Is Man (Tower of Chelms) the Ulm of LA?

[OmikronWarrior]

Yes, I'm being somewhat of an exaggerator here, but still I'm surprised with how many disadvantages LA Man seems to have. The troops are fine, or would be if they A) weren't so resource intensive and B) overwhelmingly map move 1. Still the combination of crossbowmen and heavy infantry is a very deadly one, especially with easy access to air magic for Wind Guide. Then you set your defenders to fire closests. When the opposition closes those in the front move to engage in melee while those in the back continue to fire with remarkable accuracies AP bolts.

Yet, as Dom3 veterans know, you have to win midgame battles with magic, preferrably damage spells until you move further up the research tree and have more options open up. And Man has only one battle mage, the Magister Arcane (A2E1S1 +50% ASEF). You could use the A3 Arcane's to cast storm and everyone power up to Air-3 for a thunderstrike spam, but that halves your archer fire power creating a terrible synergy. Anything else, you only have a 1/8 chance of getting. Theoretically, any arcane master could form a communion, but Man doesn't have any easy access to cheap, low level astral mages that make communions work on a reliable basis.

Yet here's the real kicker. The Magister Arcane costs a whopping 250 gold. I scoured the late age for any commander that was a worst value for that gold. There are none. The same amount of gold gets you a Jotun Skratti (Capable of SC duty) or Staret of Bogarus (Comes with a lot more paths and does a lot better in research even in Drain-3 dominion). Magister Arcanes have 1 map move, pretty bad old age with no chance of nature or death to mitigate it, minimal hp, and no protection. They don't have any priest levels or even sacred status. So, you recruit a lot, pay a lot of upkeep, and then watch a whole bunch get diseased come winter even with Growth-3.

Then, just to add insult to injury, half of your starting gem income is nature gems, but you have no nature mages.

So, has anyone found a way to rock with Man? Sure, there's always the expand fast with an awake SC, but you really need both excellent scales (including production-3 and growth-3) and a Pretender who bring Magic Diversity. Its sort of like choose two out of the three you need.