Crush my enemies and drive them before me

Okay, well let me specific then for you

If you happen to find a Lizard Province, build a Lab and recruit Lizard Shamans to use as Communion Slaves and Celestial Masters as communion Masters. Good spells to look and use are Acid Rain, Flaming Arrows, Wind Guide, Relief.

If you can get a semi-decent gem income fairly quickly, rely on your Celestial Soldiers, Summer Lions, Fall Bears, Winter Wolves and others to back up your national units.

In general the more archers the better. Since you have 2 types, the normal compositebowman and the imperial. It's generally a better idea to go with the normal and use spells like Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows to cause havok. Unless you have alot of resources and can afford the normal ones. But in that case I'd probably get X-bows instead of normal bowmen.

TC has poor repellers, they have no long weapons in which to repel with or fight against repellers, so it's a better choice to go with the more damaging Falchions than normal spear Imperial Infantry.

Unless you have enough to make a very good blessing, stay away from most the mounted troops. Even Red Guard are not that impressive. If you get into a situation where your opponents are not using fodder, pick up some Imperial Horseman and use the lances to tear up a flank.

Other than that, I can't really offer any help. One of the ways to play TC more effectively is to have a SC take provinces early in order to take the edge off of having naturally weaker troops, but since you can't do that, you are going to have to manage however you can until you get a good strong core beneath you

And by all means, have fun no matter what. That is of course what the game is about

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Zen:
TC has poor repellers, they have no long weapons in which to repel with or fight against repellers,

Yeah, aside from their glaives and pikes...

Let me change that by saying "Heavily Armored Repellers".

Glaives leave me wanting, even though they do good damage. Mostly because they get massacred by arrowfire and can only repel normal spear length and lower (4 and under). Though I don't have the latest Version of the Combat Sim or I'd do a series of tests.

[ January 22, 2004, 03:44: Message edited by: Zen ]

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Zen:
Let me change that by saying "Heavily Armored Repellers".

Glaives leave me wanting, even though they do good damage. Mostly because they get massacred by arrowfire and can only repel normal spear length and lower (4 and under). Though I don't have the latest Version of the Combat Sim or I'd do a series of tests.

Oh, the combat sim has repeatedly shown Glaives to be terrible. I think it is the worst weapon.

In terms of badness of normal weapons, it was something like:

(worst)
fist
glaive
halberd
maul
machaka spear
axe
hammer
(almost decent)
...

Note that 1-h weapons get a big bonus, and halberd beats glaive simply because it is cheaper. This is somewhat arbitrary... but don't use any of those weapons unless you have to.

..and glaive is length 4, so it cannot repel spears.

[ January 22, 2004, 04:22: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

Machaka Spear is rated that low?

WTF? I've had nothing but success with it on Machakan hoplites. Maybe it's the combination of the Hide Shield and the unit that makes it decent.

That is to say I've never actually used the Lord of the Desert Sun to fight anything, either.

Edit: Isn't it the longer the weapon they can repel weapons below it's length? Or is it differen't. I can't remember exactly the thread that had the repel issues. But if a Glaive is Length 4 and a Spear is Length 3, I'd think it would repel it. Unless Spears are special.

[ January 22, 2004, 04:25: Message edited by: Zen ]

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Zen:
But if a Glaive is Length 4 and a Spear is Length 3, I'd think it would repel it. Unless Spears are special.

...spears are length 4. Machaka Hoplites have excellent shields; their spears are terrible. A normal spear or longspear is better (though the longspear is pretty bad too).

Must have just been one of those things. Ah well.

I'm still trying to figure out how the:

Machaka Spear 5, -1, -1, 5

is worse than the

Spear 3, 0, 0, 4

If you put them both on the same stat units (as opposed to the fantastic hoplites), does the Machaka Spear lose?