Have you tried out your ideas? They don't look like they'd work. First, without a E9/10 bless, reinvigoration gear is a must. That adds 4-8 gems to the cost of each Lord. I don't understand why you think skipping a 5 gem brand in favor of 2 5 gem items so you can clear a single square per turn at greater fatigue cost is supposed to be a plus. And at least a minor N bless is also a must. Mistform reduces damage to 1 point per hit, but Sidhe Lords have only 15 hp.
And evocations work fine against them. A Sidhe Lord with a frost brand can buff up immunity to lightning, cold, and poison, but not all of them due to fatigue and limited scripting slots on a already heavily buff dependent thug. Mix multiple of the above elements to pop their mistform, at which point they die fast. They also cannot buff immunity to fire, just the 50% from elemental fortitude, reduced to 25% if you cast barkskin. Mistform doesn't work if you don't have good protection underlying it, so you need either barkskin or shell out 10 gems for better armor. Again evocations don't need to kill them, just pop their mistform at which point they die quickly to normal attacks. For communion nations, spamming the astral MR negates spells works, not awesomely or anything, but well enough. Their big advantage though is that with range 100 and precision 100, they are not countered by the national mist spells or storm dropping precision. Incidently, hiding in the back row for 5 turns can 1) be countered with scripting if you keep doing it, and 2) does not necessarily stop stellar cascades. Astral mages without other paths like casting stellar cascades even after the script runs out. They will also cast stellar cascades if you are immune to what elemental spells they can cast and you don't have a good number of nonimmune chaff. If you do have chaff, once they die, your thugs will flee from the hp limit, and die if they are behind enemy lines as glamour thugs tend to be. Sure, rain of stones is an option, though not particularly easy since your best earth mages have no feet, but CBM has pushed that to Evocation 8. It's not as if your research is good enough to make even Evo 7 in good time, and you can forge neither lanterns nor mentors.
The big counter to Eriu though is mindhunt. Works on stealthed units, and Eriu has no counter. It doesn't have access to astral mages, who wouldn't be able to sneak with glamour armies anyway. It can't forge AMAs except with a Pretender and there's no way that can keep up with demand. Lead shield makes buffing ridiculously fatigueing, so no go, leaving just rainbow armor. It's good, and you should have them, but it's too low protection so barkskin is a necessity which means vulnerability to fire unless you can add more gems for fire protection gear, which you can't even forge with your build.
Now, I don't know how many tests you have done, but the vine shield is not an option. It's a must. You aren't talking 50 hp giants but dudes with 15 hp. A single lucky hit can kill them. So in the end, for an unstoppable army of 4-5 kitted out thugs, you are looking at ~30 gems each. That minor forge bonus reduces that to 25 (as no bonus for fire gems). You army costs more than an SC. It has advantages over an SC of course, but also disadvantages.
Incidently, all of this has nothing to do with the false fetters effect from the golden lance. Again, it's practically meaningless against regular armies. It's meaningless if you keep locking down 3 guys while the rest hack at you, and even more meaningless if you add so many attacks that you kill that square in one turn, since, well the dead aren't locked down. I haven't tested them against SCs to see how well that'll work. I suspect it works, but has the same problem of all specialized anti-thugs of getting hung up on a few points of PD then dying instantly when the SC wacks them.
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Originally Posted by Shardphoenix
Dunno, indie elephants trampled water-blessed Lords without too much trouble. He just needs more tramplers, I guess.
Also, try summoning imps. They interrupt buff cycle and swarm nicely (13 MR helps too).
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That's why storm staves are not an option either. Eriu's guys are so buff dependent that turn 1 flyers wrecks them good. I find it hard to justify spending air gems on practically anything else. You can't do anything about horrors and storm demons though. And from experience, tramplers do mess up low hp thugs. I think it's because even if you dodge the trampling attempt, you lose 1 hp, and Sidhe have so few.