Re: Arcoscephole.
There was a very good thread of Arco tips in the past month or two, which you might find of you search the forums a bit.
Reasonably big Groups of hoplites with some heart companions make for a very solid front line, which you can back with some peltasts and lots of slingers. Plus a few preistesses in the back casting Sermon of Courage. Mages are a plus but not critical. You will take some attrition, but this combo held up well against almost everything I came across early-mid game. Unfortunately, this makes for a slow 1-province-move army
Better, though, is the tip I got from that thread I mentioned:
Build elephants and hypaspists, and group them together in 1:4 ratio (ie: 1 elephant per 4 hypaspists). 4 elephants/16 hypaspsists makes for a pretty solid group. Late game, I've done 10/40 or even 12/48 Groups. I always use one or more Strategos commanders to lead, for their Standard bonus. The elephants generally race ahead of the hypaspists, trampling everything, and leaving the stragglers and flankers for the hyps to mop up. The elephants take to brunt of the damage, but you can even lose all your ele's and the group *still* doesn't route.
With this plan, you don't build any peltasts or slingers, and idealy equip someone with a Staff of Storms to give you some missile defense (especially your low-prot elephants). Bring some priestesses for SoC and healing. Bringing some mages is bonus, but you can live without them (depending on what you're fighting, of course!)
A hyp/ele army also has 2-province move, which is nice. The downside is that those elephants are expensive! (The same plan should work with the much-cheaper chariots, but in my experience the chariots die too quickly to really be worth it.) Another thing to watch out for is that eles have pretty low MR and seem pretty vulnerable to stuff like paralyzation. Having 3-4 paralyzed elephants in a battle is a sad thing. I think there's an astral spell than can give some MR boost, though.
Other tips:
- If you give your Strategos' some items, they can be pretty survivable (and even make their way into the HoF) even if you put them on "attack closest". When I could afford it, I tended to give them stuff like luck pendants, shields of valor, Dragon/Spirit helm, and/or a decent magic sword.
- For battle-mages, I tended to have them concentrate on the 100-precision Frozen Heart, and Incinerate (for those that were capable of such), and I avoid the low-precision area affect spells after the first 1-2 rounds to avoid zapping my eles with them.
- Arco has lots of flexibility for creating SC's. The Bane Lord with some items is a great choice. I also like the trampling golem-with-stygian-armor SC.
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