skelliespam

[Corinthian]

In my experience of fighting C'tis; the best way to beat skellie spam is with overwhelming force. You want to be able to kill his skeletons faster than he can raise them. Or at least have enough killing power that you do not get overwhelmed. I have found that waves of cavalry is a great idea as cavalry have two attacks and get less fatigue per attack than norm tropes. Skeletons have too poor attack skill to hit cavalry unless they can swarm them. And the huge number of attacks from the cavalry will prevent that.

Cutting of their retreat rout with flying/teleporting guys, is also a good idea.

[krpeters]

Originally Posted by rdonj

krpeters - assume you have 10 d2 mages spamming skeletons. So assume you have a minimum of 200 skeletons to kill.

In EA, with Reborn at only 100 gold apiece, that's a real problem. But in MA he's using 220 gold Marshmasters. That's 2200 gold... if you go head-to-head, you're coming at him with 220 light infantry. I admit I'm not experienced enough to know if this will work, but I think it has a fighting chance. Does anyone have a simulator to test this? Javelins alone should really chew 'em up.

[DeadlyShoe]

The problem is that even if you win you'll lose half your units while his skeleton spammers walk away with their XP.

[krpeters]

That depends on how badly fatigued his casters are. If you can get to them before they wake up and run, you get to chew up his 2200 gold force.

If they're likely to wake up first... then yeah, having some flyers to head to the rear and cut off his retreat will be a big help. Cavalry might be able to pull it off too if they run to the back before the undead horde gets too large.

[Numahr]

If you have enough territory, you can play attrition: accept to loose the battles where he gathers like 10 mages, but take as many marshmasters with you every time with cheap tactics (archers, assassination, flyers, magic duel, etc.) or battlefield globals such as Earthquake (A Troll King can cast it), Grip of Winter (a Water Troll King can cast it) etc. My experience is that en Earthquake alone will kill maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of the mages, it is not much, but if your troll survives to cast it one more time, the attrition of his relatively expensive mages will cause Ctis troubles.

A couple or archers well positioned (as close as possible to the front) can be very effective. I've seen like 30 archers kill 6-7 marshmasters before my PD chaff "lost" the battle to the skeletons.

[ExHeretic]

For thugs fire shield is very good against skeletons. Their low hp means that they pretty much just kill them selfs when trying to attack. For an example try bane lord with charcoal shield and regen ring. Archers are guite good against skelly spam too

[LDiCesare]

Earthquake is so-so against C'tis. If there are astral mages around (shamans for instance), it's likely most of the skellyspammers will be body ethereal-ed and that 1 earthquake will have almost no effect in terms of killing mages unless you are the defender and cast it without summon earthpower or any other boost.
My experience with earthquake against C'tis has been rather poor. Lots of troops, preferably tramplers backes by archers, is better.

[Groundworm]

Thank you for the excellent suggestions. I was finally able to defeat his mages after multiple battles that whittled down his chaff (serpents, sirrushes, lizard infantry). This allowed my mages to target his mages early, and I killed several of them in the first few rounds with well-placed thunderstrikes. He still managed to summon a lot of skellies, but between my priests and several hastily-forged herald lances, I was able to kill most of them.