Why no love for Caelum?

[Cainehill]

In addition, the nerfers have been totally ignoring one thing : if Caelum (or another flying / stealthy army) raids behind enemy lines, what happens when they rout? Every single mage and troop is lost : they don't get to retreat to safe territory that's within easy flying range, they don't get to sneak into the neighboring province with their stealth.

Caelum's raiders, similar to Pan's stealth marauders, take a lot of casualties because of routing. A couple of roving bands of defenders can easily cause the routing.

Yes, Caelum's flying scouts (and Pan's harpies) can more easily keep track of armies than many nations. But even if they can blanket every enemy province, they still don't know which way the roving defenders are going to move, so raiding via normal means gives a good chance of running into the rovers, if there are enough roving bands - say archers / xbows, some 50-morale magic troops, and a mage or two.

Air Trapeze does allow them to airdrop in before the defenders can move. But then Caelum is spending gems to attack, can't bring any screening troops, and can still be busted if people reinforced the PD with a handful of other troops (archers, priests, fast moving cavalry, etc) and nailed even worse by hidden defenders with glamour - Vanheim and LoT Man can easily manage this, and both Vans and LoT infantry can sometimes be recruited via magic sites.

Apparently the AI / Sermon of Courage does need to be fixed. But Caelum doesn't need to have its advantages nerfed. First False Horror, then, oh my - two seraphs can route 20 PD all by themselves with Quickness and Lightning, so Lightning has to cost more fatigue too!

[Boron]

and what is lost when routing ?
100/175 gold for 1 seraph / high seraph .

the economic damage you do on your enemy when attacking 5-10 provinces midgame this way at once , perhaps destroying some temples , putting taxes to 200% , killing pd is much greater .

you surely lose 2-3 seraphs , so -200-300 gold .
your enemy needs to keep lots of troops at home , loses all money invested for pd , is forced to castle , loses pop / money through 200% taxes etc.

all with extremely little effort.

man Last of tuatha / vanheim has to put in much more effort . AND their best mages are capitol only and much more expensive so they are not worth being risked this way.

but a caelum with watchtower as castle has quick his second and third castle to start producing 2 then 3 seraphs / high seraphs each turn .

togehter with the too strong battle summons like the false horrors this gives them a big advantage .


i guess even i could win a 1on1 game on urgaia with caelum though i never played them against almost any opponent expect the experts like storm and zen because their expierience is much greater than mine ( only 5 mp games so far , most still running only 1 finished ) .

[Ygorl]

Another disadvantage of Caelum that I don't think anyone's mentioned, and that makes them somewhat weaker until later in the game, is that their large size prevents more than a few of them from attacking a given target. Most nations can overwhelm a high-defense baddie by swarming it. Not so Caelum. Conversely, they are easily swarmed by hordes of junk.

[Boron]

Ygorl said:
Another disadvantage of Caelum that I don't think anyone's mentioned, and that makes them somewhat weaker until later in the game, is that their large size prevents more than a few of them from attacking a given target. Most nations can overwhelm a high-defense baddie by swarming it. Not so Caelum. Conversely, they are easily swarmed by hordes of junk.

caelum has little need for normal troops . i think some archers are enough to prevent routing . most work do the mages .
since caelum has the only earlygame fliers ( pan harpies , the expensive vanheim valkieries are the only others that come to my mind ) and can easy get a staff of storms to cancel midgame abysian devil flying armies etc. i think thats really enough or they can use a normal army with wingless + mammoths which should hold out long enough until caelum mages finish the work .

[Kel]

Cainehill said:
In addition, the nerfers have been totally ignoring one thing : if Caelum (or another flying / stealthy army) raids behind enemy lines, what happens when they rout?

Given there ability to cut off retreat with flyers, they will do a lot more damage with rout than they will suffer from it.

I am not saying they are over-powered as I rarely think of PD as being anything more than spy catchers anyway...but rout is often more of their advantage than their disadvantage.

- Kel

[alexti]

izaqyos said:
currently in a big MP game I'm playing as pythium I'm losing badly to caelum in mid game phase. This is because I failed to counter their strengths- mobility, seraphs (quick+ lightning / quick + false horrorX4), and SC air queens. I think Caelum is very strong, but every battle I lose prompts me to some hard thinking. Not only what I could do differently in that battle, but also what I could do differently at previous turns to have been in an advantage.

That game has very difficult research, which apparently makes the time-frame where Caelum has many advantages quite long. And from what I could see your problem wasn't that much because of Seraph's raids, but rather from the big losses in major battles.

In another game I'm losing to Caelum myself, but again, that's not because of Seraph's raiders (though his Ghost raiders are nasty). It's long long war which I'm slowly losing and it is mostly due to the skills of the Caelum player than to anything else.

Aside of that I agree with your position on nerfing. So far I haven't seen Caelum winning too often in MP and while it has some strengths, other nations have advantages in other areas too.

[alexti]

Cheezeninja said:
In point of fact i just ran several tests in which i left 2-4 raptors from call of the winds in a province with 1 pd (man) and then proceeded to cloud trapeeze seraph after seraph into the province. The raptors were able to routinely win against the single seraph so long as there was at least 2.

Couldn't you wait with your analysis for a few days? Now my strategy is goind down the drain

[quantum_mechani]

Just thought I'd point out Rl'yeh's PD can often take out a sereph or two.

[WraithLord]

alexti said:

Couldn't you wait with your analysis for a few days? Now my strategy is goind down the drain

Very interesting information indeed, might be I'd find some use for it

[alexti]

izaqyos said:

Very interesting information indeed, might be I'd find some use for it

Fortunately, it won't work that well vs Air Queens or Bane Lords