Troops vs magic, what am I doing wrong?

[krpeters]

OK, so I tried thugging with Sidhe Lords, just to see how it would work out. First, I never got a chance to apply vine shields and frost swords to them -- I got sucked into an early war against Ashdod. But I did have alt-3 researched, so with mistform, barkskin, and a E9N4 bless they held up very well against chaff. 4 of them could easily take out an army of 100 light infantry, which is about par for cost effectiveness.

But once I got to Ashdod's capital, the tables got turned. His mages stepped outside, summoned earth elementals, and my Sidhe Lords turned into Sidhe Roadkill.

So... I'm not convinced an army of 80 Firbolg javelineers would have fared worse. I would have had more casualties against his regular troops but roughly the same number of wins, and I don't think I would have gotten pasted so badly at the end. Lots of small troops with throwing weapons is just the thing to kill tramplers.

Seeing how painful that was to me, though, gives me an idea, maybe I need to fling some elementals at the AI and see what happens