[aaminoff]

Alternatives to armor in protecting your communions:

Suppose you are on defense. You know your opponent is going to Stone Rain (aka Communion Bane) their first turn. How do you protect your communion? Putting armor on your mages has been mentioned, but I suspect most nations can recruit cheap communionable mages faster than they can forge armor for them. My thought would be, have a crystal matrix on a mage at the end of the ID list (the bottom of the commanders listing), and have them cast Stoneskin or Barkskin or something like that the first turn. The slaves above that crystal-matrix-enabled buffer have all cast CSlave already, so they should be part of the communion when the buff gets cast, so they will get it. You still need armor on the other masters though.

Suppose you are on offence, same problem. If all the slaves have slave matrices and a master has a crystal matrix and an amulet of barkskin, will the barkskin get auto-cast before the beginning of combat and affect all the slaves? In fact if I read the discussions of Crystal Shields etc. in the thread above, it sounds like in this case you don't even need to worry about the order of the slaves/masters. The only disadvantage to this plan is that slave matrices are expensive, it may be cheaper just to forge armor.

If the enemy throws Earthquake against your communion, I'm not sure what to do. Same trick, but use Boots of Quickness, to buff Defense? Does that even work that way?