Advice Wanted: EA Caelum Pretender

[Slice]

Looking for opinions on creating a pretender for EA Caelum. Single Player. I prefer not to take misfortune, but if it's truly worthwhile I'll give it a shot.

Thanks in advance,
Slice

[Morsigil]

In single player you can take just about anything and probably make it work. Caelum has lots of cool summons, most of which require death and fire or astral (and one which is astral + water). So if you want death and fire mages take 4 death 2 fire on your pretender. If you want other elemental magic and nature take astral at 5.

EA Caelum's pretty open especially in single player. You can go heavy scales or heavy bless or some mix and do pretty well. A good bless isn't a bad choice because you have recruitable as well as summonable sacred troops.

I've never played revamped Caelum, but personally I would be interested in trying an awake S5 sage with good scales. I'm not sure what is feasible with the points but I'd shoot for Dominion 5 Order 3, Prod. 0, Cold 3, Growth 0, Luck 0, Magic 0 and take whatever points were left and try to get D3F2 or D4F2. If I couldn't make it to D3F2 though I'd put the remaining points into luck, magic, or dominion.

[Red Bat]

I don't like Caelum, and haven't tried them in a while, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Also someone posted a guide to playing them on Steam.

EA Caelim can make due with a lot of pretender options. I usually try to go with one of the flying titan chassis, because it's annoying when your pretender is the only thing in your army that can't fly. I really like that flying naked chick pretender for Caelim. Not for strategic reasons. I just like the idea of playing a nation that worships a flying naked chick. Although she does have awe and 3 magic paths if I recall correctly, and Caelim has a lot of item crafting potential, so she could make a pretty powerful frontliner later on.

Your troops suck, and in my experience your sacred troops also kind of suck. You can try a minor air bless for your sacred archers and mages, but that doesn't seem worthwhille, especially since you don't really need extra air paths. A minor earth bless might be a bit better. Not sure a major bless of any type is worth it. If I recall correctly they get E1, so making an E2 pretender at least might be worthwhile to make earth boots. It's up to you if you want to take the extra path options to get Caelum's national summons. Personally I don't priortize them.

For scales, magic is an obvious choice. You need to rush some research as Caelim. Magic 2 is probably enough. Order 3 is something I get on most nations, and Caelim benefits heavily from it. Production is a bit iffy. Your troops suck unless spammed, but you'll probably want to direct your money toward stronger mages rather than stronger troops. Somewhere between sloth 1 and Production 2 is probably good. I can see an argument toward playing a high production Caelum, but it's not something I'd recommend. Growth is good in general but it isn't really better as Caelum, so consider it a possible point sink if you have extra, same with Luck, although I'm convinced Luck is a bit underrated.

[Shinuyama]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=691059179

[Slice]

I had looked at the guild but missed the bugs bunny pretender discussion.

I'm going to try a Great Enchantress S4E2W1D1 O3P2G3C3L0M2.

Wish me luck! :)

Thanks for the help.

[dyslexicfaser]

The new Caelian pretenders are some of the best in the game, in my opinion. Either of the size 4s packing ethereal/teleport do a great job as an awake expander type. The Ahura of Water and Fire you'd THINK would be great (half a dozen water elementals plus Invulnerability, for example) but in my experience they tend to die where the ethereal ones don't.

[[762] RomanticFool]

Honestly, I'm a fan of T3L3M3 scales with revamped caelum - their troops are cheap for the most part, though sometimes resource heavy, and they have a 45g spire mage that researches as 7 in neutral scales. You absolutely want astral on your pretender if you're planning on the game going late at all, because you don't have access to astral natively. I like to rush cons 2, because they can make quills at 2, lanterns and skulls at cons 6, so their research explodes at cons 6. Obviously they need evo too, and your pretender ccould cast wrath of god if you're looking for a nice defensive global while you build up to that sweet sweet conj 7 and 8 (6 casters casting living clouds? yes please). A flying god is nice because until conj 7 (fravashi), he and your prophet are the only guys that can claim thrones. Their sacreds benefit from several different style blesses, but they rarely are in a position to want to take them - making this nation one of my favorites for use as a disciple. Getting to the spenta / greater daeva summoning spells opens up a ton of other magic paths at quantity that you probably didn't have access to, but it can be a crapshoot as to which one you get - and they're all sacred too. I think they benefit from at least a minor earth bless - but because of your varied gem requirements, I'd go with something fairly rainbow with a high enough astral to get to S5 - if you don't just start off at 5.

Feel free to flesh out those scales as you will.

[kasnavada]

Shinuyama's guide nails it, from what I can tell. I've been playing more or less what he wrote in the wecan'tbefriends MP game (currently on-going) and I'm doing fairly well for now. The parts that I didn't follow (Growth 3 mostly) hurts me the most. And yes, it really hurts. The loss in gold income is coming back to bite me rather hard.

About mages, the 45 gold mage should definitly not be the focus of your recruitments. They're difficult to use properly in battle due to their low magic, and caelum can't really afford less battle mages. Some are useful to serve as researchers but that's about the amount you need.

@Shinuyama, what your guide lacks a bit is "mid-game" strats. For example, stating your next goals behind hitting thunderstorms / elemental spam =).

[dyslexicfaser]

Originally posted by kasnavada:

About mages, the 45 gold mage should definitly not be the focus of your recruitments. They're difficult to use properly in battle due to their low magic, and caelum can't really afford less battle mages. Some are useful to serve as researchers but that's about the amount you need.

Debatable. They're the best RP for your gold, and with a Eagle King throwing up a Storm they can hit Lightning Bolts. Not as good as the A2 guy throwing Thunderstrikes, sure, but you can afford like, 3 of the little guys for the same price as him.

[Shinuyama]

Yeah i'm not really following romantic's point of view. Are you talking about singleplayer romantic? Caelum needs masses of lance caelians to win fights vs actual players, and they also need battlemagic, all of which costs huge amounts of earlygame money. Also i'm not sure why you'd need to cap lots and lots of thrones all at once? You have a flying mapmove3 prophet. That's plenty for earlygame. The only reason you need a lot of throne cappers is for a throne rush, and a flying god won't help with that - you really need the fravashi to pull that off, unless your enemies are noobs who don't react fast to seeing thrones starting to be capped by a frontrunner (simultaneous capping of everything you need to win is the minimum for a throne rush).

Similarly going const. 6 before any battlemagic is not a tactic I would expect to succeed in many MP games. Only if you are very confident in your diplo so you don't get surprise attacked (or attacked at all) in year 1 and 2 would I consider that worthwhile.

That's not a guide for SP, by the way. SP to me is not something that really needs a guide and you can do a lot of crazy stuff and be fine. It's a MP guide.

[kasnavada]

Originally posted by dyslexicfaser:

Originally posted by kasnavada:

About mages, the 45 gold mage should definitly not be the focus of your recruitments. They're difficult to use properly in battle due to their low magic, and caelum can't really afford less battle mages. Some are useful to serve as researchers but that's about the amount you need.

Debatable. They're the best RP for your gold, and with a Eagle King throwing up a Storm they can hit Lightning Bolts. Not as good as the A2 guy throwing Thunderstrikes, sure, but you can afford like, 3 of the little guys for the same price as him.

No, I don't think it's much of a debate. In MP every single recruitment counts because you cannot afford to build 2 more forts + labs (which amounts to next to 2000 gold) just to crank out the 2 extra mages. It would need what, 15 turns to be worth it ? Assuming that no one gets to you first ?

Which is actually why not going to G3 hurts me in that game I'm playing. I'm lacking that income and have to recruit some of those 45 mages...

[Shinuyama]

Debatable. They're the best RP for your gold, and with a Eagle King throwing up a Storm they can hit Lightning Bolts. Not as good as the A2 guy throwing Thunderstrikes, sure, but you can afford like, 3 of the little guys for the same price as him.

Fort turns are a cost. Given that a fort costs a big pile of gold, the 'little guys' cost a massive upfront payment (and turns of construction that a surprise Bogus or jag rush can screw up) before you get any use out of them. On top of the lab.

A tstrike hits 1 SQUARE with infinity lightning damage, then 9 SQUARES with 10 fatigue + 1 AN lightning damage. Lightning bolt hits 1 PERSON with 14+ lightning damage and 10+ fatigue damage. Even if you had 3x as many spire horn seraphs as airya seraphs, 3 lightning bolts < 1 tstrike. And alphastrike damage is more important for caelum by far than slow steady damage, due to flying troops. Plus, air gems to cast the spells 1 gem = 1 tstrike, 1 gem = 1 lightning bolt, it's much weaker.

They also cost 2 gems to cast an air elemental even with storm where airya seraphs only need 1, doubling gem-efficiency.

If you somehow magically had all the infrastructure for no extra cost, it would still be worse to build spire horns vs airyas in a situation where you weren't severely gold capped. With infrastructure costs... it's something to do when you need gold for other stuff and still want to not waste a fort turn, not something you should be doing as a matter of course. If you're that gold capped, you are not expanding properly, either against indies or against players. That's a sign of a bad situation/play rather than the 'expected' situation for most caelums.

[forrestomintero]

One good option is to take really heavy gold gen scales. This is because you have a lot of low resource units so you're gonna be spending a lot of time relying on quantity over quality. The other reason is that having more mammoths faster is gonna do a lot more for you early game than blessed troops will, and blessings tend to get somewhat sidelined by late game thanks to all the high level magic being thrown around. Since that's the case, better to focus on having the gold to make more troops and mages throughout the game.

[Red Bat]

Yeah I have to admit the 1 air mage they get is really situational. Cheap research bait isn't as cost effective as it sounds even on nations with awesome troops, and Caelum does not have awesome troops and therefore needs it's mages to be good to pick up the slack.

However there are rare occasions when getting the cheap research bait mage will allow you to afford to build a fort 1 turn earlier. Other than that I don't see much point.

[Shinuyama]

if you want a guy to forge an owl quill every turn from now to forever, you might as well make a little guy, also. That's a real use. It's not one i'd really expect from caelum though - you should be spending every single air gem on battlemagic and corpse constructs

Other than situational gold shortage I really can't see a use for them

even as 'researchers', i'd prefer to build harabs who have useful randoms

[dyslexicfaser]

Originally posted by kasnavada:

No, I don't think it's much of a debate. In MP every single recruitment counts because you cannot afford to build 2 more forts + labs (which amounts to next to 2000 gold) just to crank out the 2 extra mages. It would need what, 15 turns to be worth it ? Assuming that no one gets to you first ?

Which is actually why not going to G3 hurts me in that game I'm playing. I'm lacking that income and have to recruit some of those 45 mages...

Originally posted by Shinuyama:

If you somehow magically had all the infrastructure for no extra cost, it would still be worse to build spire horns vs airyas in a situation where you weren't severely gold capped. With infrastructure costs... it's something to do when you need gold for other stuff and still want to not waste a fort turn, not something you should be doing as a matter of course. If you're that gold capped, you are not expanding properly, either against indies or against players. That's a sign of a bad situation/play rather than the 'expected' situation for most caelums.

Your mages are all non-sacred, so yeah, I don't imagine you'll have hundreds of gold to throw around on Airyas every turn. I've experienced it with an Order 2/Growth 2 Caelum.

Caelum is extremely mediocre at expanding, so I can't see how you'd expand fast enough to be able to afford tons of mages; I ended up with somewhere between 1 to 2 dozen forest/mountain provinces in the game I referenced (fairly good, considering I boosted expansion with my awake pretender), and yeah. Gold capped fairly quickly.