LA Tien Chi: Barbarian Kings Strategy Guide 2.0

[rdonj]

While it's a perfectly valid point that TC likes a lot of paths early and can do very nice things with all of them, you're comparing evo 4 or maybe 5 (to grab shadow blast, gifts from heaven, healing mists, falling frosts, storm, etc all in one go) with having 3 enchantment, 4 alteration, and 7-8 construction. Enchantment 3 and construction 1 is a somewhat comparable option, but I would prefer to go with either evo or alt 4 over the enchantment route.

[Shangrila00]

High enchantment has some interesting synergies with an E9 Cyclops pretender, with order and magic scales for your armored old guy mages. TC should have a very healthy earth income, so with just a little luck and heavy research down enchantment, you can cast a reasonably hard to dispel Earthblood Well as soon as your pretender breaks free. Along the way, you also get flaming arrows, enliven statues, hidden in sand, arrow fend, and mass flight. Only the last 2 are immediately useable unless you luck onto fire indies for flaming arrows, but they are nasty enough. Arrow fend forces the enemy to either lose in a shootout or close to melee with heavy cavalry, and if the enemy is so ranged heavy that they will still win, mass flight guarantees your cavalry gets to close. Sure they can cast storm, but it just weakens their ranged firepower enough for cavalry to close the old fashioned way.

The well gives you more options. Hidden in sand is pretty efficient with order and magic, and gets you a sacred thug chasis roughly equal to banelord, a bunch of tough undead, and a good probability of a mage that breaks you into fire and higher death as well as the fire/death combo for 35 earth gems in CBM. As far as I can tell, it's also the only way to break into fire for LA TC. An E9 caster with earth boots gets 24 good blockers/arrow catchers with just one casting of enliven statues. And of course, all those earth gems come in handy when you head down construction.