Tip: The Art of Placement

[DrPraetorious]

This is based on advice I gave to Llamabeast after I killed a bunch of his magi with blade wind.

When fighting against another player, your chief concerns in placing magi are:
* You want to be able to hit the enemy with your zap spells (or your own units with buffs, whichever).
* You want your enemy's zap spells and archery not to hit your magi.

This is somewhat similar to the dillemma faced when placing regular units, who gain bonuses for outnumbering enemies, but are very vulnerable to spells like Falling Fires when deployed in tight formation.

AFAICT, the following considerations are applied when the AI targets a damaging evocation. I'm prepared to be told that I'm wrong:
* Potential damage dealt. Thus, a caster shooting blade wind will prefer low Prot targets, someone casting falling foo will avoid targets resistant or immune to the elemental damage, and so forth.
* Number of anticipated hits. Thus, a low precision caster will tend towards closer/more tightly packed foes while a high precision caster will take other factors into consideration - and AoE attacks will tend to avoid small skirmishers and hit tightly packed enemy ranks (if they expect to hit at all.)
* Quality. I've only really noticed this with a few single target spells, but hitting a better-quality target does seem to enter into the calculus. It might just be a function of damage dealt - don't know enough to say.

Finallly, if everything else is a wash, the AI seems to prefer targets in the *middle* of the enemy ranks. These are often the targets of choice for archers set on "fire" with no specified target, as well - making this often a good choice.

This means that leaving your magi in the default position is the worst thing you could possibly do!

In addition to spreading your magi out - which is also a good idea in case enemies break through to melee or anything else untoward happens - place some actual skirmishers (low prot, no elemental resistances) in front of *each* individual mage, so that they'll be targeted instead, if it comes to that.

Spreading out is a must, since that way, even if you mess up and place a mage in harms way, at least you won't lose all of them at once.