Caelum questions

[OG_Gleep]

Decided to try these guys, wanted to try out a magic centric race. I am wondering if I could get some advice on how to use their units properly.

What does your typical stack look like, as far as national troops are concerned. Just by looking at them, there seems to be two natural stack types as far as national troops are concerend. Ground pounders, and Pure Flyers.

I have tried both, and Wingless + Mammoths seem to work well, and have ok survivability. But any flyers seem to have really really short lifespans.

1) For Pure Flying stacks, what is the best configuration, deployment, and orders?

2) For arieal support in ground pounding armies, what is the best type and orders for them?

3) Do you guys use any of the flying melee units when Archers of any type are presant in the stack?

4) How many High Seraphs do you guys normally have in a indie combat stack, and a stack geared towards humans.

5) Beyond research, is there any use for the lower cost mages?

6) When things are running right, what does a normal casualty report look like? The reason I ask, is its quite common for any unit that actually gets hit (by either bows or swords) to either break, or at the very least suffer massive casualties.

7) Is it nessisary to have Storm Generals trailing behind to quickly round up routers and get them back to the front? I have had to stall several times to reform.

[castigated]

i'm no expert, but i had a thing for caelum for a while, so i'll give you my two cents:

1) i like to put then on the sides with orders to hold and attack rear/archers

2) i have no idea what you're asking here.

3) absolutely. i also count on half of my flying units dying in most battles, though, so i just use them as special forces for taking out enemy archers or commanders, sort of like the same way i use eagle warriors as mictlan.

4) most indies i take with just wingless/mammoths and one or maybe two high seraphs. against humans, as many as i can afford to pull from research. they have great evocation spells, and the more false horrors you can spam, the better.

5) some will argue with me, but i say no. i usually only hire the more expensive ones as caelum.

6) when fighting indies, i usually have no losses on anything but heavy cavalry, knights, longbowmen, dark vines, that sort of thing. i also just use a gazillion archers (always the 9 resource ones, i've found)....and they plow through most armies and make them route before they get to you. then you have the mammoths there just in case they do get to you, set to hold and attack.

7) i have found it is often a good idea, especially for recruiting the "special forces" flying melee units i was talking about before. i use them expecting them to all die in a battle, but then i just have one guy running around picking up the runners who did survive.


edit: re-reading your questions, i think i answered number 2 with my number 1, and my real answer to your number 1 is....using only flying troops is generally a bad idea. at least, i can't figure out how to do it without mass death ensuing (assuming you don't have lots and lots of mages amongsto those fliers)

[castigated]

as an addition...when i was playing caelum last, i found instead of the wingless/mammoth thing, i was using the blue sacred guys (their name escapes me) with w w9a4 bless, and they made an awfully good meatwall for my archers when taking indies. late game, though, and especially when trying to fight other real people, i found that i wish i hadn't spent so many points on a bless i was using just to make a meatwall for my early game.

(please excuse my excessive comments...i really did have a caelum obsession for a while)

[Oversway]

5) Beyond research, is there any use for the lower cost mages?

The famous caelum false horror spam

[Wish]

I have found the most survivable way to script flying meleers is to have them guard commander. if they need to be on the front lines, then have a disposable commander amidst them for them to guard.

mind you the survivability is still pretty bad.

[Rathar]

Caelum is a bit hard in the beginning as their troops are made out of thin paper so there is a bit of a critical mass effect going on but once you have a pile of them you can cast wind guide and they become pretty efficient.

1: 30+ caelum archers (I use the weak ones as the 9 resource type doesn't seem to have any more survivability) and as many seraphs as you can get. Archers on shoot closest pepper/block while mages false horror/lightning stuff.

2+3?: if you refer to flying melee types, screw em. They are weak in everyway and I have barely ever seen them do more than fly up to enemy, all miss, get poked back, flee and spread themselves alll over.

4: a couple and as many as possible. Seem to work very well in stacks of 10+

5: I never buy them so..

6: When running right it's 0% losses for me and 100% for them. If ground troops can get a significant body of soldiers in contact with my archer blocks it usually turns out ugly for me. My goal is to have 20+ false horrors a turn getting in the way of that happening.

7: Never had a game where it wasn't necessary to have secondary leaders running around picking up retreated troops and the 1-2 x-bow men various provinces make.

Rathar

[shovah]

would just like to remind everyone here that cb mod increases the fatigue of false horror so if your planning a prolonged battle try ghost wolves

[Oversway]

false horrors have some benefits over wolves, I think you have to consider the battle, even in cb

[shovah]

flying and light fear are good and i use them alot but in bigger battles you should still have a few ghost wolf casters imo

[OG_Gleep]

For the flying stacks, these could be a mix of melee and archers, or pure archers and mages. For armies with ground units, you really intend for atleast some of them to get into melee. I was asking (although not clearly) is basically, do you normally take archers, or melee support.

Thanks for the tips guys, most of the armies I have played had very survivable units. It was a bit of a surprise to watch these guys get hit so bad.