[curtadams]

I disagree about magic as I rely heavily on regular troops well into the game. It's not at all unusual for me to end a single-player game with my regulars still providing most of the force of my assault. Magic is killer but the AI can be beat with regular troops.

First off, I think cavalry is probably an error. My experience is that cavalry is distinctly less efficient than medium or heavy infantry both in recruitment costs and support requirements. You can generally buy and support 4 infantry for the cost of 1 cavalry and infantry will win 4 on 1. I suspect this is what's happening to you. Your 15 cavalry will just get totally squished facing 60 medium infanty.

The only unboosted cavalry I've ever thought makes a good backbone is the Tien Chi Barbarian Kings heavy bow cavalry which is cheap and has great combat stats - but it's a bear to use well and it took me a dozen games to get it right. Black Knights and Knights of Avalon are both very much on my "not worth it" list. The exception is that sacred cavalry can be worth it with a good bless effect.

If you do use cavalry, you need to set up your troops precisely for each battle so that your cavalry hits the enemy at full charge, which is tricky and requires moving them around on the battlemap depending on the speed of your opponent. A good shock will frequently break the enemy, meaning you have no losses. With your huge numerical disadvantage once melee starts, only good use of the shock can make cavalry worthwhile.

My normal army is about 50/50 medium infantry/archers with mage artillery support. I set infantry on hold and attack in front of the archers. I make sure I have at least as large an army as the AI with fortress supplies and the nature supply boosters. This will totally wipe any normal army the AI fields and most magical ones. I do supplement my armies with summoned troops as the game goes on.

I'm also skeptical on Akashic record. It's a very expensive spell, and I prefer to search with either rainbow pretenders or groups of mages with suitable random picks. Searching to 1 gets you about half the sites; you don't need perfect coverage to win. Akashic record on 20 provinces is what, 500 pearls? You can get a LOT of angels and lucky coins for that. Even worse if you have to alchemize other gems, as I suspect you do. For that price you could have huge armies of Fall Bears as Ulm or lamia/Vine Ogres as Man that would annihilate an endless series of chaff armies.