Caelum questions, both themes.

[Tuna-Fish]

Imo Caelum has only one, but very powerful advantage over other nations. High Seraphs.
3 air 2 water 1? Flying, and most importantly, costs only a fekking *175* in cash, they are perhaps the most powerful single mage in game, when cost is taken into account.

At their mind-bendingly low cost, you should be making hordes of them. They are one of the most effective, if not THE most effective, researchers one can buy from the start, can search for sites really quickly (althought at limited paths), can cast quickness in battle to make them even more effective, work well with storm and storm power and do a lot of nice overland spells.

As for good battle spells for caelum, first one to cast is always obviously quickness, then summon storm power (if you are fighting in storm) and then proceed with thunder strikes or orb lighnings. The spells seem weak? Remeber, after first turn you will be casting 2/turn, and your mages are really cheap, so you have lots of them. Caelian mages have one weakness though: most of the stuff can be canceled with lighning resistance, so even mechanical men can be real nasty.

As for slaughtering abysians, or anyhting else for that matter, try this once: Take a single high seraph, give him staff of storms and ring that gives lighning immunity. Then go to battle, alone or preferably with some units that have lightning immunity guarding him, and cast wrathful skies. Proceed to watch the enemy army fry, and leave your enemy wondering at the battle report where hundreds of his units died and your units show one living commander.

Will not work twice against a human though, but is guaranteed to bring any ai down every time. There are another Versions with at least fire and poison.

[Chazar]

Umh, I'm pretty new to the game, but I really like Caelum (but not the awful Raptor Theme), but I still state my stratgey for Caleum here, since I would appreciate comments whether my thoughts are right or wrong:

- Caelum fights well in the cold, so having a very high dominion strength (8-9) and using your pretender and prophet on the front lines to spread it seems reasonable to me.

- If your dominion strength is high anyway, then use your scales as well as the effect of the scales depend on the dominion strength as well: Order 2, Prod 2, Cold -3, Growth 2, Luck 1, Magic -1. Maybe Prod or Growth 3. No theme.

- I choose the 60-point Castle. Caelum troops are quick, so a strong fortification allows me to bring in helping troops from the outside in case of sieges, without lossing the accopanying temple/lab. (But I have to think about that wizard tower again...good point!)

- This leaves no design points for magic, and since I need a strong front-line pretender I decided to take the Blue Dragon with no additional magic. (I agree that cold resistance is a must have for the caelum pretender!)

True, this renders blessing useless, but my sneaky preachers serve other purposes anyway and I dont like those temple guards anyway. I'd rather build more mammoths and wingless if I want a non flying army.

In addition, the mages of caelum are indeed really nice, so they must take care for item creation and spells. My Dragon's Breath and his fly ability allow a fast start and I rely on my good scales to produce more troops to compensate the lack of a useful spell casting pretender in mid or end game, so I really put my pretender in the front line in the beginning. Once he is crippled with afflictions, he just "takes care of the reinforcements", ie. sits just behind my front line to spread his dominion.

I dont know whether those extra-heros appear always or whether it depends on my luck scale set to 1, but so far I always obtained that raptor-seraphine skilled in Death-Magic which complements my magic neatly.

- If there is no underwater nation in play, I usually try to send a water 3 mage or my pretender with a mammoth to an oceanic province as early as possible. Building aquatic troops goes slowly, but its neat to build temples at your enemies coastline...

- I prioritize research in construction in order to produce owl quills (you have +3 air gems from the start) to compensate my drain scale. If I have that Death-Magic heroine and she found a death gem site so far, I will even go for that cool research boosting skull. Otherwise I go for Alteration (Mistform/GhostWolves are good to conquer underwater) or Evocation.

- I disagree with the "heart of winter"-dominon. I think those 50 points are more worth on growth, production or even order, since you can spread with sneaky preachers anyway.

I'm usually not sure who I am going to turn into my prophet. A mage who accompanies my front line troops? A seraphine for stealth? I think that having a prophet-strom general in raiding party is a bad idea, as my raiding parties usually wont return home...

I dont like building non-caelum troops. As long as I manage to fight in the cold, I feel fine. Why hire other archers? Money is rarely a problem, and caelum archers require only 4 resources and are quite effective, so I dont want to build other archers. Protecting my archers is done with thos spire horn warriors. Depending on my scouts, I use them either to stand fast and protect my archers (via guard commander, who is set on hold or fire if he has a bow already), or, if the enemy has mages or plenty of archers himself on "hold and attack archers/rear" as said before in this thread. I always adjust my army setup before each battle.


So far I have only battled against normal AI's, but i intend to start a game with local friends soon. What do you think, how will they beat me up?

[Endoperez]

You can destroy a human player's army multiple times, just use Wind Trapeze... Your scouts will find his armies, and he can't protect his every army... There are better strategies, though, and you might not like it if your enemy gets few Staves of Storms for himself.

[Chazar]

Gosh, this is sooo interesting! I only hope my human 'enemies' dont read this thread...

I have not really understood "storm" so far: How do I get into storms except from casting the battlefield spell storm?

I mean, sometimes there's snow (and I think i've seen rain) on the battlefield, but I always thought that this is a mere graphical nicety without effect. Did I miss something here? How do I make a weatherforecast then?

- As for RotR: I agree that Caelum should have a theme where blessing might be of more use. After all, they are angel-like beings anyway, so an entirely divine-based theme woulde be cool. And there's a lot to trade of: the cool mages, making mammoths unique to the captial, etc. But maybe I just dont know enough about the other nations.

I got the feeling that RotR was meant to give caelum a tainted, evil touch, but I think they are not evil enough...

- A question about the drain-scale: What is the big deal? I loose one research-point per mage, it increases MR by a half-point (what does a half-point mean by the way?). I'm not aware of the increased fatigue, but I recall that I've read somewhere something about that....

[ March 04, 2004, 08:21: Message edited by: Chazar ]

[Endoperez]

A strategy I learned in my first Caelum mp game: those scouts can conquer any province wihtout provincial defence. I must have taken almost ten provinces in two turns, losing two scouts and a seraphine when some provinces had few defenders... Then I took the rest, got his castle, his sites, slaughtered his sages and did other small things like that. It was fun!
If you do this, your enemy will surely buy some PD. Then you make some raiding parties and kill his PD, which would have slaughtered a scout but can't stand versus 20 Spire Horners! After that, he doesn' know what to do!
And you want to have many fortresses, as between scouts, High Seraphs and Seraphines you just have too many places to produce commanders. Thanks for the Mausoleum hint, Gandalf! Imight actually use them again if that works...

[Tuna-Fish]

Originally posted by Chazar:
I have not really understood "storm" so far: How do I get into storms except from casting the battlefield spell storm?

I mean, sometimes there's snow (and I think i've seen rain) on the battlefield, but I always thought that this is a mere graphical nicety without effect. Did I miss something here? How do I make a weatherforecast then?

- A question about the drain-scale: What is the big deal? I loose one research-point per mage, it increases MR by a half-point (what does a half-point mean by the way?). I'm not aware of the increased fatigue, but I recall that I've read somewhere something about that....

If one of your (or his/hers/its) commanders carries a staff of storms, there will be a storm.
Storm has 5 effects:
1. it halves all precision scores (air magic bonus is given afterwards, as is the bonuses given by eagle eyes and wind guide)
2. of all fired (ordinary) missiles, 50% are discarded on flight.
3. fire magic is harded to cast
4. normal flight is not possible.
5. Casting of storm power is allowed (very easy air spell that gives +1 in air magic for duration of battle)

There are better strategies, though, and you might not like it if your enemy gets few Staves of Storms for himself.

And how exactly would enemy having staff of storms hurt? I really can't figure out why.

Originally posted by Tuna-Fish:
If one of your (or his/hers/its) commanders carries a staff of storms, there will be a storm.
Storm has 5 effects:
1. it halves all precision scores (air magic bonus is given afterwards, as is the bonuses given by eagle eyes and wind guide)
2. of all fired (ordinary) missiles, 50% are discarded on flight.
3. fire magic is harded to cast

Harder to cast = Double Fatigue

4. normal flight is not possible.
5. Casting of storm power is allowed (very easy air spell that gives +1 in air magic for duration of battle)
And how exactly would enemy having staff of storms hurt? I really can't figure out why.

It could hurt if you had very little forces that could fight in a storm and primarily archers (Caelum archers are just as bad in storms as the rest).

Wrathful Skies + Storm is always bad unless you have Thunder Ward.

Certain summoned monsters and items give increased power during a storm.

If you don't plan on being a storm and any one of those things is counter to what your army is composed of, it can be bad for you if they have a storm.

[Chazar]

• Thanks for the advice on storms!
  Is it generally speaking a necessity to go for construction with Caelum early on? So far I always did, but not that extensive, alteration/evocation are useful. But then again, these owl-quills might make it up again then, as I dont have too many mages around in battle in the beginning anyway...
  

• Originally posted by Norfleet:
  If using a Nataraja SC, be warned that the Nataraja is not immune to the effects of your cold-3 dominion and will suffer large fatigue penalties when fighting in it, unless given a cold resistance item.

  Ahem, I agreed with you there before, but then considering again, a high seraph can forge a "Ring of Frost" already on the second turn (provided that you dont use the Raptor theme). So the only drawback here is the lost misc-item slot, or did I miss something else? (I'm thinking about trading the blue dragon against a virtue pretender, among other changes...)

• Posted by fahdiz: I don't think they're supposed to be necessarily evil as much as they are desperate and rebellious.

  Well, yes, but death/earth magic and no seraphines looks not that nice to me. I would just like to have a fallen-angel theme for caelum, but I'm not sure if it adds well to the other nations.
  
  The raptor theme is just not appealing to me, but maybe shifting it more into rebellious-religious fanatics by adding more sacred troops would be real tempting choice as well, as we said here before...

[ March 04, 2004, 22:57: Message edited by: Chazar ]

[fahdiz]

Originally posted by Chazar:

quote:

---

Posted by fahdiz: I don't think they're supposed to be necessarily evil as much as they are desperate and rebellious.

Well, yes, but death/earth magic and no seraphines looks not that nice to me. I would just like to have a fallen-angel theme for caelum, but I'm not sure if it adds well to the other nations.

The raptor theme is just not appealing to me, but maybe shifting it more into rebellious-religious fanatics by adding more sacred troops would be real tempting choice as well, as we said here before...

---

Well, I didn't say they were nice, just not necessarily evil. "Desperately fanatic" and "embittered by being squeezed out of Caelian society for centuries" is definitely more how I saw it from reading the flavor text.

I'm becoming more and more fond of the sacred Raven Guard/sacred Wingless idea for Return of the Raptors. But I would be interested to see the opinions of the experts of the list - do you think such a change would present balance problems, or do you think there is a place for a "new RotR"? And do these changes even sound good or appropriate to you?

[ March 04, 2004, 23:11: Message edited by: fahdiz ]

If I had to do what I say (Which is of course the hardest way to do it I'd more than likely make RotR a complete overhaul.

Change the Preference to Cold 1 or None (Depending on the points).

Remove Wingless, Remove Mammoths, Remove Spire Horn Warriors (Replaced with Raptors), Make Raven Guard Sacred. New unit Gryphon. Move one Air to Random on the Harab Elder and give him Holy 3. Starting Spell = Blight.

That would play much differently. With the removal of Cold preference but keeping the units Cold Resistance, you could take Cold if you wish; but you lose the 'free points' and makes you play quite a bit differently.

Those are just some things I was thinking for my own modifications; but hardly a general consensus.