How to use mage in a battle

[Cainehill]

Skolem said:
well it seems that horror, undeads or phantasmal warrior summoning is quite common.
when I set mages to this spell after two/three turn most of them stop because of fatigue, do you every mage in armys recuperation items? or how do you solve the fatigue problem if you have no nature at our disposal?

Booster items help to keep the fatigue costs down. (Note that I'm not much of a fan of phantasmal warrior, but it can be a way to produce minor amounts of chaff.) For nations with sacred mages (Pythium, Vanheim, etc) an earth blessing is always nice - 2 or 3 fatigue back a turn isn't much, but it helps, and stacks with normal fatigue recovery. A positive magic scale also helps lower the fatigue costs.

And no, I don't usually give fatigue recovery items to my mages - I think a booster generally gives more of a benefit (halving the fatigue cost for an 80 fatigue spell like bladewind, etc) than spending gems on a recovery item. Hopefully, by the time the mages go unconscious they've done enough damage to win the battle, or at least given the other person a pyrhic victory.

[Crash]

Well,

I'm not the greatest mage user, but I have gotten stomped by several different configurations of mages casting different spells.

One constant I've noticed, people tend to build armies around spells, rather than look for spells that compliment an army.

By this I mean, find a useful/damaging spell (or set of spells), Yvelina gave 2, wrathful skies and horrors, but there are others especially if you play modded games. And then find a country with national mages who can cast those spells with minimal buffing. Then for the army just throw in some 'blocker' type troops to keep the mages upright long enough to do your damage.

I haven't really explored this part of the game thoroughly yet, but I have been on the receiving end of several very effective firing lines .

Crash