[Cainehill]

Huzurdaddi said:

It started out as a 5 star thread.

And it may have dropped, not because of 'rudeness and insults', but because of the quality (or lack thereof) of a bunch of Posts written by people who haven't thought about strategies much less tried playing them.

Edit: Or because the rating for a thread about Pythium that contains mostly debate about Caelum doesn't deserve five stars. And sorry, but it wasn't I (who I expect am the alleged rudester) who perverted the thread's content.

As to false horrors. I find it weird that the spell breaks indeps so well ( I mean, try it it take 10 minutes to set up a game and get to the stage where you can try it ). With a handfull of Serphas you can take any indep. You can grow at an amazing rate. It SEEMS to me to be faster than any other nation. And it is also great for busting PD.

Independents are broken just about as fast via a handful of quickened seraphs using lightning. Frankly, I find lightning more effective against many of the independents, and also against any PD that includes archers.

I think Caelum does not win most games since this strategy takes TIME to develop ( like turn 12 or so on normal research maybe a little earlier ) and on a somewhat small map with a few players conflict happens before this time. However on a big map with a good amount of space my money is on Caelum. It's not 100% alliances can be made stuff like that.

Most of my games are on moderately large maps - Cradle, Karan, etc. And still, I don't see Caelum winning even a simple majority of the games that it's in. This, without "OMG! We gotta get Caelum!" alliances - which just a few months ago, were "OMG! We gotta get Ermor!" alliances. It's simply the panic du jour.

How about this. Take a decent sized map ( something a little bigger than Aran ) with 2 players one takes Caelum one takes something else. Set indpes to let's say 9. My money is on Caelum.

My money would be on Caelum if the "something else" was T'ien C'hi, maybe. Otherwise, it's fairly trivial to come up with a solid counter-Caelum strategy, given that it's only indies and Caelum.

Any of the undead nations / themes would have good odds; all in all, I'd say that about half the nations could get at least 50/50 odds, if you predicate players of equal skill. And any nation could lose against any other nation in this scenario, simply because of luck with magic sites. If you have Atlantis and it only finds 2 water sites in its first 20 provinces, a lot of its usual strategies are shot.

And I can name a handful of prominent posters who would raise the odds of the other nation winning to 75%, if they were playing Caelum.