No MA C'tis guides :(

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by krpeters

That reminds me, what is the proper order of casting to get communion master/slave working? Do the slaves have to cast slave after the master, or before? Or can everyone cast both?

Hmmm... that gives me some interesting ideas for Marginon, it never occurred to me that their astral path would be great for communion.

Anyone can join the communion as either a master OR slave, at any point in the battle. This includes Crystal/Slave matrices to be part of the communion at the beginning, and even allows the AI to join the communion after your script runs out. Most often, of course, the spells are cast in the first round of combat, which then gives your masters 4 scripted spells apiece before the AI starts doing strange things with all that power.

There's a lot of nations that get random Astral picks on their top mages..... It's most useful if you get a cheaper guy who either more reliably gets Astral (100% guarantee is nice) or who is a very cost effective researcher. Otherwise, you are using main mages for masters and slaves, and it's not as cost effective, or as easy to make up a large communion. However, even a 4 slave communion boosts you 2 levels in all paths, and starts to make some spells massively increase in power - not to mention that over the course of a longer battle, the lower fatigue costs can lead to more castings, rather than all mages casting 3x and passing out.

[MaxWilson]

If you're planning on using lots of communions it may not be a bad idea to take a light Nature bless so your slaves don't die as easily from fatigue. There's nothing quite as infuriating as having your 5 communion masters raining down destruction on the last fleeing remnants of PD while their 10 slaves die from fatigue. A Nature bless doesn't fix the problem but sometimes is the difference between them dying in a 10 round fight vs. not.

-Max

[danm]

Vine Ogres will suffer from your miasma, but the C'tis national summons are decent (and holy, if you have a good bless) lamia summoning can be super-gem-efficient with a high nature pretender (not that that helps you now) and not a bad choice otherwise

Poison Slingers can be incredibly useful with good (or lucky) placement and instruction(and INCREDIBLY frustrating otherwise) you want them to fire as far to the back as possible without running up past your front lines... (which is hard with their lousy range)

PAY ATTENTION TO MORALE -- lizards are cowardly as hell, and will drive you INSANE if you don't find a way to make them braver. Positioning your snakes well is almost as hard as positioning your Slingers (

I've so far had pretty poor luck making enough progress with the national troops to reach fully summons/magic based armies, but when I do, mid game is easy sailing (no real end-game contest in SP, so don't want to make assertions on that)

Skelly-spamming assassins (add skull staff asap) are super handy, and can research and/or scout till you need them.

I've not yet hit on a strategy that I felt was guide-worthy, but i suspect there is one with these guys. I always feel like i'm "oh-so-close" to figuring out how to make them really click, and then hit a streak of critical battles gone horribly horribly wrong (

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

If you're planning on using lots of communions it may not be a bad idea to take a light Nature bless so your slaves don't die as easily from fatigue. There's nothing quite as infuriating as having your 5 communion masters raining down destruction on the last fleeing remnants of PD while their 10 slaves die from fatigue. A Nature bless doesn't fix the problem but sometimes is the difference between them dying in a 10 round fight vs. not.

-Max

It's a good point, the Shaman are sacred, so can take advantage of a bless. Why Nature instead of Earth though?

As for communion slaves dying, I've not seen much danger of it with a 1:1 ratio, unless my opponent casts a fatigue inducing BE - or all the masters decide to chain cast Blade Wind or something. Maybe it's just because I try to make sure the communion is large enough that the fatigue costs of each spell are significantly decreased?



My current dilemma is that I am much more of a scales player, but C'tis seems to scream out for an awake SC..... Doing some test runs with a PoD right now - I am finding him remarkably fragile for some reason. I considered trying the Saurolich, but he just not as cost effective.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

It's a good point, the Shaman are sacred, so can take advantage of a bless. Why Nature instead of Earth though?

As for communion slaves dying, I've not seen much danger of it with a 1:1 ratio, unless my opponent casts a fatigue inducing BE - or all the masters decide to chain cast Blade Wind or something. Maybe it's just because I try to make sure the communion is large enough that the fatigue costs of each spell are significantly decreased?



My current dilemma is that I am much more of a scales player, but C'tis seems to scream out for an awake SC..... Doing some test runs with a PoD right now - I am finding him remarkably fragile for some reason. I considered trying the Saurolich, but he just not as cost effective.

This worked pretty well for me in MP:

Prince of Death (Body 383, 45 hits)
Magic: Death 6
Dominion 9
Scales: Order 3 Sloth 1 Heat 3 Death 1 Fortune 3 Magic 1
Awake

You really want high Dom and Order 3 to go with your high-income miasma bonus. I like the gem income from luck 3, and luck 3 scales with itself: more events that are better. You could go luck 0 and more prod or growth. But MA Ctis has more problems than anyone with magic diversity, because of miasma. So the extra random gems from luck are really nice.

Your starting City Guard is great for eating arrows while resource-cheap Slave Warriors do the damage. A Lizard King or two is also good to add for morale and smiting.

With Enchant 1, your starting empoisoner can take territory by himself, just avoid amazons, lizards, and other provinces with bodyguarded commanders.

Turn 2 you can make an enchanted shield (or raw hide) by alchemizing. Enchanted has much better Parry.

You can alternatively wait until Turn 3 and make a Raw Hide shield to save gems, and use your Death gems to make a Black Servant prophet to build up an early lizard souless army. In this case go Conj-1 first and make a skull for your empoisoner -- the skull is safer than casting in any case.

A dom 9 PoD is still pretty good versus tribals and barbarians if you can find them in MA. He'll probably pick up a couple of afflictions, but he can still scare off the indies. And if he dies once, well, you've got a bunch of H3s to call him back, and he'll still have D5 for the extra fear.

And once you've got Enchant-3, you can really start to roll, with Marshmaster skelly spam.

[AreaOfEffect]

From my limited experience with Ctis I can tell you two things. Placement and Magic.

All of C'tis' units are situational and specialized. Some factions can at often times just buy one unit and apply critical mass to acheive victory without fail. Vanhiem/Midgard is the biggest culprit I know of for this kind of brute strategy. With C'tis you need to know the role of every unit and use them all in order to get maximum effect. Getting the corus of C'tis units to sing together is difficult. In the end it may just come down to luck though.

The best use of poisen slingers I've seen is in spreading them all around the field as just one unit and have them target archers. It only takes eight or nine of them in a large army to deal a lot of hurt this way.

The units however are a weak wall to throw up between the units that matter and the enemy. In my opinion it is the mage power of C'tis that wins wars. There is a reason why your best mages can be made everywhere you go. I can remember several instances where I lost battles solely due to skelly spam and magical artillary. Again, making C'tis sing is a matter of tediousness. Study the list of magic spells and know how to weild them. 90% of your victory depends on knowledge of magic.

Good luck.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by danm

Skelly-spamming assassins (add skull staff asap) are super handy, and can research and/or scout till you need them.

Try swarm instead. You'll have fun.

[krpeters]

Regarding morale, the best solution I have found for this is to recruit loads of H2 priests and use them as my main commanders. Casting Sermon of Courage works very well. The downside is that this makes it harder to recruit mages, but you'll have this problem anyway because you can't use indy commanders (miasma). Also they catch arrows frequently, but any large army will have several (each can only carry 40+ units) so losing all of them is unlikely.

I find a mix of elite lizard warriors and city guard mixed together does an adequate job of chewing up heavy infantry while surviving arrows.

With a skull staff, marshmaster skellyspam is moderately effective. I still don't see any good mid-game options, though.

[HoneyBadger]

Do Dark Vines suffer from miasma? Does anyone know?

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by krpeters

Regarding morale, the best solution I have found for this is to recruit loads of H2 priests and use them as my main commanders. Casting Sermon of Courage works very well. The downside is that this makes it harder to recruit mages, but you'll have this problem anyway because you can't use indy commanders (miasma). Also they catch arrows frequently, but any large army will have several (each can only carry 40+ units) so losing all of them is unlikely.

I find a mix of elite lizard warriors and city guard mixed together does an adequate job of chewing up heavy infantry while surviving arrows.

With a skull staff, marshmaster skellyspam is moderately effective. I still don't see any good mid-game options, though.

I've always been partial to the Lizard Kings. Since you don't have a cap only mage, you can keep up your Marshmaster spam in your outlying castles, and pump out as many Lizard Kings as you need at your home, and they can Smite spam too.