Battlefield Tactics cheese

[JimMorrison]

Well, that's kind of silly then.

There are significant drawbacks to just placing all of your units on Guard Commander.

Not the least of those drawbacks being that any foe with sufficient ranged power will be targeting your mages, since they will be at the center of your massed troops.

In the late game there are ways to help with that, somewhat, but if someone is using those tools to great effect - either their opponent has researched their own tools to deal with that - or they have been outplayed.

Different nations have different capabilities at various stages of the game. Caelum is relatively fragile in the early game, and they must push hard to develop tools to gain the upper hand. Using Abysia as the counter example isn't exactly fair, as Caelum does tend to eat Abysia - but also because Abysia starts out VERY strong - especially in the EA when all of their infantry have Heat auras.

Believe me, I have had a good rush ruined by Thunder Strikes. After the first horribly failed assault, I never quite reached the critical mass that I needed, to finish off my foe, since he managed to almost never lose a single mage. Some matchups are just bad, and will usually not turn out well for the same nation - that's not cheesy, it's just Dominions-realism.

[Dragar]

To detail the rock-paper-scissors thing, EA Abysia's weaknesses are definitely air magic and tramplers, the latter mostly early on. However against any infantry based army they are incredibly strong, archers aren't a big threat and niefel giants look pretty tasty.

I'm actually experimenting in SP with an E9A9 bless, dormant titan, to see if the cost is worth paying to shore up that massive weakness. When you look at it IF you can reach the late game with enough gems (mist covered, pretender site search, trading) to conjure some Air Queens there is a lot that air magic has to offer abysia - shock res, arrow fend, mass flight, fog warriors, wind guide. I can't think of a school that does more for them, even earth. It requires a lot of research to get both the casters (Conj 8), and the high Alt and Enchantment magic to get all those, so you have to get by without through the early and mid game. Hopefully the bless on the burning ones is enough!

[chrispedersen]

If you are going to go a9, I doubt you will need more than e4 on the pretender, and possibly just e3 for dwarven hammers.