[Shangrila00]

I don't think that's how damage with exploding dice rolls works. It would make the B4 bless as good as the W9, at 50% greater damage. Do we have a mathmatician here?

In any case, any well played Man will have both knights and Wardens, and longbowmen too regardless of bless. It's just relative proportions that change. It's not like Mictlan where the bless multiplies the effectiveness of the entire army and extends to the endgame summons.

And making that list of battlemagic useable as early as possible is one of the major arguments against a high bless. Take flaming arrows, which is only available off a pretender, despite being obviously ridiculously good with Man, who on top of great archers, has excellent research (cheap forts, cheap temples, efficient sacred researcher), and some interesting national spells in enchantment. Like Song of Power which you left out of your list, and Man's the only nation that has it and can actually make good if unpredictable use of it, with its expendable N3s. I've had some success with a F4A4 Phoenix in tests. Okay, it does very little either for diversity or bless, but it does give you early high air magic, and it's pretty much ideal for supercharging your archers with the mobility to support more than one archer army if necessary.

As a sidenote, how good are sprites? I've never actually used them since you can't script them. Is it worth summoning a Faery Queen just to chain summon sprites that you can script?