[Baalz]

Well, "forcing" R'yleh to fire closest isn't as worthless as it might seem. Otherwise, "fire large monsters" (assuming you're using deep ones) will blast your commanders/mages. Trying to fight mind blasters with any of your units who are big enough to shield your mages is a suckers game, you'll be fielding 1/2 to 1/3rd as many troops with either worse MR (!) or worse attack. Sure, you can eventually get Basalt Kings buffed up enough to be pretty resilient, but that's a hell of a lot more expensive in gold, gems and research than popping out some trolls. As far as using them early with no buffing/items...it seems a bit silly to use a 500 gold cap only mage where a 1 gem summon does as good a job.