Caelum vs. T'ien Ch'i

[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.

[The Panther]

What???? Only two games as Caelum?

How did you manage to be playing BOTH those games against little 'ol me??? And recently too???

Probably bad luck on my part, darn it all.

[alexti]

The Panther said:
What???? Only two games as Caelum?

How did you manage to be playing BOTH those games against little 'ol me??? And recently too???

Probably bad luck on my part, hehe.

Probably so. I am/was in 3 MP with Cainehill and he isn't playing Caelum in any of those (Pangaea, Arco and Machaka).

[Cainehill]

The Panther said:
What???? Only two games as Caelum?

How did you manage to be playing BOTH those games against little 'ol me??? And recently too???

Probably bad luck on my part, darn it all.

Heh. Could be worse - you're Vanheim in one, with no quarrel with me. In the other, you did in fact attack me, I retaliated (and retaliated, and ...) but it all worked out in the end, as you got to feast on Marignon's AI corpse, which I didn't even nibble on.

At least I'm not too bad a neighbor - no ice beer bottles getting thrown over into your backyard, I'm not playing Vanilla Ice too loud, heck, I'm a nIce neighbor compared to some.

And yep - only these two games as Caelum. I get bored and like to try new nations, and avoid having more than 2 with the same nation at the same time.

And I'm arguably doing better in one of my first two R'lyeh games than I'm doing with Caelum.

Guess you're just lucky, eh? Could talk diplomacy over a beer sometime if you wanted.

[Arryn]

Cainehill said:
Confirmed Caelum player? Heh.

Get used to it. I got tarred by Zen months ago as a "confirmed Jotun player", only because I played it twice in MP games he was in, and I wrote an AAR based on Utgard. My preferred nation (at the moment) is actually R'leyh, though I also have some fondness for Caelum and Ulm.

If I was going to try to nerf Caelum, I'd consider making *both* seraph types capital-only, leave their costs alone, and make the random pick (or one of them in the case of the high seraph) elemental-only. To balance this and make the use of mammoths more viable beyond the early game, I'd make wingless recruitable at any fort.