Guide to EA C'tis

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Pretender commentary, from experiences: (limited, but will get better as my survival times increase)

Saurolich: Immortal, undead, and not cold-blooded. Worth noting you're only immortal in your dominion, undead is a vulnerability, and if you make it far enough, you won't be able to use the Jade Mask on your pretender, only your necromancers. You can't depend on that for a late game death boost. Still, you can equip enough, certainly.

Prince of Death: Though a death pretender is somewhat redundant with C'tis, this, barring the lack of immortality, is in many ways superior to the Saurolich. There's the obvious flying, but in addition to that, you get fear +13 base. Add in the death magic bonus, and you can get some truly ridiculous fear. If you go all the way to 10 death magic, for instance, you get a fear of 20. So, considering pg. 57, your fear would affect 26 squares (longer than some bows), and require a morale check against 14 instead of the base 10 and 6. Also, you save about 35 points, and get an extra dominion candle to boot.

Mother of Monsters: I wanted to use her, I really did. She seemed fairly tough on paper, but she ends up dying earlier than any of the other combatants when used offensively. The problem is her poison cloud - my first thought was enemy only crowd control, but it can easily deal you more damage than the enemy, even with the 50% resistance. (The Serpent's Blessing spell is later, but definitely worth getting.) You'll often find her exposed or hurting her own troops. You'll need to think very carefully about placing her so she doesn't get swarmed, or she'll go down quicker than you'd expect. Consider giving her all your nature/death summons (most of which are conveniently PR100%), giving your commanders poison rings, placing non-critical mundane troops in close support, or dancers. Even if the dinky skeletons or vine men aren't much from a damage perspective they're much superior from a morale perspective than your regular troops, and conveniently poison resistant.

It's much easier to use the Mother of Serpents (just be sure to give her the attack order so she doesn't waste her time hiding behind your troops). You can equip her with more and she is much more friendly to mixing with your troops. So not only does she make better use of your normal support, she also comes with her own renewable bodyguard team in the form of several horned serpents. While these guys will go down pretty quickly on their own, they combine nicely with a rushing strategy. Put her slightly in the front, they get the first arrows, when and if they're down, your troops are there to take more blows. A few less troops to replace and a lot more momentum. She won't win battles by herself, or make you win the unwinnable, but you'll go through 'fair' fights with a lot less casulties. Against some independents, you can go fairly far with just 30 light infantry and 10 city guards and one Mother of Serpents.

The healing is almost a nonfactor, but it is nice icing on the cake. The mother of serpents is definetly my favorite pretender so far, and easy to use, though not as overpowering as say, a Wyrm. Oh, and unlike the Mother of Monsters, she'll dramatically benefit from barkskin.

I haven't tried the Cyclops, though I am interested if anyone else has. He's the only Ctis pretender with a three base in earth. That might enable some C'tis strats that no other C'tis pretender would allow, or it may just be a minor event.

My early research often goes in a drive for black servent, followed by shades. I was thinking ethereal would combine with the heat scales and encumbrance and low mr of ulm, nicely. But it turns out that EA Ulm has a surprisingly low encumbrance. So, I'm thinking instead I might try for Black Servants followed by a beeline to raise skeletons/undead, then finally Dark Knowledge, than finally the nature scrying spell, since luck without order often gets me that nice shaman.

Now, I'm seriously considering bowing to pressure and trying an order scale or two... What would you suggest as an early game spell build for that?

If I find that lack of luck too painful, I'll experiment with growth, constant over-taxation, and militia patrols. I don't expect it to go very far, but I'll hit the math and give it a try-out. After all, I already made the mistake of getting confused about how much income a Tel City/Fort brings in. It's only somewhere around 25% extra, right? Hardly reason enough to save up for a city/fort when forests and hills are available.

When you take death scales, does that influence your starting position any? I've only played a few games, all on randomly generated maps, and while it may be coincidence, all my death scale games have surrounded me in wastelands.

Come tomorrow, I'll have a day off to hammer out these ideas of mine with some practice. Thanks again for the original posts and later responses.

P.S. Don't Lammashtas attack your own mage? I heard somewhere that you can place them at the edge of the battlefield with a summon, retreat order and they'll likely survive.

[MaxWilson]

Lammashstas--yes, they do attack your own forces, particularly if you have some ahead of your mage, like an archer decoy. I think they must do an "attack closest" order.

Prince of Death: while fear +20 does have an AOE of 26, that's not the same thing as a *radius* of 26. It's 26 squares around the POD, arranged in a semi-random fashion that will generally be circle-ish, with a radius of 4-5. So, don't try to rout archers from across the battlefield with this.

-Max

[RamsHead]

OK, first off, I have never had as much trouble with Lammashtas as most people on this board apparently have had. There is a chance they will backfire and attack your own forces, but, in my experience, they seem to attack the enemy much more often.

Saurolich: I like him. Giving him some earth, fire, and air makes him a hard hitting SC early on, and later on he can make use of those summons, items, etc. that you have a difficult time getting access to. The fact that he is immortal also makes it so you can use him a bit more liberally than you would others. Putting all that magic on him can be quite expensive though.

Prince of Death: The PoD is rarely a bad choice. If you are not sure what to go with, a PoD is a safe bet.

Mother of Monsters: I have never used her, but after checking her out, I would say that her real advantage is being a titan-like pretender with rainbow mage-like easy access to other paths of magic. Mind you, she doesn't do either as good as the actual titans and rainbow mages. She is awfully expensive though with such weak starting magic, low dominion, and the obvious difficulty of using her in battle. I would say that there are better choices out there, but don't take what I say as the final word.

Mother of Serpents: I have only used her once and briefly at that. To me, her healing powers are primarily useful for healing herself if she gets hurt in combat. She is not as tough as other titans, but her stats are not bad. Those snakes she wields in combat are limited in power. They might be useful against the normal riffraff, but you should give her an item to take advantage of her great strength (which you probably already do). I have two main complaints about her. One, she is expensive. She has better dominion than MoM and better magic too, but it is more difficult to get access to other magic, which leads me to my second problem. She doesn't really offer EA C'tis anything that they don't already have. Death and nature are the two paths that your national mages best cover. With such difficultly in diversifying magic, a pretender with at least one path in another magic is preferred. You can put other magic on her, it is just going to be a bit expensive. If you want a pretender with multiple paths and be a powerful SC, the Saurolich is a better choice in my opinion.

Cyclops: Once again, we have an expensive titan. C'tis is not really in need of lots of earth magic. Some is good no doubt, but you can get that with other pretenders. Also, he has a penchant for losing that one eye of his.

Going with an order scale: I am not sure why you would need to change your magic strategy because of an order scale.

I am also not sure why you are constantly over taxing your provinces and patrolling them. I can only guess that it has to do with having little income without order, or maybe you are not expanding fast enough.

I don't believe taking a death scale affects where you start.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I'm not generally over-taxing my provinces, but I was considering that because of my negative income modifier. I may have to go with order after all.

About changing my magic strategy? Well, to be honest, it wasn't really about going to an order scale, except on not spending as much on commander. It had more to do with being uncertain about my magic strategy.

So, you'd recommend diversifying magic away from my nation's strengths?

Now, oddly enough, I've built twenty militia and a taskmaster, and my income hasn't gone down one bit. In fact, 40 produces the same result. Does this mean that the 'cost / 15' is rounded down, or truncated? So, 10 and a taskmaster is oh, 100 gold down, no monthly payments. And why don't I see any upkeep for my taskmaster? Anyways, if I had a farmland i was willing to exploit, it could pay for itself fairly quickly.

I agree. The mother of monsters is far from a good choice, but she interests me - I may play her simply to see if I can use her without killing my own troops. Later, though, and only in singleplayer when I'm able to avoid dying regularly.

Other than giving myself one easy opponent whose always the same race, do you have any advice on any particular map settings that it will make it easier for me?

I certainly will refocus my fort building efforts and I'll take order three in my next game. Though I will miss seeing the random events. I am avoiding rainbow mages, though, simply because too much magic variety is a bad thing at this stage- simple data overload.

I think, since I'm living in Florida, and my state's recently been on fire, I should consider switching to Abyssia. I may not be serious, but its the ultimate roleplaying extreme! Yeah... I hear I can scan in a map of the state, if I just throw in some heat scales and fire magic, its true to life! No water mages allowed. We're conserving water, ya hear. Heh.

[Shovah32]

You shouldnt notice a big drop in random events once your empire is mid-sized or larger due to the 3 per turn limit.

[MaxWilson]

Your income doesn't go down when you recruit troops, but your upkeep does increase. Every turn your treasury accumulates (income - upkeep).

I think it's been mentioned that stronger indies make for an easier game. IMHO this also applies to larger maps--crowded maps always result in AIs ganging up on me (because I'm weak in the beginning, having no bonuses to production like Impossible AIs get) before I'm ready. I like Glory of the Gods (multiplayer) with 6 or 7 AIs, tops.

I always take Order-3 Misfortune-3, mostly because I don't care about heroes and expand quickly enough not to notice the bad events (chance of events doesn't scale linearly with empire size). Sloth is often a good pick, depending on your race. The only times I've ever taken Death scales I've regretted it, although this may have something to do with my playstyle. Expensive blesses are a lot of fun but not generally as effective for me as good scales and terrific mages (I usually only play races with good recruitable-anywhere mages, like EA C'tis, LA Agartha, pre-3.08 Helheim, Arcoscephale, EA Ermor).

Have fun!

-Max

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Well, see, Max, I did a test game on the demo map, with my own Pretender and C'tis. No matter how many militia (7 gold, 2 resources) I recruited, my income didn't go down, even if they just stood around doing nothing. It makes a certain amount of sense that the militia would be free (7/15 < 1), but not the taskmaster (30 gp). Maybe it was a little glitch? It seems to reacting more or less as expected now - 50 militia increase my upkeep by 24 gold or so a turn, but they didn't before.

Edit- so farmlands still could be profitably overtaxed with militia support.

[Shovah32]

If you have growth then with overtaxing and patrolling you can still keep a stable population at 0 unrest.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

RamsHead, I'm editing some basic information into that wiki page. Do I have your permission to copy your guide in? Or do you think you'll get around to it?

[RamsHead]

If you are on a smaller or even medium sized map, you can go with a death scale. C'tissian mages don't suffer from old age and with nature magic, you should not have any major problems with supply. Though if you do go with a death scale, you should avoid over taxing and patrolling.

Yes, you should put magic on your pretender that your nation doesn't have access to. If you were playing Arcoscephale or T'ien Ch'i, then it wouldn't be as big of a deal, but EA C'tis is quite magically focused.

As far as your magic strategy goes, I don't see any glaring flaws with it. You might want to consider going for Raise Skeletons first. Black Servants are nice, but you should be able to expand fast enough to come across an indie province that allows you to recruit scouts. Most of the time you shouldn't bother with Shades. They are fairly weak, so it is better to save up for more powerful beings.