Overview
A guide to spamming elementals for maximum effect.
Spamming Elementals and You – An Elemental Magic Retrospective
Elementals are either like a single surge, or a river. Depends on your paths. Notably Earth Elementals trample, water elementals hit super hard, and fire elementals hit a square and have a fire shield to hurt lightly armoured chaff attacking them. So you want to place things differently with different types. Additionally, buffing elementals is often vastly more effective than buffing regular troops, but due to inability to give them orders, buffing them can be quite difficult, and a matter of battlefield-wide buffs (Mass Protection is incredibly funny and effective on fire elementals – it’s barkskin, on a fire creature) or placing mages in the right spot and timing their buffs to coincide with a bunch of elementals going past them.
Want to be placed (and scripts timed) for maximum initial shock, just like elephants. A ‘straggling line’ of units to channel the earth elementals up an extreme flank can be worthwhile when you have casters that can cast a lot of earth elementals but not all at the same time. Alternatively, a small number of earth elementals can be used as shock weapons and seeded through a front line, or sent up the centre, purely as distractions – they’ll move into enemy formations, disorder them, clump them, and halt them for quite a while.
Are probably the most tricky to use. They hit super hard but unless underwater don’t have any real defensive abilities, meaning they are best used against hard targets like giants, SCs. Making sure your water elementals engage the tough units and not the weaker ones is important. If you don’t have a viable target for that, but water elementals are still a thing you want to deploy, they need buffs. You’re entering a battle of attrition with the enemy via your crush attacks, so you need to use a line formation or something to contain the elementals, drop buffs on them (earth ones), and then wait for the line to die before the buffed elementals go into play. Like all ‘attrition’ plans it is a tough one and requires your mages have Guard Commander units to not get ganked by stray cavalry. Alternatively, fog warriors well-timed to coincide with the elementals being on the field will also do the trick. Water Elementals can be used buffless, but you’re relying on having quite a lot of them compared to the normal ratios of elementals:enemy infantry. The smaller water elementals tend to be a bit useless, so only the first few forms really ‘count’.
Are just fire elementals – you send them in, ideally ahead of or out of the way of other troops. This means a specific flank, up the centre with your own units on the extreme flank and ideally hold and attacking. It’s worth noting that like many of the other elementals, the best use of fire is en-masse. With their fire shield and fire attack, they can destroy/rout enough things quickly enough that they don’t get cut through, or mess up the enemy formations quite badly, while spewing heat all over everything near their targets for good measure. They deprecate quite badly against things fire resistant or heavily armoured. But against other targets, the ideal use is emptying labs and dropping ten metric tons of fire all over the enemy. It’s expensive, and you need a good target, but it will ruin that target entirely.
Are like flying, better, earth elementals. Except that means that when summoned they rush off into the enemy’s endzone and die, instead of waiting for more casts, which means often the ideal use-case is a bunch of cheap a2 mages with 2 air gems each (or stormpower and 1 gem), 1 air elemental each, all on the same turn. But, there is a trick to this. Enemies engaged with your troops are far more vulnerable to air elementals than enemies clumped in their endzone. Holding the air elemental casts until turn 4, or 5, of the battle can make quite a big difference in how they hit. It’s also why air elementals work well with flying troops – your troops can get ‘stuck in’ at the same time as the air elementals, who will merrily trample away while the enemy struggles to kill off your flyers.
Are like earth elementals, but better. They’re a big reason for Water nations to take Cold scales. They do all the things earth elementals do, but need less coddling to do them. Unlike Earth Elementals, they can operate well without en-masse, as long as they’re sent in with troops so they aren’t completely surrounded and overwhelmed.