[Kuritza]

Amhazair said:
You have national access to some nice items (say, for example a standard setup of: frost brand, eye shield, starshine skullcap, hydra skin armor, boots of quickness, antimagic amulet, pendant of luck. Nothing much wrong with that) but it definitely narrows your options.

Lets see. Frost brand is not armor piercing and its AOE doesnt affect undead. Sometimes its a really big downside. Hydra skin armor and boots of quickness means death from encumberance unless chassis is undead. So your options are REALLY limited.

Amhazair said:I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about the chassis? I don't see much difference between C'tis and other nations here. Just about the only SC chassis that will get diseased are the elemental royals.

Bane and Bane lord are rather weak and cannot teleport. Golems are possible only if you took a rainbow pretender. Elemental royalty is also something you will never get with your national mages. Blood magic is also very tricky for CTis, so no devils. And no national summons.

Amhazair said:
Now, here is where I totally disagree. First off, skellie spam is quite good, although you do need to attain enough critical mass for it to be effective. One or two mages casting fireballs will make something of a difference in a medium sized battle, two skelliespammers won't. But make it 10 on each side, and the skellespam starts to look a whole lot better. I do agree they're less good at this as their EA or LA brother though. More importantly: Foul Vapors at Ench 5 is the spell to shoot for as MA C'tis. It does work a bit slower as the other battlefield destruction spells, so towards end game it looses its relevance, but it does make for a very powerful mid game. Your lizards are poison resistant, so with the appropiate spells (conveniently in enchantment too) you can immunize them. And those skeletons you were spamming before are now the ideal delaying tactic for the poison to take effect. (And, guess what? They're in enchantment too. ) And as we're talking about enchantment anyway: That gift of health I mentioned before? Yeap, that's here too.

Thats theory, right? You look at the race and think - wow, they can do this and that!
So we agree that skellie spam with d2 mages is ineffective unless you field lots of mages. And then your enemy might bring along some priests... But still yes, in a very big battle your mages can skellie spam. But then, somebody might think - hey, he brough 20+ mages! Where's my rain of stones?
Also, I have tried foul vapors and skeleton spam in a really big battle. I even had darkness there. Well... darkness and skellie spam by 40+ marchmasters was just scary. Foul vapors DIDNT TO ANYTHING. They are just TOO slow, 95% of the time battles dont last that long.

Amhazair said:And to top it of they're one of the very few MA races who can recruit their main mage everywhere.

Thats hardly an advantage because they are also a race that needs lots of mages on the battlefield to do any good, as we agreed.

Amhazair said:
At the same time they have the lizard shaman who are not only efficient researchers, but, headed by couatls, also make for powerful communion potential.

I like the plural on a summon that costs 40 nature gems. You also want to cast Gift of Health, equip thugs with hydra skins and eye shields and probably make clams, right?

Amhazair said:
I'm not argueing that they are a powerhouse nation, the miasma does indeed hurt too much for that, and they have a number of challanging difficulties to overcome, but they do have their strengths too, and calling them "just bad" is doing them injustice imo.

Ok, I'm not saying they are hopeless. Just mediocre. I can see how they can become very powerful in the endgame with a good pretender design and lots, LOTS of luck.