Caelum pretender design

[Boron]

Chazar said:

As I said, I agree with that purpose, but apart from combat...?

I do not like using Close-Combat-Pretenders, since having access to foreign magic to forge nice items like DwarvenHammers and StaffsofElementalMastery or to summon creatures like StormDemons or IceDevils is much more helpful than a single strong combatant. I guess this particularly is true for Caelum, which relies on magic! I mean, how do you get those items/summons if not by your pretender?

I found that except for Death, empowering is way out of question for Caelum, whose mages eat away the gems like vanilla ice on a hot day (even during Caelian midwinter !). Or do you think that one can get along without, summon more readily accessible creatures like those AirQueens? (Even with GaleGate up, I hardly have enough air gems for summoning left. I use them mainly for staffs of storms (every army and skirmish-squad should have one), bag of winds, combat-casting like wrathful sky and storm warriors,...)

if you take e.g. a nataraja with f2,w2,e3,d3,a2 :
you do not intend to use her as a sc earlygame .
but if you have to defend you can use her as an earlygame sc in times of need .
she can sitesearch then earlygame , midgame she forges / summons and lategame you can equip her to a really frightening combattant .

d3 is imo a musthave for most nations , especially magically narrow nations .
then you can do 3 things :
summon spectres for magic flexibility
summon bane lords as thugs / small scs
forge a skull staff + the death+1 helmet : then you can summon wraith lords / demi lichs too

since d3 lets you cast soul vortex in combat it is useful there too .
Last but not least with death 5 ( with items ) you can armytravel via stygian path spell lategame .

oh btw my mentioned nataraja with dominion 6 costs "only" 420 points .
so you have 80 points left for scales + castle .

i like : order 3 , sloth 3 , cold 3 , growth 3 , magic 3 and misfortune 1 .

if you want another castle than a watchtower you can chose misfortune 2 for mauso and misfortune 3 for 40 admin castle .

you have exactly zero design points left so you feel "perfect" as a nice psychological sideeffect

i wish i had chosen this pretender in thufirs new game as caelum and not my lame vq