[Micah]

I don't know why your blessing didn't work, it sounds like you did everything correctly. When your sacreds get blessed properly the candles in the sacred icon get lit, did you click on your troops and make sure they were targeted properly with the bless? If you're not casting divine bless the normal bless can leave a lot of unblessed troops. In addition they don't get any new graphics on the battlefield while the bless is in effect, just the modifiers (although flaming weapons should cause the occasional fire). All you need is someone casting bless and sacred troops for it to work (there are some problems with undead sacreds, but Jaguar warriors should work fine). Bless has no effect on non-sacred units.

How worthwhile your bless is depends on what nation you're playing. Mictlan relies on their sacred troops, whereas Ulm doesn't have much worth spending the design points on.

And yes, a properly built commander can take on limitless amount of unbuffed troops, but pretty much everything will die to hard-hitting troops if they're buffed. The AI is especially bad at dealing with tricked-out units, but players can counter them. Try an Earth King (summoned from conjuration 8) with a charcoal shield, stymphlian wings, a wraith crown, the weapon faithful. Fill his misc. slots up with resistance items depending on what you're fighting and then script him to cast Summon Earth Power/Invulnerability/holdx3/attack and watch him go. Enough mages will likely be able to take him down, but you can see the effects he'll have on normal troops pretty well.