Conceptual Balance Series (Mod)

[Graeme Dice]

The Panther said:
I fail to see how a competent Caelum player will lose any seraphs.

Rain of stones for Arco and Vanheim. Raise skeletons for C'tis. Howl for Man and Pangaea. Machaka can use all three of these at once. Growing fury if you really are short on mages and need to keep your troops from routing. Acid rain for T'ien C'Hi and Atlantis. Vanadrott's and the like for Vanheim or Tuatha. Devils, devils and more devils for Abysia or Mictlan. Add in fireshielded lightning immune Archdevils and falling fires to clear away false horrows. Astral tempset for anyone with golems.

Too much fear for anything but perhaps undead.

Or vine ogres or mechanical men or living statues.

Even enemy fliers can only kill a few of the archers who are close by.

You didn't bring storms? Devils will kill your archers on the first turns, then quickly move on your seraphs and other troops. They won't rout either.

In particular, Ulm had no chance. His smiths always targeted his own troops once the horrors appeared. His best strategy was scripting fire shield on his commanders where he could.

Ulm versus the air nations is always uneven. This isn't a particularly good comparison point.

Surprisingly enough, the seraphs frequently switched to frozen heart against the bane lords and Jontun infantry once the script ran out, which was very good.

No, they certainly didn't switch to frozen heart, since bane lords and Jotuns are both immune to cold.

Arco was a rookie in his second MP game, that much was true. He could have beat me with the astral mind spells which ignore the horrors. But he had too many priests and not enough astrologers.

He brought priests to a battle with Caelum. That tells you that the Arco player didn't really have a good grasp of how to defeat Caelum. He'd have been better off throwing around the elemental battlefield magic that arco is good at.

Certainly not 20 seraphs.

How are you planning to defend them against a spell like rain of stones, which is especially devastating against physically weak mages? Or howl, that brings wolves up behind your troops?

Also, the seraphs are so incredibly cheap for their power that Caelum will always have more fighting mages than any other race.

They certainly won't research much faster or have more mages than C'Tis, nor Utgard, nor Machaka.

I will agree that Caelum becomes somewhat limited late game, but I have not played past about turn 70 in any MP game as yet.

Late game is about turn 20-40 onwards, depending on when people have developed magical paths other than what their nation easily provides.

[deccan]

Graeme Dice said:
Rain of stones for Arco and Vanheim. Raise skeletons for C'tis. Howl for Man and Pangaea.

Hmm, I was the Jotunheim player Panther referred to. Howl is a good idea. I wish I had thought of it.

I tried some things which I detailed in the Newbie Slugfest thread. Mostly, I've found that having mindless tanks doesn't work too well unless you have good mages able to kill the false horrors / mages. The mindless stuff (vine ogres, skeletons) can actually be killed by false horrors fairly reliably because of the horrors' very good combat stats and ethereality. Making chaff to tank horrors costs gems too while making false horrors doesn't cost any. And I've had my mages get scared away by false horrors (even without any horrors attacking them), thus causing the mindless chaff to dissolve.

I also watched some of Ulm's battles. I expected "Blade Wind" to work against the horrors, but they missed most of the time.

How about some more concrete advice? Panther never did need to go there far, but it seems to me that if I ever did build a significant force of mindless stuff, mages, etc., Caelum could just pop in a seraph to cast Wrathful Skies and blow things up. And just how could one defend against an air queen set to cast Wrathful Skies before attacking? *Sigh*

[PDF]

Looks like the thread degenerated into Yet Another "Caelum overpowered" thread
From my experience Caelum is unbalanced from turn 6 to at least 50, because of :
- Good cheap mages everywhere
- Mammoths against indies
- Lightning spells quite early, then effective Ghost/False summons
- And ability to shift front in one wing buffet - The same army can take out an enemy army, then fly to another point, make a raid, come back, giving Caelum a power multiplied bu its number of enemies eventually

A typical Caelian army is my games is like 12 Seraphs, 30-40 archers, and 20-25 infantry. Archers can take out light troops using Wind Guide (BTW, main use of WG is indeed to give +5 prec to the Seraphs, an exploit IMO), Inf main use is to buy time when the enemy try to get to contact and/or disrupt the archers.
Supply is not a real issue, a simple couple Bags done by Nature A Seraphs, Sage, Druid etc solve it even if fighting in deserts.
A Storm+WS+Air blessing strategy give different layout, but is rarer.
Such an army uses only national standard troop end is possible from turn 15 on, quite before summons become common, and no comparably priced army stands much of a chance against. I've seen TC, Marignon, Ermor, Arco, Machaka all been beaten neatly, even when allied...

There are surely ways to counter Caelum, but the only effective one I've seen is to gangup against in MP. Sure it rebalances things, but not from a design standpoint !

[Chazar]

PDF said:
Such an army uses only national standard troop...

Cool! And I always thought people complained about the uselessness of national troops!

[PDF]

Chazar said:

Cool! And I always thought people complained about the uselessness of national troops!

Still early game armies have to use national troops , and anyway you got to use national mages for all the game.
The trick with Caelum is that this combo is effective, but mostly due to the mages; the main usefullness of the troops is to have chaff, but this on eis flying along the mages !

[alexti]

PDF said:
Looks like the thread degenerated into Yet Another "Caelum overpowered" thread
From my experience Caelum is unbalanced from turn 6 to at least 50, because of :
- Good cheap mages everywhere
- Mammoths against indies
- Lightning spells quite early, then effective Ghost/False summons
- And ability to shift front in one wing buffet - The same army can take out an enemy army, then fly to another point, make a raid, come back, giving Caelum a power multiplied bu its number of enemies eventually

A typical Caelian army is my games is like 12 Seraphs, 30-40 archers, and 20-25 infantry. Archers can take out light troops using Wind Guide (BTW, main use of WG is indeed to give +5 prec to the Seraphs, an exploit IMO), Inf main use is to buy time when the enemy try to get to contact and/or disrupt the archers.

You're making good points why Caelum is very powerful early on (I may only disagree about Mammoths - too expensive and not reusable), but that advantage won't Last until turn 50. I think it's more like until turn 25-30 (standard research). Nothing good will happen to such army if it gets into the rain of stones Effectively, enemy's pretender alone can stop this kind of army. And with cloud trapeze available it will mean that such army can not be used in the open anymore. Caelum will still have their superior raiding ability (with lone seraphs), but it brings back the defense problem).

[PDF]

Alexti,
I agree with you, things change when global battlefields spells come into play - in my experience it's rather after turn 40 (but I'm in peaceful Old Europe, so maybe .. ).
But when this happens Caelum gets no special drawback - their mages won't survive RoS (does Mistform not protect ?), but neither will most other mages and troops : if Caelians have SG/IC/TC they won't be scratched.
Same goes for most global BF spells, once they're in summons are needed.

[The Panther]

I did not intend for this to be a nerf Caelum post. Sorry about that. Everybody seems happy with Caelum being one of the most powerful races, as I found out in my nerf-Caelum post. So be it.

What I did intend is for the devs (or the folks doing the mods?) to hopefully fix the flying imbalance. Because land troops cannot go over even one friendly province to attack an enemy, flying troops should also be prohibited from doing this too. Ergo - flying is far superior to walking by a much too wide of a margin. Especially the flying SCs, which is a huge problem for nearly all races.

For the Dice man: you are correct. My frozen heart was how I killed the Ulm Black Knights, not the giants. I remember this now, watching the knights frozen in place while they died. It sure all runs together after a while!

[archaeolept]

well, look - technically this thread is about Zen's conceptual balance mod

now, the mod does not address flying, whether or not flying is overpowered. But the caelum problem resides in a combination of synergistic effects: flying + false horrors + wrath, for the most part (exceptionally cheap mages, able to easily get by w/ the watchtowers and sloth-3, also). Zen's mod at least cuts out false horror spam and makes wrathful skies more difficult to cast. both of these, in and of themselves, help balance out the problems. (the scale mod should also end up making caelum pay a bit more for taking sloth -3 as well).

[alexti]

PDF said:
Alexti,
I agree with you, things change when global battlefields spells come into play - in my experience it's rather after turn 40 (but I'm in peaceful Old Europe, so maybe .. ).

RoS is Evo-7, FH is Alt-6, so they're not too far apart. If I have some Pythium/Arco/Caelum neighbour I'd prioritize RoS to have a counter if they attack me. In this case I'll have it much earlier than turn 40 (turn 25-30). If I have other enemies I may postpone this research.

PDF said:
But when this happens Caelum gets no special drawback - their mages won't survive RoS (does Mistform not protect ?), but neither will most other mages and troops : if Caelians have SG/IC/TC they won't be scratched.
Same goes for most global BF spells, once they're in summons are needed.

Mistform helps to some extent (if one has time to cast it). I'm not sure what "strong hit" is, but multiple RoS are still nasty. I haven't really tested it, but from past experience I'd guess that mage has 10-20% per RoS to get killed. And heavy troops are ok in RoS, so any army that primarily rely on heavy melee troops is reasonable safe from RoS, opponents won't probably cast RoS to kill couple of support mages and few units. In many ways Pythium and Arco are similar to Caelum. They all have deadly and easily dying mages.