MA T'ien Ch'i - a little of this, a little of that and BAM!

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

I agree with most of your guide, but I believe you've overlooked some aspects.

I believe TienChi should use a hit and run strategy. Use consorts to over throw key provinces. Use remote summons to take others. Drive the province defense sky high (you'll have the money) so that it takes him 2-3 attempts to retake a province.

Also, your eunuchs and city guard have patrol bonuses, so that one eunuch and 10 guards can easily maintain tax rates of 140 or so. Take growth.

Build at lease one alchemist fairly early for those odd turns you need to alchemize gems.

Rdonj has it exacty right. Attack strategically, defend copiously, *using PD*.

Eh, I don't know, I suppose you could though that seems pretty situational to me. MA TC's PD is decent, but it's not awesome (LA TC's sure is though!) and you don't really have any good remote attack spells which will conquer much more than 1PD (and sometimes not even that). I'm not sure what you mean about consorts overthrowing a province, as far as I know all they can do is raise unrest which reduces your opponents income and if you can get it over 100 shuts down production in that province. Raiding can and should be part of every nation's playbook, but I don't really see MA TC as being a particularly effective blitzer in this fashion. I think you run a very real risk of losing more money than your opponent if you're counting on PD to stop him much.

Patrolling with a higher tax rate and growth scales are a personal preference which can work with this strategy. I tend to dislike the extra micro, lost mage recruitment, opportunity cost of taking growth scales, and long term damage to the economy, but I can imagine it could be effective enough if it's your cup of tea.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Baalz

I'm not sure what you mean about consorts overthrowing a province, as far as I know all they can do is raise unrest which reduces your opponents income and if you can get it over 100 shuts down production in that province.

IIRC, if unrest gets too high (over 100?) it unlocks the bad event which can let a province revolt and become independent again.

-Max

[Tolkien]

What is your opinion on Conscription?

[Frozen Lama]

not sure if this makes sense, but I was thinking,

I guess one thing that seems particularly nasty against this would be rain of stones/earthquake right? aren't a ton of 10hp mages really tasty targets for rain of stones kamakazies?

[Baalz]

Conscription is neat thematically, but strategically insignificant.

@FrozenLama - stone rain is the typical anti-communion goto spell. Check out my guide to communions for a more detailed discussion on several communion topics, Cliff's notes on this one: stick cheap armor on your mages.

[Sombre]

I thought rain of stones hit the head especially, largely bypassing body armour? This may just be my imagination though.

Conscription to my mind makes order turmoil slightly less painful, because your core provinces which you hold for quite a while can build up enough pd to see off the small barbarain attacks. It's not a really big deal, but there's some synergy there.

I also want to reinforce that MA TC really does have very nice troops in the early game. Sure they aren't going to pose a massive challenge to some crazy MA Van bless rush, but they pretty specialised and you've got all the ingredients that make other nations troops awesome, just not all in one or two places. Imperial Guard I find really solid (under cbm), almost as good as the heavy infantry from the roman nations and let us not forget troops with patrol bonus to go with eunuchs - you can crank significantly more gold right when you need it using tax patrolling. Couple this with the spies you send out and I think winning an economic grind war is totally doable.

They really, really need to get forts up though and I think patrol taxing early is a good way to get those going.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I thought rain of stones hit the head especially, largely bypassing body armour? This may just be my imagination though.

Conscription to my mind makes order turmoil slightly less painful, because your core provinces which you hold for quite a while can build up enough pd to see off the small barbarain attacks. It's not a really big deal, but there's some synergy there.

I think conscription is tied to an order scale.

I won't swear to it, but I think somebody ran a test a while back and concluded body armor helps against rain of stones.

[Baalz]

Yeah, another thing that I wanted to mention was the lack of 800 gold forts. You do get them in swamps (and you'd be foolish not to plop one up in every swamp to crank out ministers), but when your choices are between a 1000 gold fort or a 1200 gold fort I find it's usually worthwhile to go ahead and spend the extra gold to put up that nice 50 admin fortified city on the (hypothetical) farmland bordering two mountains and a forest. You get a nice permanent income boost and you actually pull in more resources (because of the admin) than you would plunking up a dinky fort on a mountain province. With the suggested scales you really should have a really good early troop output.

[Baalz]

LA TC has a different troop makeup if I recall correctly, more emphasis on the cavalry. Cavalry seems like a sub-optimal deployment against Mictlan in particular. Against a mixed group of jaguar and eagle warriors plus some chaff I'd think you'd just want arrows, arrows and more arrows with a couple of blockers (who can shoot arrows). If you've got the production for it (production-3 scales and a couple early castles) I'd say mostly Imperial Archers are the way to go here (supplement with regular archers to the back if you're short on production). Those 100 horse archers would be more like 200 foot archers for the same gold. With the assumption you had a good idea of your enemy's troop makeup (spies) split them into about 3 blocks in your back row scripted to fire flyers. My guess is you'd take a few casualties in the eagle warrior's first attack (though your scale mail will help a good deal), inflict enough casualties in your first volley to route the eagle warriors, then spend a couple turns decimating the jaguars as they closed. If I'm wrong and it takes a couple turns to kill the eagles and the jaguars close without significant casualties, they still will likely engage one block of your (scalemail and short sword wielding) archers while the other two blocks hammer them. Meanwhile any slingers the opponent is using will probably inflict more friendly casualties than do anything useful. It'd probably also be worthwhile to put some small clumps of tower shield blockers out front just to tangle up your opponents and probably gain another turn of archery.

There is such a large difference in effectiveness against different troops across MA TC's varied lineup. You really have to bring the right tool to the fight.

[rdonj]

Hmm. Well, in that game I literally could not have had any more arrows flying, since light cavalry and archers cost exactly the same amount of resources and I was being fed gold by some of my teammates. However you are absolutely right, in a normal game with more than one fort per person I could have had quite a few more archers than horsemen (no one had more than one fort at that point in the game). I also apparently only had about 75 archers altogether, so I had a slightly excessive number of blockers from my mercenary group plus the heavy infantry freespawn.

I only had that insane of a pd because there was literally no way for anyone who attacked me to not go through that province. Otherwise that just would have been crazy. Anyway, thanks for your input. The further away from that game I get the more I see things I did wrong....