How to not die

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Baalz

I'm not sure what exactly the point you are arguing is. My point: spells & tactics which increase your attack/defense/fatigue advantage can be more effective in some situations than the typical SC/artillery configurations most people tend to goto. Sure, you could have basalt kings with construction-6 researched. And some alteration researched to make him actually useful. And conjuration (earthpower). And have invested in a strong blessing. And have the gems and spent the time to forge appropriate SC gear. And have him where you need him. And your opponent doesn't have nasty SC counters (charm, a couple bishop fish spamming smite, etc.) Or....maybe one of those things isn't true and instead you're trying to figure out how to stop an attack with a couple gems and stuff you've recruited out of your border fort.

I'm not arguing that they can't be effective or even more effective than anything else. My two points are that they are situational (which we don't argue about I guess) and that they are not useful early on.
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I also don't understand what your reluctance is about using early magic. It's an opportunity cost, obviously, but many an early war can be turned by a couple mages dropping early spells like numbness or tangling vines precisely because early wars usually involve smaller number of troops so countering 10-20 troops can be a very big deal. Obviously it's a bad idea to try and tag slingers with numbness....but I'm seldom much worried about pulling my mages out to stop a slinger rush. That's, admittedly a snarky way to phrase your position, but really what you're saying is "there are lots of situations where numbess isn't gonna cut it". No arguments from me on that one, but I think you're vastly underestimating how often a dozen or two super elite units are dominating the early battlefields.

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I'm reluctant because I have "used" (by used I mean scripted, what the AI used instead is a different pair of shoes) these things and have been very disappointed. Tangle Vines, Earth Grip, Destruction, Numbness (actually I didn't use it but I just ran a test with it against my troop only strat against Mictlan 20f and the troop only strat was better). These spells are great in theory or set piece battles (like against indies) but not against a player where you don't know how he plays.
Tangle Vines for example has a very limited range, so you w9 sacreds or heavy cav can be tearing through your ranks before you even get the 1st in or waiting outside your range while your mage fatigues himself out.
Numbness is better (but it's effect are less) but when your enemy brings in a couple of slingers in addition to his sacreds and sets it up right your mages will numbness the slingers (I didn't think there could have been any misunderstanding about "slinger rushes" when I said "fire and retreat)" and his sacreds will then come to kill you.
The other thing is that it doesn't get better with smaller armies. Going from the idea that if you take extra troops instead of mages and exploit the attack boost from surrounding it's clear that this works worse when you can't surround the enemy and half of your army is idling behind others. So if you have 500 guys it's likely better to add 5 mages casting numbness instead of 100 other guys. But if you have 40 units it's not likely that 20 others have to stay behind others.

Now the other thing is that later on where you can get the mass or extra spells to make this a good strategy there are a lot of other options and you have to compare it to the other options you (could) have. Falling Frost will kill many of the things that are vulnerable to numbness for example and many more. Of course when you are defending a fort with what you have they can be your best bet, but that's not something to base your strategy on imo.