Re: reverse communion slave orders
 

No, the slaves will not cast anything in a turn iff a master casts before they get to act. If a slave acts before the first master, he may cast spells normally. Actually try it, it works.

I dislike retreating the masters, and thus putting them on the top, because it breaks up your army for future use. Further, the effect of masters on communion slave fatigue is mostly irrelevant. You also only need one master:

S1s all

Slave1: Communion Slave, Hold, LotNS (2s), SSx2 (fatigued out - who cares?)
Slave2-n: CSlave, Hold, SSx3
Master: CMaster, PotS, SSx3

Each master SS produces a whopping 20/n fatigue for each slave, or ~2.5 fatigue per slave per casting with 8 slaves. Ie, not relevant.

Re: reverse communion slave orders
 

This probably ranks #1 on my request list of things people should always do before posting on game specifics.

Since a lot of tests take less than five minutes to perform, but doing so could avoid an awful lot of just plain wrong information appearing on the forum. If you're not sure about something, test it :) And then if your tests go against what people are saying, then by all means say so and post your test findings.

[/Rant about pet hate]

Re: reverse communion slave orders
 

And if you don't want to test something or can't test it, don't present what you believe as fact.

Too many times I have seen people quoting the manual as evidence that they are right about something, or simply saying "X works in Y way and never Z" without qualifying it. When I believe something from playing the game but haven't tested it, I will generally say something along the lines of "I am 80% sure of X and people seem to concur, but in order to be sure this requires a test".

Re: reverse communion slave orders
 

LoL, and this is probably my #2 request :)