MA T'ien Ch'i - a little of this, a little of that and BAM!

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

Thank you for the elaborate and convincing response

I could be argumentative and say things like - "put more magic on your pretender", "get a minor bless", "take an awake SC with great scales apart from sloth", "Crank up many castles so sloth wouldn't prevent you from mass recruiting". Instead of saying any such things I think I'll take your excellent advise and just setup two SP games - one that will follow your advise to the letter and a 2nd that would dump those sloth points on something else (I'll try to come up with something good). I suspect it is very likely that the first game will look up much better - Regardless, this is the first nation that I ever consider taking prod-3 a valid choice. Up until now I have never taken anything other than sloth 3, be it SP or MP. I thank you for helping me see the good side of the production scale.

Cool, let us know how it goes. A couple suggestions:

As much as possible you should match your troops vs enemy troops even during initial indie expansion. Send composite bows vs barbarians, lizards, tribal archers, light infantry, etc. Send Imperial Horsemen or mixed infantry (glaives & tower shields) against heavier infantry and against strong indies (heavy cav farmlands, etc.) send critical mass of Imperial Cavalry (with some tower shield chaff to catch lances for the real big indie masses). You can really have a pretty good expansion, but you'll have a hard time doing it efficiently with homogeneous expansion groups.

Once you've got 3-4 good expansion parties (depending on how many indie territories you expect to be able to take) stop recruiting anything other than ministers of magic for a few turns. The gold will pile up incredibly fast allowing you to plop up around a fort per turn.

If you're comparing my suggested dormant master lich, once he wakes up send him out site searching, specifically to the territories you've put up castles. This is a great way to get at least a minimal dominion to push your production scales without building many temples.

Speaking of which, make sure you push your fabulous order 3/production 3 scales to every province you own, temples pay for themselves pretty fast if they're keeping your territories in dominion.

[Sombre]

I guess I'll be building more MA TC pikemen from now on!

Although light lance can beat lance in damage output with SoG, lance allows the cavalry to also use their main weapon in the first round of combat, which almost certainly does more than the 3 damage light lance does (often it's a sword which does 7) and while that doesn't get the charge bonus, it gets the SoG bonus. So light lance with SoG could theoretically be better than lance vs targets with super high prot (high enough that SoG + a sword doesn't crack it and neither does the 16 damage + charge bonus lance) but the vast majority of the time lance charge is far more damaging than light lance charge.

[Baalz]

Good point, but the other consideration (at least in this case) is you'll be fielding twice as many light horsemen compared to Imperial, so you're getting twice as many lance attacks at the expense of a falchion attack, and also an additional hoof attack which helps drop defense and knock armor off under iron bane. Don't get me wrong, the Imperials are much more effective in a more drawn out fight, but for the gold I think the light horsemen generally give a more devastating first contact. Plus, they get bows which they can fire before charging, which can be quite effective depending on the enemy.

[Sombre]

That's true if your imperials would not be maxing out frontage - one of the problems I sometimes have with massed light lance cav is that they can get stuck and the ones at the back never even get to use their charge bonus. There's a point at which numbers don't help you that much offensively. Though I suppose if they're getting killed in melee, the ones at the back will filter through and still get their charge bonus attack.

[Baalz]

Yeah, I find haste/mass flight helps out with that depending on enemy troop placement. If they aren't shoulder to shoulder (which sounds like time to break out the archers/xbows/evocations to me and not go with a glass cannon charge) you can often get a good bit of wrapping around them. Break your cavalry up in a few groups spread around with "attack rearmost" while not perfect, will help mitigate that.

Plus, having too many lances to all connect immediately isn't the worst problem to have.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Yeah, I find haste/mass flight helps out with that depending on enemy troop placement. If they aren't shoulder to shoulder (which sounds like time to break out the archers/xbows/evocations to me and not go with a glass cannon charge) you can often get a good bit of wrapping around them. Break your cavalry up in a few groups spread around with "attack rearmost" while not perfect, will help mitigate that.

Plus, having too many lances to all connect immediately isn't the worst problem to have.

Thanks baalz. I have often noticed the spread when you tell flying units to attack rear. But I never considered mass flight as a mechanism to maximize lance damage. ++

[WraithLord]

I have performed a few tests.
First, comparing prod3 to sloth3 early game development. For the prod3 I took a Dom-7 imprisoned lich with D3N4. For the sloth3 I took a sleeping SC chasis, an E4N4 Dom-8 Nataraja.
My setup games all have the same settings, hard research and indep. strength of 9.

The prod3 setup does have better early game results in terms of income and expansion. The sleeping SC doesn't awake early enough to offset the prod3 advantage. I could take an awake SC with sloth3 but I don't think MA TC really needs an awake SC. It has very good army and mage lineup that can stand it's own even in early game.

I then tried a different pretender - a scales astral king pretender and one of my favs for nations that have good military lineups - the oracle. With the oracle I took O3P3H0G3Mf2M1 Dom-9 S6E4. Under this one I got best early game results. It is true that I'm giving up on death and blood (unless I luck out during the game to find the right indie. mages) but what I gain is out of the box (with boosters) wisher/ANer and an awesome master enslaver/undead dominator.

[Baalz]

Yeah, the pretender choice (based on the vector of this guide) is fairly open to whatever your personal preference is - there's just not a lot of holes he needs to plug. The critical portion of pretender design is Order-3 Production-3 Magic-1 and not terrible other scales, anything that allows you to afford this should work pretty well with this guide.

[Belac]

In terms of thug potential, what about Prince Generals (with attendant priests to bless then retreat)? They wouldn't be as good as those of many nations, but would they be useful at all (especially with a few cavalry as attendants)?

[Peter Ebbesen]

As a man who loves to play MA Pythium with a scales approach (it is one of the few nations where I can allow myself the guilty pleasure of an order 3, production 3 approach and feel that I am not giving up anything important compared to what I gain), thanks for the guide, Baalz. It contains a couple of good reminders.

The ability to field huge fairly tough armies designed to counter whatever threat is currently facing me on a very short notice coupled with an economy strong enough that plopping down 1200g castles everywhere appropriate (in terrain and population level) is one of the greatest joys of the game. Some nations in the game use small elite militaries, special operations teams capable of dealing with practically anything - T'ien C'hi MA uses the enlisted man, drilled to perfection and good at his job but relying on the military as a whole to deal with threats not in his purview.