[Micah]

Hmm, a bunch of interesting strategies here, but I think a lot of them somewhat miss the point. Caelum can do the raiding thing pretty well without burning gems into it, so I'm not sure that spamming bottles and frost brands is the best use of gems. The frost-brand-wielding storm general could just as easily be a high seraph spamming thunderstrike for the amount of damage it'll do, and has a much lower chance of getting killed or taking attrition damage to his guards. It's more gold, but less gems, which is usually a deal I'm alright taking.

As Natpy points out CR/SR thugs and SCs are a nightmare for Caelum to deal with, and I'm not convinced about the astral strat. Piling boosters on base S1 mages that also cost 270g a pop is a horrible idea against any nation that can get astral mages, and I'm including stuff you would normally never put into combat like sages and lizard shammies. The pretender chassis you have laid out can at least cloud trapeze and lay some smackdown if need be though once it gets geared.

The False Horror spam idea is also probably pretty good for anything without perfect morale.

Back to the idea of using TS-casting seraphs over storm general thugs: One of the huge perks of MA caelum is that they have excellent battle mages that are non-cap-only and non-sacred. Yes, I just used non-sacred as a positive thing. The reason that this is a "good" thing is that they have normal upkeep costs, and thus 15 turns after one dies you've saved enough money to buy a new one. Now 15 turns isn't exactly short, and you shouldn't go around throwing them away on ill-considered attacks, but it does mean that if a raiding force dies it's hardly the end of the world. Especially if the one raiding force that died was only 1 of 4 raiding forces...if the other 3 of them got 100g worth of provinces between them you'll have your money back in no time, and since your general upkeep costs should pretty rapidly mean you have extra commander slots at your forts it's pretty easy to "recycle" your mages. Gems, on the other hand, once gone, are gone forever.

I would also head straight up Evo til I hit thunderstrike, pretty much without exception. Lightning bolt just doesn't measure up, especially since the absurd encumbrance on high seraphs means that the fatigue costs even out startlingly well...3 lightning bolts from an A3 is 21 encumbrance + 15 spell fatigue, for a total of 36, vs a thunder strike costing 57, which means you get front-loaded damage with AoE. An A4 caster has 32 fatigue TS casts vs 3 lightning bolts at 30. The numbers for TS get even better with magic scales.