Caelum vs. T'ien Ch'i

[Boron]

If Tien Chi S&A wouldn't be forced turmoil 1 but could chase order/turmoil scale freely i think they would be a top 5 nation .

Marignon Diabolic faith is similiar but there i fear if they would be able to chose turmoil/order scale freely then they would be probably the best bloodnation , better than Mictlan and Abysia . Tien Chi S&A has still the weakness of mind duel + their CMs are capitol only so there i think simply removing the forced turmoil 1 would make them a nice nation .

Cainehill said:
Thing is, T'ien C'hi has better troops than Caelum, but yes, it's mages are lacking (except Spring and Autumn).

How do you come to this conclusion ? Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

[Chazar]

Boron said:
Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

The mammoth is nice during earlier stages of the game, but it is useless once the game has progressed and your armies start to count substantial numbers of mages among their ranks:

• First the mammoth disables strategical flight
• Second a trampling and routing mammoth will cause more losses among your mages than the enemy - and severely restricts the mages tactical placement. (and the high-moral but captial-only and hence limited and really-crappy-otherwise wingless do not change this for mid-game purposes)

So a mammoth isnt worth its high upkeep apart from initial expansion and early game blitzkriegs. The mammoth is just Caelums ticket to survive the early game stages.
(Maybe the mammoth could be made more useful if the seraphs would be allowed to target routing units - the Mammoths are used to friendly fire anyway... )

Well, and the Caelian Archers are nice, sure, but in later game stages their short bow becomes useless due to the constant storm produced by the obligatory staffs of storms (even despite of wind guide) and the increased protection of the enemies you are facing. Still they have their place in end game, since they are nice meatshields for the mages: They do allow strategical flight and they stay put in their tactical place thanks to the fire command. Give me the tactical 'hold only'-command and I will use any other size 3 flying troop. So they are just there to prevent the enemy to target my precious mages with "attack fliers" or "attack large" orders.

[Boron]

Sure but this is all true for Tien Chi too . I just wanted to point out that Caelum's troops aren't worse than Tien Chi's .

What you say is more or less true for all troops in lategame .
Some like devils are a bit tougher but even they get wiped out by magic quite well .

[Cainehill]

Boron said:

How do you come to this conclusion ? Caelum has good archers + mammoths . So their troops are superior to Tien Chi S&A and about on par with base Tien Chi .

Like some other people, I'm getting very tired of answering your questions when you're too lazy to look for yourself, since it's fairly obvious that, if you ever played T'ien C'hi, you didn't bother to use their troops.

How are their troops better?

Archers : Composite Bow (damage 12, range 35) instead of Short Bow (dam 10, range 30) does more meaningful damage and has slightly better range. The Imperial Archers have almost as good a precision (11 vice 12) as Caelum's, have better armor, and far better morale (12 vice 10). And TC also has Imperial Crossbows, to do armor piercing damage against high protection units. The only real edge Caelum has is - flying.

Infantry : Caelum's flying infantry mostly suck. They have a top damage of 14, from the troops with the Ice Blade. (Frankly, I suspect a bug - an "Ice Lance" should do more damage than an "Ice Blade", but it's 3 and 5 respectively.) They also have relatively poor morale (except for the Iceclad and Storm Guard, which are _very_ resource intensive).

TC's infantry have a very nice top base damage of 20, from both glaive-bearing troops. (Glaive - damage 10, length 4, a great weapon.) They also have pike wielders, for a length 6 weapon for repels. And spear wielders with tower shields, great against archers, better than the round shields most of Caelum's troops have (exception being the Iceclad / Storm Guards that, did I mention, are incredibly resource heavy?) And TC's Imperial Footmen have morale 12 - quite nice.

Then TC has the Imperial Guard, with very high morale (13), good protection, 15, decent attack (11) and good damage (17 with their falchions), combined with that nice tower shield.

And solid cavalry, including _great_ blessable heavy cavalry in the Red Guard.

On the other paw, Caelum's troops can affect vampires and such. This doesn't really have much of an effect until mid to late game, when flying infantry can take down some vampires or even swarm ethereal SCs before they cast their buff spells. And they fly.

But with the exception of two troops that are tough to acquire in any numbers, the bulk of Caelum's troops are flimsy and not terribly good against other mortal armies, like most independents.

That's why Caelum has great, cheap, mages. Because the bulk of their troops aren't very good at all, while TC has perfectly solid troops - it's only their mages that could use an upgrade.

[Alneyan]

My only problem with T'ien Ch'i is their capitol-only Mages, especially in Spring & Autumn. I can get the money to recruit two Celestial Masters/Master of the Five Elements every turn, but only have a single capitol (duh!). I am not sure if allowing either of them to be recruited everywhere is a good idea though.

Besides this, T'ien Ch'i has adequate troops (though I am not fond of cavalry, but that's more a personal feeling), and Spring & Autumn keeps better than average archers. Sure, Composite Bows are not Longbows, and they won't win the game, but they work well enough against the weaker independent provinces (on Independent Strength 6/7 at any rate; I have yet to try them with Independents 9). Cavalry provinces are another story though, especially with Spring & Autumn, at least with the national armies.

If you did want to bother Caelum, why not give them an enforced Astral path on their mages? Astral 1 is a curse, and Caelum does not strike me as a nation able to get much us from the low Astral spells (such as Body Ethereal and the like). It will, however, make Caelum closer to T'ien Ch'i, though only one of T'ien Ch'i mages have a mandatory Astral path.

[Boron]

Cainehill said:

Like some other people, I'm getting very tired of answering your questions when you're too lazy to look for yourself, since it's fairly obvious that, if you ever played T'ien C'hi, you didn't bother to use their troops.

How are their troops better?

Where did i say they are better ? I said only that caelums troops are better than those of Tien Chi S&A and not much worse than base Tien Chi's .
And in your long and otherwise good analysis you completely left out the mammoth .

It is expensive with 120 gold but with good placement it hits first and the first round is perhaps even enough to rout the enemy .

If caelum had no mammoth then you would be completely true .

The comparism of their troops only is though anyway not viable because caelum will aid their troops with battlemagic anyways .
Tien chi can do this too but not as good and finally caelum has +120 points from cold 3 .

[Thufir]

Alneyan said:
My only problem with T'ien Ch'i is their capitol-only Mages, especially in Spring & Autumn. I can get the money to recruit two Celestial Masters/Master of the Five Elements every turn, but only have a single capitol (duh!). I am not sure if allowing either of them to be recruited everywhere is a good idea though.

I'm a big fan of TC S&A, though I haven't figured out quite how to play them competitively in MP play (yet, that is!). I do think they are somewhat underpowered, but I don't think they're as pathetic as they're generally made out to be.

While I'm too much of a newbie to make claims about what tweaks should or should not be done, I will anyhow!

My suggested tweaks to S&A are:

1) Make summons for Demons of Heavenly Fire and River produce more than one demon per summons. The gem cost can be kept on a proportional basis, or perhaps at a slightly lower cost per demon.

2) Make MoT5E not capital only. When I've suggested this previously, it was said that this was "not thematic". I don't quite get that, but I find that when I'm playing S&A, I recruit very few MoT5E (which I use only for site searching), as it usually seems better to recruit Celestial Masters every turn in my capital. I don't think it's a good idea to make CMs non-capital only, but to the extent that my limited experience guides me, it would seem reasonable to make MoT5E non-capital only.

[Vynd]

Thufir said:

1) Make summons for Demons of Heavenly Fire and River produce more than one demon per summons. The gem cost can be kept on a proportional basis, or perhaps at a slightly lower cost per demon.

I think it is interesting that it took until well into this thread before anyone even mentioned T'ien Chi's unique summons. I think that it goes to show that aren't having much of an impact. So I agree that it would be nice for these to be made more cost effective and/or powerful.

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
And in your long and otherwise good analysis you completely left out the mammoth .

I left out the mammoth because I left out _all_ the non-flying troops, which are of limitted use to Caelum. Without Wingless and the sacred guard, the mammoths tend to rout and kill your mages; in any case they can't fly (unless you have the Flying Ship) and so aren't mobile enough to be terribly useful. And as the two high morale non-flyers are capital-only you can't easily get them to places where you might recruit mammoths (on the front lines).

The comparism of their troops only is though anyway not viable because caelum will aid their troops with battlemagic anyways .
Tien chi can do this too but not as good and finally caelum has +120 points from cold 3 .

What does this have to do with the comparison of the nation's troops? Someone else said that T'ien C'hi's troops were as bad (or worse) than Caelum's and it just isn't so.

And _YES_ Caelum will aid troops with battlemagic - they have to, because their troops are among the worst in the game. The mages are the _point_ of Caelum. Or have your forgotten, they're a bleeding magocracy?

"And finally" what has Caelum's cold three scale to do with any of this? It's an advantage when designing a pretender, but then your economy goes down when the cold scale goes down, your troops aren't as useful if it isn't cold 3, some of the mage's spells aren't as useful if it isn't cold 3, etc, etc.

Feh. *plonk*

[Cainehill]

Vynd said:

I think it is interesting that it took until well into this thread before anyone even mentioned T'ien Chi's unique summons. I think that it goes to show that aren't having much of an impact. So I agree that it would be nice for these to be made more cost effective and/or powerful.

Just like people rarely speak of Marignon's Conquerors of the Sea getting a benefit from its starting spell of Holy Pyre.

The mages can rarely cast the spells, therefor the spells really don't do much for the nation. The paths on the mages ought to be adjusted in TC's case, or the spells changed (definately in CotS case, possibly TCs as well).

As things stand, I think TC can't get enough casters capable of summoning the demons until mid to late game, by which point it's too little too late to build up enough demons to be effective. True, the pretender can take up some of the slack - but it's a waste of the pretender's time to be doing low-to-medium level summonses.