[rdonj]

To answer your original question, magic is useful at ALL levels, but it depends on what you're trying to do with it. Most lower level magic is best used on small numbers of very expensive or otherwise rare things, rather than trying to be useful in army combats. For example spells like earth meld or mind burn are very useful on relatively small numbers of enemy elites. Under CBM, fire prison is an amazingly good spell. Try it sometime. It can be a real battle winner, especially if you rely on ranged units or something like summer lions. There are some exceptions to this though. Thunderstrike is an amazingly good spell no matter the number of troops the enemy has... it demolishes anything that does not have full lightning immunity, is pretty accurate, and can be spammed by thuggish mages who can survive without really needing troops to guard them. Try playing tir na nog, eriu, or ea caelum to get an idea of what I mean.

By and large though higher level magic is just much more efficient, especially buffs. Fog Warriors is one of the most powerful spells in the game IMO.

One thing that can help make your mages more efficient is using trick armies. Like say you're playing marignon. You can use summer lions to occupy the enemy army while your mages rain fire down on their heads, or have all your mages cast resist fire and then cast fire storm. Or with your C'tis example, using undead in combination with the raise dead spells (yes I know everyone's talking about these...), shadowblast, cloud of death, etc. Undead are immune to the effects of death spells so when you accidentally hit them they really don't care. A few wights or a bane lord or two can absorb all the missile fire they throw at you, and are quite tough to kill, and can hold the attention of nearby troops long enough for your mages to create an impenetrable wall of skeletons while dropping painful spells on them from afar.

Have you tried thugging? That sounds like something you'd feel is way too inefficient, but it works very well, and is really the best way to fight the AI. If you haven't and want to get a good idea of how effective thugging can be, try the following: Play Tir na N'og with an e9n4 bless. Try making armies that consist of 2 sidhe thugs, and 3 mages with air magic to at least level 3. Thugs should be equipped with a vine shield, a frost brand, and possibly rainbow armor to help with fatigue. Nothing else. Script bless, air shield, mistform, resist lightning, barkskin, attack closest. Script the mages to air shield, bless, aim, thunder strikex2, spells. As long as they don't have any flanking units, an army like this should be more or less invulnerable to conventional AI armies. The mages aren't really even necessary to be honest, they are just there to prove that it can be done :P Something like that is safer with death mages because of the skelly spam acting as a barrier to keep them safe.