Best Body guards vs. Horrors?

[PsiSoldier]

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on what the best units are to guard commanders against Horrors and Doom Horrors.

I'm currently trying out Iron Dragons as body guards in a game where Astral Corruption was cast and my commander WILL be attacked by a Doom Horror. In the past I have used Abominations in another game but some of the Doom horrors have pretty high MR so they may not work too well all the time since their Gaze is negated by MR.

Some of the Doom Horrors also use Ranged so if you have melee body guards that just stay by the commander they might not help out too much in that case.

So I'm curious if anyone has any units that they like to use that work pretty well against Doom Horrors or maybe even against regular horrors in general.

[KissBlade]

The best bodyguard is to script returning. With guard commander, your troops will cluster around your mage anyway making their flight effectively pointless.

[Calahan]

Troops revert to default orders during assassination spells. Meaning they will attack rather than huddle around the commander. Which is a good or bad thing depending on what you're up against.

But as KissBlade says, Returning is the best bodyguard you can get (although you must then remember to never hit the pool astral gems button again)

[KissBlade]

Ah right, I forgot that. In which case, nothing is really that effective since the horrors will fly over whatever you send anyway and smack your commander. =\

[thejeff]

Don't forget the blood slave trick.

Blood slaves appear around the holder. Enough of them can block access to the commander for a round or two.

[PsiSoldier]

What the heck is the pool astral gems button?

Anyways I suppose your right about returning, although I believe my pretender is more than capable of handling any Doom Horrors, But he might loose a few body guards in the process so that may put things in favor of returning. Better than loosing an Iron Dragon or two to a Doom horror just to prove how tough my pretender is, not to mention the benefit of avoiding yet more horror marks.

Of course there are still other commanders that dont have Astral and might be in need of body guards since they cant just flitter away from combat.

[PsiSoldier]

Its good to know though that my Iron dragons would actually attack rather than stand around waiting to be killed at range by some Abomination of Desolation or something.

[Lingchih]

In you magic gems inventory window, you just hit POOL to dump all the gems on commanders in labs into the treasury. It's very nice for late game, but also kind of dangerous, as Calahan mentioned.

[KissBlade]

Keep in mind, your pretender will probably not rout on his own but his bodyguards might depending on whom you use ...

[Tolkien]

Returning is a great spell, as is Inferno/Cocytus when dealing with horrors. Infernal Prison and Claws of Cocytus are especially effective, as Returning sometimes just doesn't want to cast sometimes ( :\ ).