Kael: Your arguements are trash, and I've slammed them left right and center. Armies of Fiendish Centipedes? You still haven't explained where you got them, or how that makes any sense.
It was an offhand comment designed to show how silly your assembling an army is. Of course, since fiendish centipedes are callable, trainable, and summonable, the fact that some guy in Baator wasted his time making an army of them is pretty comparable to some guy wasting his time traveling around diploing a bunch of crusaders.
Casting not Ex? That ignores MMV as well as CustServe (the latter is forgivable), as well as the page in the PHB that defines what various abilities are (from that page, casting is not Su, because Spell Resistance applies, it's not Sp because component costs exist, and it's not natural because only purely physical traits are natural. Since all abilities must be one of the four, it's Ex. Basic logic).
Only "purely physical" traits are natural? Really, because that seems to be complete bullshit that you made up, since natural abilities are defined as abilities inherent to the particular creature that are not Ex/Su/Sp, such as a Solar's casting. The thing is that unlike you, I recognize that their are two contradictory statements regarding this definition (MM and PHB) and therefore do not assume that the one I want is true, but recognize that most DMs are going to use the MM definition, since you are using a creature in the MM and they don't want you to completely rape clerics after level 7.
Shapechange doesn't give you time to memorize spells? It's 10 minutes per level, which means a 17th level sorcerer has at minimum nearly 3 hours of Cleric casting, plenty of time to memorize (from within a Rope Trick) and then rock out, plus a Greater Metamagic Rod of Extend makes that last long enough for many adventuring days (especially if he has a few caster level boosters at this point, and who doesn't?). So seriously, what arguement of yours have I not taken down?
That's great, you can pretend that you have Cleric casting, but that completely negates your argument that the very next round you can get Wizard casting. If you change form, you lose all those spells, so unless you give up one of the primary benefits of Shapechange (free action shifts to appropriate forms) you would not be able to use spells.
Now assuming your DM treats casting as an Ex ability, you do realize that polymorph actually removes your own Ex abilities when you shift right? And in fact, so does Wildshape. I guess any Druid that takes Natural Spell is actually an idiot to you? Or did you not consider that when you were trying as hard as possible to make Shapechange even more retardedly awesome then it already is.
You're right though, the Astral Deva was yet another random monster that makes no sense that you just brought in. I assumed when you said an Astral Deva was fighting the army that you were talking about someone you'd already mentioned turning into one, but no, evidently my army must go up against Fiendish Centipedes and Astral Devas for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The Astral Deva and Fiendish Centipedes were both examples of equivalent challenges for that army. It's not my fault you hide as much information about your examples as possible so you can gotcha people later. "HAHA, you may be warriors, but my army of 4000 people is made entirely of Crusaders for no reason! Gotcha!" I just presented some likely challenges that are supposedly equivalent but that would easily crush you.
It was an army battle! Why are you bringing out random monsters?
Offhand, I'd say because random monsters make up a large part of the world, and giant armies of low level PCs rarely have the /avoid command open to them when confronted by something. So if you march your army past a Glabrezu, you better expect that he'll run around spamming Confusion on you and laughing.
And by the way, the Astral Deva that you claim is equal to the whole army could easily get shot down by archers... 16 archers with Point Blank Shot, Rapid Shot, and Cooperative Archery (which was the standard units I was using) plus the Bardic and Marshal support can do a LOT of damage, and that's just one unit.
Well that sound excellent. Are they all going to attack random squares since the can't see anything? How well are they going to do when the surprise round involves an 80ft circle of death appearing in the middle of them? I imagine that might disrupt coordinated archery at empty squares in the hopes of hitting things. And God forbid what if your bards are included in that death circle.
Now because you keep being a whiny petulant bitch about how your all Crusader army makes perfect sense in all your other posts without addressing my points at all, I am going to shred your argument to pieces.
1) Crusaders are more like Paladins then Clerics.
2) So a Metropolis has X number of people. This includes Y number of Clerics, Z number of Fighters, ect.
3) You argument is that it would have Y number of Crusaders, since they are similar to Clerics.
4) Let's apply this logic across the board.
There are X people. Let's say Y is 1% of X, and that Z is 2% of X, I don't have my book, so feel free to fill in the actual numbers and prove me right.
X=N(non-fighter non-clerics) + Y + Z
Crusaders are like Clerics.
Warblades are like Fighters.
Swashbucklers are like Fighters.
Hexblades are like Fighters.
Duskblades are like Wizards.
Beguilers are like Rogues.
Factotums are like Rogues.
Favored Souls are like Clerics (or Sorcerers).
Dread Necros are like Sorcerers.
Wu Jen are like Wizards.
Archivists are like Wizards.
ect.
See where I'm going with this?
If the actual population of a city in the DMG is based on the following assumption:
X(total)= N(NPC classes) + W (Wizards) + C (Clerics) + S (Sorcerer) + R (Rogues) + F (Fighters).
These numbers add up correctly. However, if every city has the same number of Crusaders and Clerics, and that number is the number in the DMG, not half that number, then You instead have:
X(total)= N + 12W +7C +4S +6R +32F
If the DMG doesn't define the number of NPC classes, then you can push that number smaller and smaller, but eventually, anyone sensible (IE not you) will accept that having more level 1 Fighter classes then Commoners renders the statistics meaningless.
So the correct way to determine the number of any given class in a city, is to take the DMG numbers and divide them by the number of classes that would be classified under that category. So for Crusaders, assuming you shunt as many classes toward Wizard and Sorcerer and away from Cleric in order to maximize the number of Crusaders, you end up with at most 9 level 1 Crusaders in the largest metropolis, Large Towns might have 1, if you don't give some priority to Clerics, who are probably more likely, seeing as large towns should probably have Clerics for at least a couple of deities.
In conclusion, take your all Crusader army trash elsewhere, and burn up your I found 60 guys who all had this exact feat set up, especially this really obscure fighter sub level, sheet. And try to actually run an army that has to fight a Dragon. And remember to take those huge penalties to Leadership for losing a Cohort and a few hundred followers every other day.
