Good Pretender for T'ien C'hi?

[Lord_Bob]

LA T'ien Ch'i has no need of a pretender! T'ien Ch'i KILL! T'ien Ch'i CRUSH PUNY NATIONS! HA! HA!

Really, given that you have such magic versitility and an awesome sacred, and mighty army, insane PD.... your pretender should boost your nation.

[Edratman]

I play MA T'ien C'hi a lot. This probably is terrible MP advice, but it works for me in SP.

I use a sleeping crone with rainbow 4's in E,A,S,D and N. I think I have 5 candles and 1 magic. This ensures that I forge all the boosts required to upgrade the recruitable rainbow mages into potent battle mages/forgers and also Cast Forge,Gift of Health and Natures Bounty with appropiate boosts on the Crone.

[Torin]

for access to avery magic i think you could use:

F3 (burning skull + Flaming helm)

A4 (minimum for helm and Bag)

W2 (ring of water + Armor of the sea)

E2 (earth boots + probably blood stone)

D2 (skull staff + ring of sorcery + skull helm)

N2 (staff of nature +1 + amulet of nature+1 + ring of sorcery + 2 handed staff of nature +2)

S4 (neat to have big here, i think you need S6 to ring of wizardy wich you get with the astral cap and the amulet and later get to S9 to wish. minimum S3)

B2 (could be B1 since you couldnt use blood without blood slaves anyway. with blood 2 you can get to blood 4 with both amulets, sorcery and wizardy)


I dont remember how much you need yo get each of the 2 staff of elemental magic. it was 4F 4W and 4A 4E
its in page 282 of the manual.

[DrPraetorious]

I've been studying pretender design for MA T'ien Ch'i, and this is my advice:
- You have healers. This means you want a living, awake, out-of-the-box, supercombatant pretender, non-undead. There are merits to either the Cyclops or the Wyrm - the Wyrm is much cheaper.
- Order is great. You get national bonuses for Order on top of that, so take Order.
- You also get bonuses for Fortune - specifically, you get very efficient bad-event prevention out of the minister of rituals, and you get a number of really cool unit-triggered events. So take Fortune.
- Your army is effective without being too resource intensive, and your mages (with the exception of the geomancer, who is kinda useless anyway, at least as far as I can tell) are not old, so you take Sloth and Death.
- You have every magic path except death and blood covered, so you don't really need magic on your pretender.

So, you can afford:
A domstr 10 Awake Wyrm, with 3 Order, 3 Sloth, 2 Death, 3 Luck and 1 Magic. For long games, consider 2 Drain and 1 Growth, instead.
A domstr 10 Awake Cyclops, with a 4th point of earth magic, 3 Order, 3 Sloth, 2 Death, 3 Luck and 2 Drain. Note that this guy gives your communion mages a bit of recuperation, which is not entirely shabby.

Attack blind with these units, when they get afflictions, send them home to be healed! Build up a massive force of archers, you can cast flaming arrows and wind guide as a mid game strategy.

[Torin]

if you can prevent bad events then you could use bad luck

[DrPraetorious]

Preventing bad events is good for Fortune, OR Misfortune, or Turmoil - in particular, while taking Fortune makes substantially more of your events good, you also get more bad events just because you get more bad events total.

In the case of T'ien Ch'i, this is completely overbalanced by the nation-specific events which, as far as I can tell, require Fortune and possibly Order as well to get - but a systematic study of events would help a lot.

[KissBlade]

Don't take Death with TC. Ever. Their Cm's are old as are their imperial alchemists (if I recall). If anything I would take Growth 3 if you can afford it somehow. (most likely not) I wouldn't bother with fortune either, misfortune is probably better since you can cancel out a few of the bad ones hopefully. The real loss is the butt kicking immortals.