As soon as you have Arrow Fend, air bless becomes worthless, and as kailasa is a nation that is not so good early, but can get really strong later. I personally think that a strategy based on compensation their early game weaknesses with sacrificing later power is wrong. A good kailasa should aim to maximize the power of the nation, and not try to make it survive. And the effects of Air and Water bless you get from the spells Arrow Fend and Celestial Music, so you dont take them in the beginning because they will become useless. And for the Shock resistance i had never problems with wrathful skies, as you can finish battles very early, if you have a nice fire bless. (and will of fates
)
Also with S9 you can live long enough to conquer almost any indy you want.
Your sacreds survive 2-3 arrows on average when you get N4 bless you regenerate an arrow every 5 turns, and also make sure that it really needs 3 arrows to kill you.
And if someone is intending to kill you, with Conj 5 you get ghandaravas and they can kill lots of archers
. Also there are not so many nations that have strong archery and i dont think that a sane player would mass slingers, so that he can engage kailasa.
The only Nations that can field heavy archery early are:
Ulm (Mass Maidens)
Sauromantia (Always be nice to sauromatia they have way to much archery)
TC (they have nice archers)
Caelum (they have archers, but kailasa should not be too afraid from mammoths)
Yomi (Bakemono archers are very cheap)
So i would not recommend an air bless, except in a blitz against one of these nations.
I actually played a MP with an air bless, but the only thing that happened was that i got trashed by helheim.
And if someone really wants to play archery duel, you have always the possibility to recruit your own cheap archers. Or just use markate decoys. Or get Ghandaravas. Or Die (id rather use ghandaravas
).