Trying to start playing Caelum, and wanted to get a straw poll from the board experts on how best to start. Here are my questions:
a) choice of pretender. I have toyed with the idea of the vamp queen, but she feels quite expensive and focuses on death/blood vs air/water. While I can add air/water, it gets expensive. What are folks thoughts - magic pretender vs combat pretender for the caelum? Which makes more sense? What paths to add if magic?
b) dominion mix - I have seen several folks recommend order 3/prod 1/cold 3. I also considered upping prod to 3 and adding anti-magic 3 with a no magic pretender with exceptionally high dominion & restless worshippers (could you actually beat someone by wiping their dominion from the map, even with tons of troops left around? is this realistic?) Which mix makes sense? Lastly, what is the advantage of Fire 3 ie taking advantage of the bug? Not sure why this is such a good thing for Caelum vs cold 3, but earlier posters seemed to think it needed to be fixed because it gave Caelum an unfair advantage.
c) Castle choice - I read somewhere to take quick build castles to match the caelum paratroop approach. What are folks thoughts on this vs better admin/defense castles? IF quick build, is wizards tower worth it?
d) early game troop mix. To understand the troop mix, I played a couple of early games with the bird-men. First I went anti-elephants and just used archer, spiked horn (both are what you start with), added some storm guard, and recruited high seraphs. This worked fairly well and allowed me to take several provinces quickly with minimal losses. My larger question was about the effectiveness of this approach if I ran up against anything beyond militia/archerss ie enemy players or AI. Elephants seem good, but I soured on them when the second independent I attacked had a spectre lord who turned them to his side and used them to trample my archers
They are also darned expensive and almost preclude adding mages/priests at the same time for at least a few turns.
e) first few moves - is the general wisdom to attack a neighboring province on the very first turn or let your forces build for a turn first and get scouting reports? A bad defeat on that turn can really prove to be a setback, but the missed opportunity for the additional income/resources seems high, since it improves your trajectory for the game. Given the 70% chance of weak independent neighbors, the odds seem in your favor. Thoughts?
Thanks for the help
Caelum Starting Strategy
Threaded Mode