Caelum vs. T'ien Ch'i

[Zen]

Indies are also not cold or fire immune.

[Graeme Dice]

Indies are also not immune to skeletons, nor are they immune to mind burn.

[deccan]

Graeme Dice said:

You missed the biggest one. Any unit that is both cold immune and lightning immune is untouchable by their mages.

Well, there's always "False Horror". And I've seen fully-equipped ice devils get killed by mass ghost wolves tanking for Caelum priests casting "Smite Demon".

[Boron]

Hm would you rate Pythium or Caelum higher as "best" magocracy ? Or maybe a different nation like C'tis ?

Pythium hasn't the high strategic movement of Caelum but Pythium has communion therefore and with Astral magic not the best but sufficient spells against SCs as well . I can't say atm if i would rate Pythium or Caelum higher .

[deccan]

Cainehill's points are all valid and I admit that I have a tendency to value skill (which Caelum has) more than HPs and strength, which may be wrong. However, even if I downgrade Caelum's troops and priests to merely "average and competent" instead of "above average", it still seems to me that Caelum has no obvious, glaring weakness. For example, I would still say that Caelum's troops are still better than, say, Tien Chi's mediocre ones, and isn't the mediocrity of Tien Chi's national troops supposed to compensate for their versatile mages?

Furthermore, Caelum has interesting specialist troops in the form of its Mammoths and the things that fly in storms. Those are not useful things in a general way, but they could be useful in the right kind of situation, and gives them an added versatility and ability to surprise, which I think should be considered quite valuable.

One Last point: I think that we shouldn't underestimate cold immunity + built-in magic weapons. The reason why so many national troops do so poorly against SCs even in large numbers is IMHO at least partly because of "Breath of Winter" + "Etherealness" + "Mistform". This makes Caelum's troops quite useful I think over the whole course of the game. Personally, I would value quite highly the ability to break mistform reliably. For example, in some previous tests I've run with AQs, I find that once an AQ's mistform is broken, it can be very easily killed by lifeless things.

Cainehill said:
Not resource intensive - incredibly resource intensive, as you can buy about 2.8 Vans for the same resources.

Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

[Zen]

C'tis researches as fast. Expands faster via Terror early and Raise Skeletons later, has powerful Priests and their first army can expand on turn 2, City Guard and always affordable Elite Lizards.

[deccan]

Boron said:
Hm would you rate Pythium or Caelum higher as "best" magocracy ? Or maybe a different nation like C'tis ?

I wouldn't know so don't ask me.

But I just wanted to add that I haven't been able to make Pythium communion work very well for me in SP play. I guess it's just a huge pain. You need to assemble Theurgs / Communicants in the right proportions. You need a screening force to tank for them. You need to replace communicants as they die. You need to estimate how long battles are going to take, play around with scripts a lot etc. That's just a lot of bother, and having a big, elegantly crafted army that depends on all of its pieces being there in order to work just makes me nervous.

[Cainehill]

deccan said:
Cainehill's points are all valid and I admit that I have a tendency to value skill (which Caelum has) more than HPs and strength, which may be wrong. However, even if I downgrade Caelum's troops and priests to merely "average and competent" instead of "above average", it still seems to me that Caelum has no obvious, glaring weakness. For example, I would still say that Caelum's troops are still better than, say, Tien Chi's mediocre ones, and isn't the mediocrity of Tien Chi's national troops supposed to compensate for their versatile mages?

No, Tien Chi's Astral-1 mediocre mages counter-compensate for good troops in the default theme, and forced turmoil and lesser troops compensates for powerful mediocre flying mages in Spring and Autumn, who still have Astral-1 and tend to be gunned down by magic duel. Base T'ien C'hi has _GOOD_ troops - I've already written one post about this in the first section of this thread, I'm not going to repeat myself here.

Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

And Production-3 still only lets them get maybe ... 3 or 4 Temple Guards a turn, max, and still no way of getting them to where they'd be useful. It would let them get Iceclads everywhere, but Iceclads tend to be useless against anything 14 protection or higher, not to mention that they keel over from exhaustion too quick.

[Graeme Dice]

deccan said:
Well, there's always "False Horror". And I've seen fully-equipped ice devils get killed by mass ghost wolves tanking for Caelum priests casting "Smite Demon".

Breath of winter will kill all illusionary troops that approach the SC, a fire shield will do the same.

[Graeme Dice]

deccan said:
Heh, so you take Production 3, and pay for it by, er, not taking Order 3 since Caelum has no super-expensive stuff anyway unless you want to mass Mammoths or something, or is that blasphemous?

One could always go with order 3, prod 2, cold 3, misfortune 2, magic 2, wizard's tower with a Nataraja with air 1 (empower quickly), water 2, nature 3. Or something along similar lines.