Caelum vs. T'ien Ch'i

[Cainehill]

Another way to weaken Caelum slightly would be to change their random to be random elemental only. Sure, it means they get more A4s, but it also makes it tougher for them to get nature, death, and astral, all of which are quite valuable. (This would seem to make some sense, since Caelum's mages are definately elemental based - it makes more sense, imo, than Arco's mystics only having elemental randoms.)

The priest side of TC's mages is definately something of a bonus - if your pretender dies, you easily bring him back. Caelum may well have to build a bunch of seraphine priests all of a sudden, which are of dubious value unless menaced by undead.

Giving CM's an extra random (and increased cost) might help, imo.

Thing is, T'ien C'hi has better troops than Caelum, but yes, it's mages are lacking (except Spring and Autumn).

Frankly, if Water was improved the way it should be then TC's mages would be a lot more viable. That's how I'd like to seem them fixed, especially rather than nerfing Caelum.

[Boron]

If Tien Chi S&A wouldn't be forced turmoil 1 but could chase order/turmoil scale freely i think they would be a top 5 nation .

Marignon Diabolic faith is similiar but there i fear if they would be able to chose turmoil/order scale freely then they would be probably the best bloodnation , better than Mictlan and Abysia . Tien Chi S&A has still the weakness of mind duel + their CMs are capitol only so there i think simply removing the forced turmoil 1 would make them a nice nation .

Cainehill said:
Thing is, T'ien C'hi has better troops than Caelum, but yes, it's mages are lacking (except Spring and Autumn).

How do you come to this conclusion ? Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

[Chazar]

Boron said:
Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

The mammoth is nice during earlier stages of the game, but it is useless once the game has progressed and your armies start to count substantial numbers of mages among their ranks:

• First the mammoth disables strategical flight
• Second a trampling and routing mammoth will cause more losses among your mages than the enemy - and severely restricts the mages tactical placement. (and the high-moral but captial-only and hence limited and really-crappy-otherwise wingless do not change this for mid-game purposes)

So a mammoth isnt worth its high upkeep apart from initial expansion and early game blitzkriegs. The mammoth is just Caelums ticket to survive the early game stages.
(Maybe the mammoth could be made more useful if the seraphs would be allowed to target routing units - the Mammoths are used to friendly fire anyway... )

Well, and the Caelian Archers are nice, sure, but in later game stages their short bow becomes useless due to the constant storm produced by the obligatory staffs of storms (even despite of wind guide) and the increased protection of the enemies you are facing. Still they have their place in end game, since they are nice meatshields for the mages: They do allow strategical flight and they stay put in their tactical place thanks to the fire command. Give me the tactical 'hold only'-command and I will use any other size 3 flying troop. So they are just there to prevent the enemy to target my precious mages with "attack fliers" or "attack large" orders.

[Boron]

Sure but this is all true for Tien Chi too . I just wanted to point out that Caelum's troops aren't worse than Tien Chi's .

What you say is more or less true for all troops in lategame .
Some like devils are a bit tougher but even they get wiped out by magic quite well .

[Cainehill]

Boron said:

How do you come to this conclusion ? Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

Like some other people, I'm getting very tired of answering your questions when you're too lazy to look for yourself, since it's fairly obvious that, if you ever played T'ien C'hi, you didn't bother to use their troops.

How are their troops better?

Archers : Composite Bow (damage 12, range 35) instead of Short Bow (dam 10, range 30) does more meaningful damage and has slightly better range. The Imperial Archers have almost as good a precision (11 vice 12) as Caelum's, have better armor, and far better morale (12 vice 10). And TC also has Imperial Crossbows, to do armor piercing damage against high protection units. The only real edge Caelum has is - flying.

Infantry : Caelum's flying infantry mostly suck. They have a top damage of 14, from the troops with the Ice Blade. (Frankly, I suspect a bug - an "Ice Lance" should do more damage than an "Ice Blade", but it's 3 and 5 respectively.) They also have relatively poor morale (except for the Iceclad and Storm Guard, which are _very_ resource intensive).

TC's infantry have a very nice top base damage of 20, from both glaive-bearing troops. (Glaive - damage 10, length 4, a great weapon.) They also have pike wielders, for a length 6 weapon for repels. And spear wielders with tower shields, great against archers, better than the round shields most of Caelum's troops have (exception being the Iceclad / Storm Guards that, did I mention, are incredibly resource heavy?) And TC's Imperial Footmen have morale 12 - quite nice.

Then TC has the Imperial Guard, with very high morale (13), good protection, 15, decent attack (11) and good damage (17 with their falchions), combined with that nice tower shield.

And solid cavalry, including _great_ blessable heavy cavalry in the Red Guard.

On the other paw, Caelum's troops can affect vampires and such. This doesn't really have much of an effect until mid to late game, when flying infantry can take down some vampires or even swarm ethereal SCs before they cast their buff spells. And they fly.

But with the exception of two troops that are tough to acquire in any numbers, the bulk of Caelum's troops are flimsy and not terribly good against other mortal armies, like most independents.

That's why Caelum has great, cheap, mages. Because the bulk of their troops aren't very good at all, while TC has perfectly solid troops - it's only their mages that could use an upgrade.

[Boron]

Cainehill said:

Like some other people, I'm getting very tired of answering your questions when you're too lazy to look for yourself, since it's fairly obvious that, if you ever played T'ien C'hi, you didn't bother to use their troops.

How are their troops better?

Where did i say they are better ? I said only that caelums troops are better than those of Tien Chi S&A and not much worse than base Tien Chi's .
And in your long and otherwise good analysis you completely left out the mammoth .

It is expensive with 120 gold but with good placement it hits first and the first round is perhaps even enough to rout the enemy .

If caelum had no mammoth then you would be completely true .

The comparism of their troops only is though anyway not viable because caelum will aid their troops with battlemagic anyways .
Tien chi can do this too but not as good and finally caelum has +120 points from cold 3 .

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
And in your long and otherwise good analysis you completely left out the mammoth .

I left out the mammoth because I left out _all_ the non-flying troops, which are of limitted use to Caelum. Without Wingless and the sacred guard, the mammoths tend to rout and kill your mages; in any case they can't fly (unless you have the Flying Ship) and so aren't mobile enough to be terribly useful. And as the two high morale non-flyers are capital-only you can't easily get them to places where you might recruit mammoths (on the front lines).

The comparism of their troops only is though anyway not viable because caelum will aid their troops with battlemagic anyways .
Tien chi can do this too but not as good and finally caelum has +120 points from cold 3 .

What does this have to do with the comparison of the nation's troops? Someone else said that T'ien C'hi's troops were as bad (or worse) than Caelum's and it just isn't so.

And _YES_ Caelum will aid troops with battlemagic - they have to, because their troops are among the worst in the game. The mages are the _point_ of Caelum. Or have your forgotten, they're a bleeding magocracy?

"And finally" what has Caelum's cold three scale to do with any of this? It's an advantage when designing a pretender, but then your economy goes down when the cold scale goes down, your troops aren't as useful if it isn't cold 3, some of the mage's spells aren't as useful if it isn't cold 3, etc, etc.

Feh. *plonk*

[The Panther]

I find it interesting that a steadfast Abysia player (Cohen) wants his personal race beefed up and a confirmed Caelum player (Cainehill) wants the most powerful nation left alone so it can continue to be too strong! To each his own!

As far as Spring and Autumn, I did not include that in my original comparison. Like me, most people get immediately turned off by the forced turmoil. And because Order (OK, maybe Magic too) is the single most important scale, S&A is heavily penalized by this.

Also, on the subject of summons, the base TC unique summons Celestial Soldiers are just too expensive in terms of air gem cost to be useful in bulk. I would rather save up air gems to try and get an air queen.

Really, TC just has nothing going for it. One of the best Posts above was Zen telling how he had to hide, appear weak, and cajole his opponents into leaving him mostly alone in order to win as T'ien Ch'i. Maybe this remains as the only known TC win on a big map. Certainly, not to take away anything from that incredible discussion of skill, since everybody knows TC is so weak and not a big threat, Zen could get away with this!

Also, the fact that you have to rely on a weak mage with W1?1P2 to do anything at all just confirms the problems with TC. I would much rather rely on a horror-spamming A2W1 Seraph to fight key battles.

The fact that the national troops of either race are very weak is close to meaningless. I mean, look at the race with the WORST national troops, Mictlan. Not many people consider Mictlan all that weak. Until they somehow eventually fix the problem of the national troops being pretty much useless other than fodder after turn 40 or so, this won't even be an issue in my mind.

[Zen]

The Panther said:
Really, TC just has nothing going for it. One of the best Posts above was Zen telling how he had to hide, appear weak, and cajole his opponents into leaving him mostly alone in order to win as T'ien Ch'i. Maybe this remains as the only known TC win on a big map. Certainly, not to take away anything from that incredible discussion of skill, since everybody knows TC is so weak and not a big threat, Zen could get away with this!

I didn't say they didn't have anything going for it. Obviously in order to accomplish that win I had to have a significant gem income, which TC excels at searching multiple paths. A strong starting force with the appropriate combination (high numbers of early archers) and the ability to research significantly.

Also, the fact that you have to rely on a weak mage with W1?1P2 to do anything at all just confirms the problems with TC. I would much rather rely on a horror-spamming A2W1 Seraph to fight key battles.

Actually, the MoTW is not a weak mage by standard of efficency and usefulness or cost. Quickness, Frozen Heart, False Horror, Banishment, combined with the ability to blood hunt easily if you are utilizing them to their full effectiveness (by building them *everywhere*) make them adaptable to whatever role you happen to need as long as you provide the stopping power to actually use them instead of being devoured by SC's.

This is actually why I was able to do what I did because I was able to adapt my defense to the multitude of nations and tactics that I faced during the course of the game.

[Cainehill]

The Panther said:
I find it interesting that a steadfast Abysia player (Cohen) wants his personal race beefed up and a confirmed Caelum player (Cainehill) wants the most powerful nation left alone so it can continue to be too strong! To each his own!

Confirmed Caelum player? Heh. My net Caelum experience is ... two MP games, both ongoing. More proper to say that I'm a confirmed Vanheim and CW Pangaea player.

And I'm also arguing against a change that was proposed to weaken Caelum, because it (giving them forced astral) would IMO actually strengthen them.

Changes that I think _could_ be made would be tweaking the costs a little bit -- anything more than 10/20 more gold would be too much, or making the high seraph capital only.