Low Cost Tactics

[AreaOfEffect]

Pan is much better. Petrify ftw.

[vfb]

Thanks! I've always been leery of Stay Behind orders ever since my priests went charging off in close formation behind their troops. But I should give it a try when they've got decent spells to cast. And most indy amphibian commanders (merman are the exception) have horrible precision, so Bows of War on mages sounds like an excellent plan for aquatic nations coming out of the water.

So, thanks everyone for these great tactics!

[cthulhu]

If you have ready access to fire-resistant troops fire drakes can produce some seriously excellent short range archers to fire from behind your main line of battle. If you have a fire+nature pretender, dragonmaster can make the gem costs extremely cheap.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by vfb

Thanks! I've always been leery of Stay Behind orders ever since my priests went charging off in close formation behind their troops. But I should give it a try when they've got decent spells to cast.

Well, AFAIK commanders on Stay Behind Troops will do one of these things:

1) move forward, but only until they're directly behind the group of units farthest back. Archers are useful for this purpose, but in long battles they will run out of ammo and join the melee, and the commanders will follow.

2) cast spells, but they'll try to stay conscious (i.e. they prefer not to go over 100 fatigue). This may be useful because they can retreat, or perhaps with communions.

3) fire ranged weapons if they have them

I'm not sure how they prioritize. In some cases they might move too close to the fighting, but I have mainly used it for my prophets in early game, so I haven't lost any to stray arrows.

[Deadnature]

what is dragonmaster?

[vfb]

Dragonmaster is a 30-gem nature ritual (Enchant-8). Makes your drake spells summon 3 instead of 1. Hopefully you've got something better to do with your god than summon drakes. Maybe with a 50%-off enchantment site and national N+(F/E/W) mages you could pull off some sort of drake surprise.

I wouldn't say it's a low-cost tactic though.

[Meursy]

In CBM Dragonmaster is a Enchantment level 3 ritual that costs 5 nature gems, making it slightly more cost effective!

[Epaminondas]

Originally Posted by Meursy

In CBM Dragonmaster is a Enchantment level 3 ritual that costs 5 nature gems, making it slightly more cost effective!

That's too drastic a modification, I am afraid

[cthulhu]

Originally Posted by vfb

Dragonmaster is a 30-gem nature ritual (Enchant-8). Makes your drake spells summon 3 instead of 1. Hopefully you've got something better to do with your god than summon drakes. Maybe with a 50%-off enchantment site and national N+(F/E/W) mages you could pull off some sort of drake surprise.

I wouldn't say it's a low-cost tactic though.

Originally Posted by Meursy

In CBM Dragonmaster is a Enchantment level 3 ritual that costs 5 nature gems, making it slightly more cost effective!

Ah, yes, I was referring to the CBM version. Without CBM, dragonmaster is utterly worthless. I also used the pretender for site searching, casting mother oak, and casting gift of health. And the mother oak was later used to empower one of my fire mages to take over the fire drake summoning job.
The fire drakes are range 10, area of effect 1, damage 15 (armor piercing), with 5 ammunition. They're 48 hitpoints, 12 protection so they have decent survivability from enemy archers and accidentally ending up in melee. It's easier to get this to work with frost drakes, but they lack the armor piercing, so aren't as interesting.

[Tifone]

N4? on jaguars? well that seems worthless to me