EA T'ien Chi

[Crafty]

Hi newbie here.

I would like to try EA T'ien Chi next, any ideas on how to do a SC build for the pretender? This is just SP of course.

Any thoughts are welcome. In my first game as EA C'tis, I didn't give my pretender any paths in astral at all, but it seems for SC builds, Astral is good to have cos of a lot of low level buff spells like etheralness, twist fate and luck?

I'm playing at the normal difficulty level (the second one).

[jutetrea]

Depends on how you're going with magic, and if you want a bless or not.

Personally: I like rainbow pretenders for magic/forging later in the game.

If going SC I would go for:
Ghost king - Lvl 2-4 astral+ lvl 4 water, death, fire, earth +1 or 2 other lvl 4's + scales, sleeping
Would still give good magic variety later

If I wanted something out of the gate
Dragon - heavy water = good def
Wyrm - either just astral or no magic. Possibly 2 paths if you have points
Cyclops - heavy earth = good prot
maybe even vamp queen - but pretty expensive
Most good SCs have a high path cost, so their magic variety is low

Alteration/enchant early for buffs, const early for items

[Jazzepi]

You can do a sleeping ghost king with 5 levels in death to give him +10 fear for a large radius fear effect.

You'll have to alchemize to get the earth gems to equip him, but otherwise you can forge all the base equipment he'll need out the gate.

Jazzepi

[Gandalf Parker]

+3 luck can be alot of fun in solo play. Especially if you take -2 order so that more things happen. Add one of the +luck gods that Tien Chi gets and it should be very interesting.

[Meglobob]

EA T'ien Chi is probably unsuited by a SC.

Good scales are probably far better, so you can recruit lots and lots of mages. Then concentrate on a very, very strong magic strategy.

EA T'ien Chi can probably employ virtually any magical strategy.

Wind guide/Flaming arrows with your composite bows for example is more powerful then ANY SC.

Another good one is recruit lots of warriors of the five elements and assemble armies that can cast battlefield spells like foul vapours, wraithful skies and perhaps the fire & water equivilents.

EA T'ien Chi is a nation to play if you want to learn the magic system in detail.

[Jazzepi]

I'd also like to say it's very easy to random yourself into an Air 2 guy who can carry lots of magic gems along and cast arrow fend.

Jazzepi

[Shovah32]

Try a W9 awake/sleeping dragon. Hes very tough(good stats, high defence) and provides a nice blessing for both your warriors of the 5 elements(high defence, good speed and they slaughter EAs lightly armoured troops) and summoned sacreds. You can also get good scales and average dominion.

[Crafty]

Megablob, jutetrea I don't want to try a rainbow pretender cos I already did so in my first game with C'Tis where I did a blessed strategy (multiple paths). Didn't know what to do besides using divine bless and lots of blessed units and running up the construction tree to craft items for my lizard king prophet and later enchantment cos I wanted gift of health and thesis's blessing to go kill the silly R'yth.

Now I read it isn't considered a good strategy, but i managed to win and it's only SP right?

I read the AI can't really handle SC strategies , so if my strategy is slightly sub-optimal it doesn't hurt I hope.

Are nationals spell generally stronger than the normal ones? The last time I totally ignored them. Should I make a special effort to get them and cast them?

W9 Dragon looks interesting...

[Shovah32]

National spells can be very strong(read umbrals and seraphs) but most are there for flavour or to add something to a nation(tien chi gets some sacreds who can really take and dish out damage that go well with their fragile sacred warriors).
If you give your W9 Dragon a ring of regen and a pendant of luck he will be a killing machine. You have some great infantry(low resource tower shields, composite bows and good damage sacreds). Site search early and often with both manual(flying CMs) and remote(you have alot of level 2's) searching and use these gems both to outfit thugs and SCs(sleepers and elemental royalty are nice) and to forge boosters(get a wing of wizardry and a staff of elemental mastery on a CM, theres not much he cant forge ) and maybe get up globals; forge of the ancients in particular is very powerful for EA tien chi's versatile mages.

Also make good, sorry, i mean great use of battle magic. You have acid spells, magma spells aswell as possible clouds(sulphur/freezing are good early against the glamour nations) and other elemental spells such as falling fires/frost, bladewind and thunder strike. Your versatile(and flying if using CMs) mages with boosters, spell boosters and gems if neccesary can really put the hurt on your enemy and help defend you early on along with your dragon(in a mp game which i thought was lost i beat a double blessed lankan army almost purely with battlemagic).

[Gandalf Parker]

National spells offer thematic flavor to a nation. It can be powerful but I dont think that is the original purpose of them.