Bless for LA C'tis?

[Graeme Dice]

Originally Posted by Viajero

Going to play LA Ctis soon, anyone willing to post some key aspects about it?

Like all versions of C'Tis, their strength is in powerful mages that they can recruit anywhere. City guards and elite warriors are your standard recruitable units, with the occasional sacred serpent thrown in if you don't need to move the army quickly.

1- recommended bless, yes no? the manual sugegsts LE Ctis is not suited for bless? why is that?

The only sacred units LA C'Tis has are sacred serpents and tomb wyrms. Sacred serpents aren't really good enough to be worth investing in a major bless, and tomb wyrms are expensive to reanimate. Your sauromancers are sacred, so they could use a minor earth bless, but don't wear armour, so the earth 9 bless is wasted on them. I'm not sure how the minor death bless interacts with banefire. But not much survives a banefire hit anyways.

2- Main thugs

Bane lords.

3- Key research paths

Enchantment 3 for raise skeletons. Evocation 6 for bane fire. Conjuration 5 for bane lords. Construction 6 for equipping them. Alteration 5 for drain life, alteration 6 for darkness, alteration 8 for disintegrate. Enchantment 6 for rigor mortis.

4- Key units/mages

Sauromancers. Lizard kings if you are fighting Ermor in the early game. Sauromancers who cast wither bones later on. You no longer have access to lizard shaman, so you'll want to find a cheap communion slave for your astral sauromancers.

5- Short, medium, ong term strategies

You have the best and most common death 3 mages around. Use them constantly. You don't have any mages that can easily forge the chalice, cast gift of health, or gift of reason, so you might want to plan for that on your pretender if you plan to make it to the tartarian stage of the game.

[Stavis_L]

Originally Posted by Graeme Dice

The only sacred units LA C'Tis has are sacred serpents and tomb wyrms. Sacred serpents aren't really good enough to be worth investing in a major bless, and tomb wyrms are expensive to reanimate.

However, note that for the cost, CB 1.6 has given the tomb wyrms fear, so they should theoretically be much more effective than before (if you're using CB 1.6 mod.)

[Viajero]

Originally Posted by Graeme Dice

The only sacred units LA C'Tis has are sacred serpents and tomb wyrms. Sacred serpents aren't really good enough to be worth investing in a major bless, and tomb wyrms are expensive to reanimate. Your sauromancers are sacred, so they could use a minor earth bless, but don't wear armour, so the earth 9 bless is wasted on them. I'm not sure how the minor death bless interacts with banefire. But not much survives a banefire hit anyways.

And what about Tomb Priests and Tomb Kings? I have read somewhere that they are blessable?

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by Viajero

And what about Tomb Priests and Tomb Kings? I have read somewhere that they are blessable?

Yes they are, but they are quite expensive to base a bless strategy upon. They don't need Earth (0 base enc) nor Astral (good mr). Fire isn't really needed for attack, and you have fire mages so spending points there on your pretender is wasted. Blood isn't very useful as tomb kings are already strong.
So you could use Nature, but I think they're lifeless... but then you need Nature access for your tartarians late-game, and a minor N bless for your sauromancers can reduce afflictions and save some from old age.
Water will only help your blessed units. The good point is it will help enter water, but with only your god to find water gems, I wouldn't iunvest too much there.
Air is meh in terms of bless so I won't discuss it.
As for Death, extra afflictions are good but not overpowering. Getting D9 for death weapons looks useless to me since it's mr negated and those opponents which have low mr you'll kill without death weapons anyway given the strength of the king.

Imho the best bless you can get is E4N4 for your sauromancers, but that's about it. I wouldn't go overboard on magic paths for a bless but look at what I need for other stuff.

[Squirrelloid]

Ok, lets assume for the moment that you really wanted to bless tomb kings and tomb wyrms. Blesses that might make sense:

*W9 - the obvious. 0 encumbrance is 0 encumbrance. Despite being obvious, this really isn't that useful because neither of your options are going to win battles by being speedy, at least not early. Probably more relevant once you can throw a flame brand on your tomb king, but if quickness is all you want, W2 on your pretender and forging some boots of haste is probably sufficiently fast to matter. The *defense* of a water bless is nice, but you don't have to go all the way to 9 for that to matter.
*A9 - both of them benefit from the decreased vulnerability to missiles and the LR. CR100 PR100 LR75 leaves you very few holes to fill in terms of elemental protection. Did i mention flame brands?
*E9 - ok, i confess, it does nothing for your Tomb Wyrms. It would be really nice if it did, because 14 vs. 10 protection on them would be a big deal. On your Tomb Kings, however, to whom you can give armor, +4 protection can be huge. A Tomb King with fire plate (easily researched/forgeable) has ~20 protection before E9 blessing. This is probably too marginal to care.

Strangely enough, the best of those is probably the A9. I've been trying A9W9 and have not been impressed with the W9. The real problem is that if you invest too heavily in a bless then you don't have enough early game to expand effectively, because neither tomb wyrms nor tomb kings are readily available early. And Tomb Kings without gear can not expand against most independents - at the very least they want armor, and a helmet would be nice. (Of course, the obvious helmet - horror - requires those D gems that you really want to use summoning more tomb kings).

Note that you probably also want E2+S3+ on your pretender for coins, hammers, and rings.

Expanding against indies is going to be really difficult if you pile on the sloth scale. While you can get by with poison slingers and light infantry against many things, you'll need to resupply every so often, and you absolutely cannot use that set up against HC. For HC you really want your heavily armored troops, which are slow and cap only, and take a *lot* of resources.

So, i'm seeing a pretender who looks something like this:
Dom 5 imprisoned Great Enchantress
A9 (W4?) E3-4 S3+, O3 H3 +good scales otherwise

Manual search early (one d site early on really speeds up tomb kings, and thus tomb wyrm generation). Prophetize your starting priest - he can animate tomb wyrms from turn 2 for you.

Rush Construction. Sadly, your d gems are really overtapped, so no skull mentors (its ok, you have great research), but feel free to pile on the lanterns.

[vfb]

W9 makes your Wyrms exactly as fast as your Undead Chariots, and they all get even speedier when you do your national Power of the Whatever spell. I tried it SP and it was pretty fun. But it takes a while to start massing the Wyrms.

[Baalz]

I wonder how viable is would be to convert lizard kings to undead via life after death. B-line up to enchantment 7 as fast as you could - desert rangers and poison slingers along with poison ward and skellispam should be able to carry you that far fairly easily with no other research. Once there I could see really piling on the tomb wyrms using lizard kings, leaving your D gems for other uses (tomb chariot reanimators probably). This would also get you haste and if you've taken A on your pretender mass flight which sounds like a pretty nasty combo on 500 tomb chariots, along with power of the reborn king. This also nets you serpents blessing, which is just begging for you to figure out a way to find a couple foul vapors casters to pile on with rigor mortis.

[Sombre]

How would you kill the lizard kings? They are poison resistant and have decent hp iirc so foul vapours might not do it.

[Belac]

What about an E4 bless so you can stick better armor/shields on them? E4 isn't too expensive, and C'tis could use a pretender with E since they don't naturally get it.

[Trumanator]

E4 is useless on 0enc units. Its good for your sacred mages though.