Base C'tis Sacred Serpent - Hints needed

[Vicious Love]

Ironhawk said:
Gift of Health doesnt really change the situation. More hp, sure but they'd still be stuck with the fatal low prot+low def combination. Pepper them with arrows and fight with some half decent infantry and they are done for.

Agreed. Even Tarrasques under dominion 10 GoH can be brought down by masses of heavy infantry, and they have both superb protection and more HP than a sizeable army of sacred serpents.

Now, A Tarrasque or Abomination prophet in dominion 10 with a Ring of Regeneration and Kurgi's Gift under Gift of Health, THAT simply can't be killed. Until your opponent just charms, enslaves, petrifies or disintegrates him, I suppose. I've never actually tried this stratagem, but I imagine it'd be truly hardcore until MR-based magic came into play. 'course, you'd need to give him air or, if you're feeling lucky, astral in order to teleport onto the field from dominion 10, unless said field is within flying distance of a dominion 10 province but... fine, so it's not a viable strategy. Still sounds fun. Not to hijack the thread, or anything. Thought just ocurred to me, and asked to be shared.

[shovah]

fine then GoH and a9 n9 bless? resistant to missle weapons and have regen and good health, not the greatest but quite fun

[Vicious Love]

I suppose that's one of the best blessings you can give these guys, but I doubt they were ever intended to actual be used as front line troops. They're strictly there for morale-related support, and any combat abilities they might possess are entirely incidental. They're certainly not worth actually desigining a blessing around.

Update: But they're cute. Oh, how I love C'tis.

[Truper]

Yah, the Sacred Serpents aren't worth building a strategy around. The Serpent Dancers on the other hand definately can be. They have nice stats that can be enhanced by any number of blessings, and total poison immunity does provide tactical possibilities...

[Wish]

I tried an F9A9W9 phoenix pretendr with the serpent dancers and a lizard king prophet to divine bless them then throw around fanatacism and smites.

had the world set as per council of wyrms diffuculty... well i had world richness be normal instead of poor... vs tien chi on the nile map.

anyway a small dancer army, combined with an equal troop of poison slingers did the trick for early independant provinces and even cut into the tien chi a bit. not expensive to replace any of those that die....

but irt lacked lasting power. I ended up taking tien chi with hoardes of pale riders instead of the blessed dancers/slingers, they where formidable though.

[shovah]

your scales must have been **** though, to getboth phoenix paths to 9 and another path to 9

[quantum_mechani]

shovah said:
your scales must have been **** though, to getboth phoenix paths to 9 and another path to 9

Triple, even triple-and-a-half blesses can work, but you need just the right setup. In this case, taking air to 9 is not very useful for the cost, 5 or 6 would have a similar effect much cheaper.

[Wish]

yeah, I tooled around with using earth instead of air. basically I had magic death turmoul and heat cranked down.

[Boron]

Ctis has one amazing advantage:
Most of their troops require almost zero resources.

So you can use Sloth 3 and get additional points from the heat scale.
Furthermore your mages are quite formidable too and you don't really need other magic since you already have death + nature, atm in my ever changing opinion imho the 2 most useful magic paths .

With CB 5 i think one lvl 9 bless is most useful. Either F9 or W9.

Especially F9 is cheap and useful:

Moloch, F9, Watchtower, Dom 6, Order 3, Sloth 1, Growth 3, Heat 1, Misfortune 2, Magic 3.

That are economically quite good scales. Very useful for Ctis. The offensive power of both your serpents and your serpent dancers is considerably strengthened.

The snakes will still quickly die but you can replace losses fast.

The Snakes are quite dangerous vs. many Thugs/tough troops also.
With their 18 attack they hit rather often. With their flaming weapons attack they also hit etheral beings.
And then their is their poison.
So a Thug has to be poison resistent and has to have either high protection or fire resistence to easily slaughter the snakes.

The main Question is though if they are really useful for faster initial expansion. I think ctis with really good economic scales is even better. 1-2 Armies expand with Slave warriors or falchioneers and then you get your skeletonspamming sauromancers.
My estimation would be that ctis without a bless strat works even better then normal ctis.

[Horst F. JENS]

Thanks for all the replys. I was facinated from the fact that i can build sacred serpents everywhere but as Boron and others said the snakes alone are not worth an expensive bless effect. On my next game i will try a death 4(+) pretender so that my cute but somewhat useless sacred serpents can boost morale as well and in the same time rout enemys with the fear aura.