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.