons are needed.

[The Panther]

I did not intend for this to be a nerf Caelum post. Sorry about that. Everybody seems happy with Caelum being one of the most powerful races, as I found out in my nerf-Caelum post. So be it.

What I did intend is for the devs (or the folks doing the mods?) to hopefully fix the flying imbalance. Because land troops cannot go over even one friendly province to attack an enemy, flying troops should also be prohibited from doing this too. Ergo - flying is far superior to walking by a much too wide of a margin. Especially the flying SCs, which is a huge problem for nearly all races.

For the Dice man: you are correct. My frozen heart was how I killed the Ulm Black Knights, not the giants. I remember this now, watching the knights frozen in place while they died. It sure all runs together after a while!

[archaeolept]

well, look - technically this thread is about Zen's conceptual balance mod

now, the mod does not address flying, whether or not flying is overpowered. But the caelum problem resides in a combination of synergistic effects: flying + false horrors + wrath, for the most part (exceptionally cheap mages, able to easily get by w/ the watchtowers and sloth-3, also). Zen's mod at least cuts out false horror spam and makes wrathful skies more difficult to cast. both of these, in and of themselves, help balance out the problems. (the scale mod should also end up making caelum pay a bit more for taking sloth -3 as well).