[Baalz]

One idea I had which I haven't had a chance to test and see if it actually works very well is to leverage those iron crafters with the forge bonus to pop out piercers for 3 gems apiece in CBM (2 gems if you've got a hammer idle). Raven guard captains are cheap, flying & stealthy so it should be fairly easy to mass up a bunch and sneak them around and cause a whole lot of havoc from behind PD with very little chance of dying. Alternatively, Seraphs have a base precision of 14 and can self buff quicken self and aim, as well as researching when not fighting so keeping a score of piercers stockpiled in your lab should prove a very effective way to press your research mages into combat - and of course fly and cloud trapeze. You won't get that forge bonus, but visions foes, black bows, banefire xbows and bows of war should all be very effective against the right foes that thought lightning immunity would be sufficient. Corpse constructs make decent chaff with a (cheap) lightning rod to give your archers/mages time to pummel stuff. Between lightning and AN archery with chaff you should be able to do fairly well against lots of different troop types, adding in (flying) mammoths, ice clads, and storm generals should give you a quite different vector of offense.