what counters ea caelum?

[Ponypony]

My friend constantly plays caelum in our games and I am annoyed by it. He wont play anything else. He is also probably better than I am and never forgets to do anything on his turn so its even more annoying... but aside from that what can i do to counter caelum.

[salva早晨享用的咖啡]

B9

[Ica]

What kind of games do you play? I mean is it just 1 vs 1 or are there any other nations in the game? Also is the map big or small? I'm just asking because if it's only you against him and the map isn't huge, a bless rush could work well though in the long run it's not the most fun way to play.

Like Salva suggested, B9 could work nicely at least if he doesn't know anything other than Thunderstrike spam. However Caelum can switch to stuff like air elementals and do just fine anyway so don't rely on it too much.

Anyway this is probably a case of him simply being a better player than you, since EA Caelum doesn't strike me as a nation that really needs to be countered. Anyway tell a little more about how he beats you so we can help more.

[AN]

Yeah Blood 9 bless, especially Early Age Agartha with Nature9+Blood 9 on their now cheaper, recruit anywhere Ancient Ones should get his troops and mages to kill themselves against their bodies for the most part. Sending out a lot of Magma Children and Earth Elementals should work against Eagle Kings with pumped up magic resist, and a whole lot of other things besides. Olms and their mind blasts behind a wall of pale meat will decently wreck Caelum's troops and too a lesser extent their mages.

The Alteration 2 Earth Meld can help a lot in tying up air elementals so that your big fat worm men can whack 'em, or better yet let your cheap summoned Magma Children blast them apart easily and safely.

If the game is lasting some time then it's good to remember that 1/3 of your Earth Readers, the ones with Fire 1 and Earth 2, can cast the devastating Magma Eruption spell after they cast Summon Earth Power once you have Evocation 6 and Conjuration 3. Also remember that they have poor depth perception with the one eye and may not be very good shots with it, make sure to use a lot of regular pale ones to block for you instead of summons or Blood Blessed sacred troops.

[Nalbem]

Xibalba? You can counter-raid him with you cheaper and more accessible flying commanders+lances (plus your commanders don't take fort turns), have access to sacred freespawn to eat their Thunderstrikes and you also have E and A+D to build up corpse constructs (25HP and 15 Shock Resistance chaff). B9 is also a decent bless for that freespawn and not a bad bless for you sacred summons or your capital only sacred. It is a blood nation, though, which are very much a matter of preference.

A bless rush is also a posibility in games with not too many players, as Ica said. Try to find his capital and simply lock him in before he's had a chance to build up research or get other forts up.

As an extra option in non 1v1 games, you can go for any of the underwater nations. Then he can't raid you at all or fight you in your lands until much much later in the game, when you might have researched ways to counterm his lightning evocation spam.

EA Caelum also needs quite a bit of research to deal with thugs or SC that have high cold and shock resistance, since they don't have good access to water elementals, like MA Caelum.

[Shinuyama]

W9 vanhere, laugh wildly

[AN]

W9 Vanheres do not stand up well to lightning bolts, let alone thunder strikes, nor can they deal with unpredictable flying troops sailing right over their heads and raiding behind the front lines. They also fall asleep after killing a maximum of 20 flying militia, a gold loss of exactly 4 times what they cost, yes, but when they're gone they're gone and cap recruitment can only allow for so much. So while Caelum parks their flying chaff on your capital and actually threatens to break the fort, unlike the Vanheres who can only stare angrily at Caelum's walls and hope everyone inside gets inexplicably diseased, and forces your limited sacreds to retreat back to relieve the castle, they'll have ample time to use their very cost efective research to gain the rather basic tools they'll need to obsolete your sacred berserkers.

Meanwhile your nearly non-existent research leaves you relying on the sacreds far longer than you can afford to when dealing with a nation of flying air mages with flying lance charges and flying chaff. Vanheim devastates Giants and Lizards and Ogres and Demons, and most humans, but they don't do well against da berds when said boids know what they're doing on even a basic level.

[Morsigil]

So this won't really work in a 1v1 situation, because I don't think you can get the research and the gems to make this work before he gets enough thunderstrike spammers, but here was my experience with Caelum:

I single handedly countered MA Caelum (and by proxy, it seems like EA Caelum would be similar) with a decked out Celestial General. By single handedly I mean I only used my Celestial General and didn't even have to involve troops to hold him at bay, as others invaded his land. It was a lot of fun. He would teleport onto an army or raiding party roughly every other turn. Caelum's mammoths flailed their trunk at him, his troops couldn't touch him, he laughed at thunder and lightning for the most part.

Unfortunately, I could never get him to cast resist lightning because he already had resists from at least one item and his A4 paths, but that meant he had something like 23 lightning resist and if he took fatigue or damage a ring of regen and reinvig amulet took care of that. Eventually I swapped out his frost brand (all I had access to) for a snake bladder and his hordes of winged Caelumites died in droves.

[Staythecourse]

EA Caelum is more flexible than MA. For instance, they can bog down your Pretender SC in skeletons, then cut off retreat so he dies when the turn limit runs out.

That said, EA Caelum is not really a nation normally considered to need countering. The OP should describe exactly what's giving him trouble. If it's raiding, then we can discuss how to counter flying raiders. If it's thunderspam, we can discuss how to counter that.

[Shinuyama]

>only kill 20 fliers before sleep time
>only 20

Okay.

putting your vanhere in one giant mob so they get tstriked is bad mkay

not using indies as blobs to take tstrikes is also bad mkay

[AN]

That's twenty millitia if nothing touches the increasingly tired and vulnerable Vanheres, and if every strike hits and kills; and actually, because of size per squarw and AP, it's impossible to kill even that many under ideal circumstances. They're getting to get hit hard by lance charges, they're going to get their glamour popped by archers, they're going to suffer damage and fatigue from just lightning bolts, let alone whole squads getting shut down by thunder strikes. You won't be able to afford much beside them and keep purchasing your overpriced mages if you took high dominion to be able to produce a lot of them as well as a major bless, because they're properly expensive since the price increase. An Airya Seraph only costs as much as 3 Vanheres, can be recruited out of any fort with a lab, and can kill 10 Vanheres before she falls asleep for a round or two and then keeps peppering them with the occasional bolt.

Blobs of indies won't work against lightning bolts, becasue Vanheres have higher-than-human base HP and will be targeted by the 16+ precison attack, and you definitely can't afford enough chaff with the fairly priced sacreds and overpriced mages to actually bunch up and present a much better target than the 45hp per square Vanheres for thunderstrike.

That's not even considering, if you somehow managed to afford and produce a bunch of chaff that removes the stealth element of your glamoured troops, how are you going to make sure none of the Vanheres get stuck behind some indie light infantry after they got popped and berserked, winding down without accomplishing anything like an ill-placed clockwork horror?. Not to mention I could amass some of my cap troops with frost bows and pepper them with fatigue arrows, shutting them down and opening them to killing crits even faster than the few rounds trhey'd normally be able to stay on their feet.

Vanheim is not, especially not when relying on water-blessed Vanheres, a good nation to fight Caelum early-to-early-mid-game, they need the gems and research to send out lightning immune, stealthy Vanjarl thugs at the least. Even then Caelum has the capacity to counter typical stealth raiding by dropping a pile of birds on the raided province immediately. It's a bad matchup and it's bad advice to tell this person asking for help to do this thing that will only ever be an exersise in frustration against a competent player.


And all that's ignoring later on when the reasearch gap is even wider and you would have to contend with skelespam tarpitting your Vanheres into uselessness, no lightning necessary.

[Nalbem]

Corpse constructs nullify lance charges and archery, since they get targeted by the same exact things that Vanheres get targeted by and are dirt cheap so who cares if a Caelian lance pops them. They also happen to be on the way to thug items and dousing rods. Which also give you Vanjarls that are mostly inmune to thunder and can raid as well as flying caelians do but cheaper.

Also, in these kind of debates, assuming your opponent is incompetent and that he or she doesn't know how to script is not the right way to go about discussing a nation's matchup.

And Caelian militia have spears, not lances. So they are worthless at fighting literally everything and just good for sieging. Plus one thing anyone that has been on the other side of a Vanhere rush can tell you is that your troops will break before the Vans fatigue, specially if you charge them head on. Berserkering plus huge amount of losses=no birds stay to fight you.

So, since militia is worthless, a Vanhere would kill 20 Spire Horn warriors before fatiguing out. Thats 200 gold per Van assuming it doesn't die before that. Pretty darn good, I'd say.

[AN]

Really, Corpse Constructs? So you started buying Vanadrotts early, so you -really- don''t have any kind of army or infrastructure outside your cap and its sacreds, so you could make sure to get at least two death randoms, one to keep a steady flow of them going while the other wasted its 390-gold STR-cap-only-thug-mage-time ferrying around more than 5 of -shock resistant- hp sacks at a time in order to supposedly absorb lightning bolts. Corpse constructs are not going to be targetted by lightning, you aren't going to have any significant amount of them, because you didn't spend an average of 8 months getting two Vanadrotts starting in the middle of year one to have this nonsense strategy ready for you first war, and if did you are not going to be able to accrue troops outside your Vanheres because you have been spending 200 mage gold per turn on scales supporting a major bless and high dominion, and you are going to have no research to speak of because you are spending 200 gold for 7.5 research research. Not to mention that Caelum will be able to choose the time of engagement since you have at least addmittd that the Vanheres will die to lightning bolts and need chaff, that, by the way, won't be targeted over a Vanhere wether its human soldiers or corpse constructs.

All this inneffective nonsense you've been trying to put forward means you definitely won't have gold for more infrastructure, so Caelum will siege and quickly break your cap if you don't come to defend it. Coming with only glamour troops means you get lightning for breakfast and lose, coming with chaff means you can be seen coming and caelum can play cat an mouse with your capital, leaving you with no Vanhere production, no ability to ramp research, no gold income, and no chance to survive. Try and be realistic about the tactics and resources that can actually be brought bear in the timeframe we are talking about in this 1v1 game the OP came asking help with.

Stop this. Vanheim is extremely powerful against most of the early age, but Caelum has everything going for them to crush them in the early game, especially if they go for a purely offensive bless.

[TheMage1]

Well, we need to know which nation you are attempting to play. If it is EA Vanheim, I would think that the solution to thunderstrike would be something like a pair of vanjarl thugs, with 2 lightning resist items each(only one needed if copper plate), scripted to mistform, bless, and shockwave. There are also items like the gauche of parrying, and bracers of defence to add to survivability. The main problem would be being overwhelmed, and gaining too much fatigue. In addition, it seems to me that vanheres would be valuable for expansion and also against the swarms of Caelum, so long as Caelum doesn't bring the mages.

[Nebulosa]

What aspect of Caelum are you having trouble with, and what nation do you play?

[Nalbem]

I think we understand rushes differently. I mean it as "be at their capital before year one ends", when they haven't had time to get significant research done. Thunderstrike spam isn't early game at all if we're talking about a game with just a few players (which I assume is the case seeing as he mentioned playing with a friend) and an average amount of provinces per player. If by the time Caelum has all that research the Vanheim player has no forts being built or already built nor has recruited Vanadrotts to set up a corpse construct factory (a very good source of chaff for Vanheim and on the way to Vanjarl thughs) or equipped some thugs (which Caelum has a hard time dealing with if they just rush Storm), then of course they will lose the matchup.

Now then, W9 wouldn't be my choice of bless for that nation. I have to wholy agree with you on that. B9 would be better, with maybe a N minor bless or even N9 if going ham on Vanheres. However, I can see an early war, by which I understand a war that starts at the end of year one or the start of year two, being hard to fight for Caelum. As much as glamour troops are expensive as heck, a few of them can stealth-raid territories while your deathball just takes the capital/fort sites pretty much uncontested. And raiding parties for Caelum come at a big opportunity cost in fort recruitment slots, since their only mage leaders are Seraphines and Eagle Kings, the first of which weakens your Thunderstrike plan considerably (by taking away a turn that could have been spent on an A2 mage that can actually fight with your research goals) and the other is a cap-only STR mage which is too valuable to risk leading some troops early game against a glamour nation.

Again, past that early stage of the game, in which Caelum hasn't gotten Thunderstrike online, Caelum has a good chance of fighting W9 Vanheres. Before that? I don't think Caelum has the tools to deal effectively with Vanheres if they come in barreling on Caelum's capital. That, I presume, is the context of Shinuyama's suggestion of picking that specific build.

Finally, Corpse Constructs are there to protect Vanheim's mages/generals from flying lances (a very stupid way to lose a battle) and not getting targeted by Thunderstike is more of a perk than an issue when that's their main role. You can also set a few of them forward and they will get targeted by archers, because they are a huge blob of hitpoints and archers do love targetting those. That is my suggested use for them, not blocking Thunderstrike... It is gem-intensive and relies on finding the right random on you cap-only mage, plus some turns of casting the ritual, but they aren't the focus of the strategy. It's a nice thing to pick up while building towards your thugs that gives Vanheim another tool to deal with Caelum.

Also, Shinuyama mentioned not mixing Vanherses with blobs, which probably means having a huge block of cheap indy chaff and a whole lot of small groups of Vanherses set on the flanks, somewhat far away from that chaff block. Then, mage AI will consider Thunderstrike to be more efficient on that one huge block of chaff than on you Vanheres. It's a common tactic to use against evo-happy nations as any nation that combines freespawn with high-health elite troops. Vanheres being spread in small groups out also means that even if one or two of them do get focused, there's a higer chance other groups will live. It's not perfect, but with W9 Vanheres, you only need a handful to massacre Caelian troops, probably triggering a retreat. Not a perfect strategy, but backed by Vanjarl thugs, I can see Vanheim having a perfectly good chance early game to win against Caelum.