Flanking and Rear Attacks

[Thufir]

One of the things I've been having a hard time with, on both offense and defense is making flanking or rear attacks work (or defending against them). In a recent battle against C'tis in an MP game, I was outclassed by his army, so I was not too surprised to be defeated, but I did expect that my Devils would reach his rear, and reak some havoc before getting killed.

Here's two screenshots, one showing the C'tis setup, and the next showing where my 25 devils attacked.

setup:


attack:



I guess I've had a hard time with setup positions ever since I started playing MP. I've read a lot of Posts, done a lot of SP testing, and done a little bit of MP testing, and at this point I'd say I've made some progress, but seems I have a long way to go. So, any general advice/pointers would be appreciated, but I also have the following specific questions.

1) In the above screen shots, C'tis had about 120 Tomb worms, and ~60 tomb guards positioned near the back, and I believe on "hold and attack" orders. His force was large enough that it covered nearly the full width of the field, minus 4 grid squares on either side.

Can anyone tell me why my 25 devils, with orders to attack the rearmost enemy attacked the tomb worms instead? I guess I would've expected cavalry to have a hard time to get around such a wide front line, but I thought fliers would be able to pull that off guaranteed.

Is successfully reaching the rear something that is dependent on relative sizes of attacking force and a front line force? Or is there a completely random element? Or might it have something to do with the positioning of the C'tis commanders that prevented my Devils from reaching the rear?


2) On the other side of the coin (mostly while playing Pythium, and trying to keep my mages safe from Abysia's devils), I had considerably less success than C'tis had in this battle. I am particularly interested in defending mages against flying enemy troops (devils being the obvious, but not only example),

One big difference between my Pythian deployment, and C'tis' is the fact I had usually had smaller armies (both in quantity and in quality) compared to what C'tis has fielded. Is the key to having your mages protected to have a big, huge front line to hide behind?

Or, does it in general work better to have your mages interspersed with the melee troops? Perhaps C'tis just got lucky that my devils didn't attack his mages in the battle above?


Edit:

3) I'm also interested in flanking attacks, which to date I've had limited success with. So far in my MP experience (which admittedly is limited to 5 games ), I've yet to see another player utilizing knights or cavalry, and every time I've tried to it's been cost-ineffective. The problem I generally have is that the cavalry always gets hung up on attacking the center, and never makes it to a vulnerable rear area or to a group of archers. In which case, I'd guess you would be better off mixing your cavalry in with your heavy infantry in order to have a larger unit, and get the improved morale bonus.

Is anyone out there (in MP play) taking advantage of flanking attacks, either with cavalry/knight type units, or other types of fast units? Is there a key to making this type of unit cost effective?