Good Pretender for T'ien C'hi?

[KissBlade]

Try to take sloth before death with Tien Chi. Also a generic w9 dragon with dom 4, order3, sloth 3, growth 1, magic 1, misfortune is a pretty standard build across the build for Tien Chi. THough MA Tien Chi, you might want to go imprisoned oracle uber scales instead.

[KainWeylin]

Early era. Any tips for starting out?

[KissBlade]

It depends on whether you're going bless or not. But as a rule of thumb, composite archers will form the bulk of your army. Starting tips tend to run the same for every nation actually. An excellent starting guide for beginners is found here :

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

Or alternatively you can click my link on my sig for how I tend to play magic nations.

Essentially you'll be eyeing soft targets first in a ring around your capital so you can add more reinforcements to your expanding army every turn. Also make it a habit to recruit mages non stop. That is how you win the game, by having more mages than the other player. Try to not mix archers with fast non shielded infantry (for example, W5e's with the exception of the occasional decoy), because your archers will shoot them up if they engage in melee too much. Your meatshields are mostly for purpose as hold and shield to block troops from reaching your archer line. EA early-mid game is literally all about archers and blesses. Also I tend to take a solo expansion pretender, usually a dragon chassis to get even more of a jump start into expansion. Script it to fire closest x5 and attack closest and you'll be able to take out a majority of the regular indies. Later on you get nice summons to buff out the holes in your melee lineup, in the form of water demons, as well as using construction boosters to beef your mages. The flying celestial masters are really good evo casters but I get slightly annoyed at S&A being almost pigeonholed to taking growth 3 for any serious long term games. Also look into alteration 6 for frozen heart so your non cap mages can do something other than wank off. =\

[SelfishGene]

Don't Celestial Masters come with a chance for a Nature random? So at least some part of you CM crew will not have old age problems.

I'd also throw a few chariots in the mix as well at least in the early game, at least as a flanking force vs. some of the weaker indies. C'tis chariots are better and almost as good (if not in some ways better) than heavy cavarly, as they get a length-3 bite attack, but Tien Chi chariots have better morale.

[Nix]

W9 bless makes your sacred troops tough as nails, as they already have reasonably high defense (and Quickness really lets them rip through enemy ranks).

[totalperspec]

I avoid negative scales with T'ien Ch'i, but if I must (if the map is small enough I don't think imprisoning is smart), I'll take drain. T'ien Ch'i research is pretty good anyway and the weakened magic helps resist magic duel spells. I suppose with the upgrade and characters that lower the risk of bad random events chaos and misfortune aren't as devastating as before, though it still hurts income.

I personally like the Celestial General, he's a good get out there kick *** and spread dominion pretender, and the only major thing is he has A-5, for air helmets. With the updated system I might do the same thing with fire magic. Then he'd really rain down death.

MA T'ien Ch'i bless I'm not a really big fan of. It only applies to Red Guard, mages I don't want on the front lines and some summons. Enough magic to fill in the holes with recruitable mages and high dominion win the day more often than not.