Caelum vs. T'ien Ch'i

[deccan]

Cainehill's points are all valid and I admit that I have a tendency to value skill (which Caelum has) more than HPs and strength, which may be wrong. However, even if I downgrade Caelum's troops and priests to merely "average and competent" instead of "above average", it still seems to me that Caelum has no obvious, glaring weakness. For example, I would still say that Caelum's troops are still better than, say, Tien Chi's mediocre ones, and isn't the mediocrity of Tien Chi's national troops supposed to compensate for their versatile mages?

Furthermore, Caelum has interesting specialist troops in the form of its Mammoths and the things that fly in storms. Those are not useful things in a general way, but they could be useful in the right kind of situation, and gives them an added versatility and ability to surprise, which I think should be considered quite valuable.

One Last point: I think that we shouldn't underestimate cold immunity + built-in magic weapons. The reason why so many national troops do so poorly against SCs even in large numbers is IMHO at least partly because of "Breath of Winter" + "Etherealness" + "Mistform". This makes Caelum's troops quite useful I think over the whole course of the game. Personally, I would value quite highly the ability to break mistform reliably. For example, in some previous tests I've run with AQs, I find that once an AQ's mistform is broken, it can be very easily killed by lifeless things.

Cainehill said:
Not resource intensive - incredibly resource intensive, as you can buy about 2.8 Vans for the same resources.

Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

[Cainehill]

deccan said:
Cainehill's points are all valid and I admit that I have a tendency to value skill (which Caelum has) more than HPs and strength, which may be wrong. However, even if I downgrade Caelum's troops and priests to merely "average and competent" instead of "above average", it still seems to me that Caelum has no obvious, glaring weakness. For example, I would still say that Caelum's troops are still better than, say, Tien Chi's mediocre ones, and isn't the mediocrity of Tien Chi's national troops supposed to compensate for their versatile mages?

No, Tien Chi's Astral-1 mediocre mages counter-compensate for good troops in the default theme, and forced turmoil and lesser troops compensates for powerful mediocre flying mages in Spring and Autumn, who still have Astral-1 and tend to be gunned down by magic duel. Base T'ien C'hi has _GOOD_ troops - I've already written one post about this in the first section of this thread, I'm not going to repeat myself here.

Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

And Production-3 still only lets them get maybe ... 3 or 4 Temple Guards a turn, max, and still no way of getting them to where they'd be useful. It would let them get Iceclads everywhere, but Iceclads tend to be useless against anything 14 protection or higher, not to mention that they keel over from exhaustion too quick.

[Graeme Dice]

deccan said:
Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

One could always go with order 3, prod 2, cold 3, misfortune 2, magic 2, wizard's tower with a Nataraja with air 1 (empower quickly), water 2, nature 3. Or something along similar lines.