Guide to EA C'tis

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Pretender commentary, from experiences: (limited, but will get better as my survival times increase)

Saurolich: Immortal, undead, and not cold-blooded. Worth noting you're only immortal in your dominion, undead is a vulnerability, and if you make it far enough, you won't be able to use the Jade Mask on your pretender, only your necromancers. You can't depend on that for a late game death boost. Still, you can equip enough, certainly.

Prince of Death: Though a death pretender is somewhat redundant with C'tis, this, barring the lack of immortality, is in many ways superior to the Saurolich. There's the obvious flying, but in addition to that, you get fear +13 base. Add in the death magic bonus, and you can get some truly ridiculous fear. If you go all the way to 10 death magic, for instance, you get a fear of 20. So, considering pg. 57, your fear would affect 26 squares (longer than some bows), and require a morale check against 14 instead of the base 10 and 6. Also, you save about 35 points, and get an extra dominion candle to boot.

Mother of Monsters: I wanted to use her, I really did. She seemed fairly tough on paper, but she ends up dying earlier than any of the other combatants when used offensively. The problem is her poison cloud - my first thought was enemy only crowd control, but it can easily deal you more damage than the enemy, even with the 50% resistance. (The Serpent's Blessing spell is later, but definitely worth getting.) You'll often find her exposed or hurting her own troops. You'll need to think very carefully about placing her so she doesn't get swarmed, or she'll go down quicker than you'd expect. Consider giving her all your nature/death summons (most of which are conveniently PR100%), giving your commanders poison rings, placing non-critical mundane troops in close support, or dancers. Even if the dinky skeletons or vine men aren't much from a damage perspective they're much superior from a morale perspective than your regular troops, and conveniently poison resistant.

It's much easier to use the Mother of Serpents (just be sure to give her the attack order so she doesn't waste her time hiding behind your troops). You can equip her with more and she is much more friendly to mixing with your troops. So not only does she make better use of your normal support, she also comes with her own renewable bodyguard team in the form of several horned serpents. While these guys will go down pretty quickly on their own, they combine nicely with a rushing strategy. Put her slightly in the front, they get the first arrows, when and if they're down, your troops are there to take more blows. A few less troops to replace and a lot more momentum. She won't win battles by herself, or make you win the unwinnable, but you'll go through 'fair' fights with a lot less casulties. Against some independents, you can go fairly far with just 30 light infantry and 10 city guards and one Mother of Serpents.

The healing is almost a nonfactor, but it is nice icing on the cake. The mother of serpents is definetly my favorite pretender so far, and easy to use, though not as overpowering as say, a Wyrm. Oh, and unlike the Mother of Monsters, she'll dramatically benefit from barkskin.

I haven't tried the Cyclops, though I am interested if anyone else has. He's the only Ctis pretender with a three base in earth. That might enable some C'tis strats that no other C'tis pretender would allow, or it may just be a minor event.

My early research often goes in a drive for black servent, followed by shades. I was thinking ethereal would combine with the heat scales and encumbrance and low mr of ulm, nicely. But it turns out that EA Ulm has a surprisingly low encumbrance. So, I'm thinking instead I might try for Black Servants followed by a beeline to raise skeletons/undead, then finally Dark Knowledge, than finally the nature scrying spell, since luck without order often gets me that nice shaman.

Now, I'm seriously considering bowing to pressure and trying an order scale or two... What would you suggest as an early game spell build for that?

If I find that lack of luck too painful, I'll experiment with growth, constant over-taxation, and militia patrols. I don't expect it to go very far, but I'll hit the math and give it a try-out. After all, I already made the mistake of getting confused about how much income a Tel City/Fort brings in. It's only somewhere around 25% extra, right? Hardly reason enough to save up for a city/fort when forests and hills are available.

When you take death scales, does that influence your starting position any? I've only played a few games, all on randomly generated maps, and while it may be coincidence, all my death scale games have surrounded me in wastelands.

Come tomorrow, I'll have a day off to hammer out these ideas of mine with some practice. Thanks again for the original posts and later responses.

P.S. Don't Lammashtas attack your own mage? I heard somewhere that you can place them at the edge of the battlefield with a summon, retreat order and they'll likely survive.