[bbz]

The troops size matters in that case. the area of effect means that you can cover an area of 25 sqares. each square sonsists of 6 sizes of unit. so that is 1 elephant(size 6) or 2 knights(size 3) or 3 normal soldiers (size 2) or 6 markatas (size 1). so it depends on what units your army consists of. what you can do is have a sqad of 25 sizes of units and one mage to cast the spell but to be on the safe side you could use 20 sizes a mage since I think it depends on the precision of the mage aswell so he might just cast it on half of them or sth(I'm not too sure about that last one) I usually put the mage behind or in the middle of the troops since mages have some strange casting priorities (they will target the troop with the lowest armor for amrmor buffing spells like legions of steel). Also if it is an important battle I suggest you download the debug mode and rebuild your army there and see how the mages are going to cast the spell,try having couple of sqadrons of 25 sizes of units and assing 1 mage to each of those and posision them in a line or sth.