[geo981010]

Ragnarok-X :
Some commanders are poison immune, but not many. So hydra bodyguards is not a good idea under normal circumstances!

Norfleet:
yup, banishment will kill them again quickly, so you do not want to be near the front line. Banishment has a range of 25, so you want to keep them in the back line with some screen to prevent priests from sneaking in. Need to try some tests on this and see if having other undead closer can soak up determined banishment attempts - only tried versus AI yet, so need to try versus someone trying with a real battle plan.

For cost saving, upkeep is 1/30 of unit cost, so the Arch Theurgs cost a little under 13 gold per turn per unit, and the Theurgs an even 5 each per turn per unit. So if your goal is by turn 15 to have 3 battleGroups of 3 or 4 mages each, couple arches out site searching, and a stable of 5-10 researching, you are now talking about saving enough gold each turn to buy a new Theurg.

If you play around with it, you can get the conVersions consistenly with little hassle with the Hydra once you get used to it.

I think I will need to try this against a real person later this week and so how it goes...