Noob+Man/Tuatha

[Saber Cherry]

Kuritza_Dru said:
Can you give me a sample Fire9/Water9 pretender for the Tuatha theme? It seems that you'll have to ruin your scales completely.

No, I almost never choose 9/9 blessings - too expensive. 9/4 is the highest I'll go except when playing Machaka or Neifelheim (in which case I'll do 9/9 or 9/4/4 or maybe 9/6). I'm just saying they'd be impressive W9 is best for sacred mages and high-defense sacred warriors. But it's nice to have enough fire magic to cast Flaming Arrows, so W9/F4 might be good. A Frost Father or Blue Dragon can get W9F4 with neutral scales and Dominion 5.

If you hire like 30 archers and tell them to 'fire enemy archers', will you overshoot them all? Will it help you, when enemy infantry (or worse yet, cavalry) will reach that puny light infantry of yours?

Man has light and medium infantry, but they also have Tower Guards (13 defense, 13 protection) and Medium Militia. Tower Guards last a while, and Medium Militia (when modded to cost 5g) are also a fairly effective screen for your archers. Of course in the default game you should never buy any Militia, but using the Rebalance mod they are quite useful to protect your archers. You can also use them to protect your Daoine Sidhe: with 10 Sidhe (350g) inside a block of 30 Medium Militia (150g) there is a much lower chance of their high defense being overwhelmed by multiple attacks, because most attacks will land on the Militia.

In the unmodded game, it's more tricky since 4 of Man's national units are utterly useless. But screening archers with a few (15-25) Tower Guards or (20-40) Spearmen will allow them to rout all the enemy infantry before being attacked, if you have lots of archers, and they stay at the far back of the battlefield. Don't use Longbows against heavy cavalry and knights without Fire Arrows. Grouping your Sidhe with Tower Guards (same movement rate, high morale, and much cheaper) will cut down the losses due to being overwhelmed by multiple attacks. And I mean same group, not overlapping rectangles.

Man should be able to expand using nothing but Longbows and a small screen of chaff into all independents except Knight/Longbow and Heavy Cavalry. The higher the indy strength, the higher your archery hit% will be. Don't set them all to "Fire Archers" for expansion, though. And don't spend all your initial gold on mages and prophets, as it will only delay your Longbow-based expansion. It's nice to have a prophet on Turn 3 but Tuatha / Sidhe Lords can't Smite, Longbowmen don't need Fanatacism, and Daoine Sidhe can be blessed just fine with monks. Keep them back with the archers and tell them to hold and attack, then you won't lose any unless your archers fail to rout the enemies.