[Dedas]

Armored units are quite easily dealt with the nice tune of dancing death and tune of growth that your dryads can sing. Now, now, I know you will all say it's too risky having mages up front but stay with me.

First let's look at "Tune of Dancing Death":

Area effect 15, stun damage 31+, fatigue 5, armor negating, magic resistance negates.

"Tune of Growth"
AoE 15, entangles enemies, depends on growth scale

The clever thing is that these tunes comes in harmony with comman pangean scales and strategies.
Growth adds to ToG
Magic +3 helps ToDD negate MR on enemies
200gp temples makes it very cheap to spread dominion
The dryad is cheap in initial cost (110), cheap in large numbers due to holiness, and is also a priest able to build temples.
Dryad has Awe +2 and no encumbering armor + able to cast barkskin with her N1 + able to forge a hide shield with the same to protect her from arrows.

The plan
Take three or four dryads (no less for best effect).
Forge a barkskin shield for each one (easy with 6N gem income from start)
Research alteration 1
Attack where dominion and scale is on your side to help with awe and magic negation.
In battle, place some chaff first (satyrs or maenads) and behind them the dryads mixed with satyrs (almost same movement). Script: 1 barkskin 2 attack one, ToDD, ToDD, Tune of Fear.

That is it. It really does work and the dryads thanks to awe, chaff, barkskin and shield. I always use this strategy when expanding and the results are more than often great. Of course you will rarely lose a dryad now and then but it is worth considering how many troops you would lose otherwise.

Try it. Experiment with placement as that is key.

Oh, tune of growth is just ridiculously effective on barbarians because of low MR (against growth) and low morale (against awe). Also, they have no bows to shoot the dryads with. That is one reason I always buy a dryad on the first turn so that I can claim any province defended by barbarians much easier.

I just want to add that the trick is really to use multiple dryads to sing the tunes as the three songs scale nicely.