T'ien Ch'i, and how they rule!

[Tiltowait]

Originally posted by ywl:
Immortal units get a chance of recovering from affliction each turn. In your case, my guess is that he got an battle affliction and then recovered.

Yes, the difference with the master is that he seems to gain them every turn as well

[Keir Maxwell]

I have been playing around with Tien Ch'i again and having alot of fun - though I'm still not sure they are that good.

Playing main theme I find the foot archers mediocre but useful and the LC archers worse - I think Man has much better shooters in the Longbow. HC have a heap of cool factor and are cheap lancers - I can't stay away from them. Celestial masters are very useful early combat mages.

The coolest thing is that I'm having a good time with the Barbarian Kings. I have taken Fortune as my Pretender and she has done me proud. With random events rare (I know I should have made them commen) I'm getting a positive event every two turns + and no bad ones. There has also been enough extra gold from events to keep me from hurting much from the Turmoil3. While its along way from being as fast as Arco/Pythium/C'tis its working in a fashion. And Spirit Mastery is really good.

I must try again with Spring and Autumn as I just love the chariots.

I still thing Barbarian Kings should be able to recruit LC through conquest and need the extra strength this would give them in MP. Spring and Autumn could do with the ability to raise more than just commander chariots. While Tien Ch'i main theme is the strongest I think it is well short of Man as Man has awesome mages, Longbow the best missile troops around, and Wardens are great. Nothing in the Tien Ch'i arsnel of main troops compares to these IMO.

What Tien Ch'i has that no-one can top is flavour. All the themes ooze flavour. I just love them. Mictlan also scores highly here while the third new race Machaka performs better but has less flavour for me as it performs in a more traditional fashion. The great thing about Mictlan and Tien Ch'i is the uniqueness of their approach. If these two do recieve any up-powering then it should not be such as to make them more like the main stream.

Cheers

Keir

[ywl]

Originally posted by Tiltowait:

quote:

---

Originally posted by ywl:
Immortal units get a chance of recovering from affliction each turn. In your case, my guess is that he got an battle affliction and then recovered.

Yes, the difference with the master is that he seems to gain them every turn as well

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Really? I never noticed that. All I saw was one affliction when he first came. But of course, I wasn't paying the most attention to him. I was more impressed by the healing Ho and the flying Lui.

[Raen]

In the Spring and Autumn theme, is there any point at all to building Horsemen, other than perhaps as patrol and/or raid units? They don't seem to work with my main armies.

The only reason I have built Horsemen in S&A is from distant provinces with forts to reinforce the frontline. In S&A money is a precious commodity and more often than not it's cheaper to build a fort near a fighting line and produce archer/HI there along with flying your summoning army to the new stronghold for faster replentishment of armies.

Hope that helps.

[Jasper]

Originally posted by Raen:
In the Spring and Autumn theme, is there any point at all to building Horsemen, other than perhaps as patrol and/or raid units? They don't seem to work with my main armies.

Spring and Autumn has a dearth of good units, and that definitely includes the 20 gold horsemen, which aren't anywhere near as good as the 25 gold lancers available to Tien Chi.

Thier heavier infantry would be _ok_ if they were strategic move 2, but instead they're weakly equiped _and_ slow. Only their Composite archers look decent; Glaives are nice, but no where near as good as 2 handed swords.

Either you can make their summoned troops work for you, or IMHO abandon all hope.

[Saber Cherry]

It's true that Tien Chi infantry is weak, because of its weapons (no sword/shield units). In the default theme, the infantry with almost-decent protection (12) cost 13 gold. I prefer indy HI to Tien Chi HI =)

But as for archers - wow! Their composite archers are much better than Man archers, IMO. Why? Higher protection, at a lower cost. Man longbows are too expensive. Who would win with 1000 gold worth of composite archers against 1000 gold worth of longbows? I would say... certainly the composite archers, since I think they'd even win on a unit-for-unit basis. And with the "Fire Archers" order, that's important!

BTW. If you want to see a shocking difference in infantry quality, compare the Tien Chi (default) elite Glaive troops to Marginon Halberdiers or Greatswordsmen. Keep in mind the Tien Chi troops are 30% more expensive! A battle between the two sides, on equal cost basis, would not be pretty... but at least TC does get some 2 strat move infantry.

[ December 03, 2003, 04:58: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]