On using poison cloud units...

[Ironhawk]

I've been playing around with some of the poison cloud units (particularly Pythium hydras and BogBeasts) and I am having a lot of trouble making them effective on the battlefield.

The main problem seems to be routing. The units themselves are pretty powerful and, of course, they poison. But big units usually means smaller numbers and this made me unable to keep them in the fight. I tried banding them with smaller high morale units (as you might with Elephants) but of course these units all get poisoned and die (even with Ctis!!). Even with what I considered adequate priest backing they were not very effective. You know, I even got to the point where I was afraid to even put normal units in the same army (not the same group) with a poison cloud unit because they would do more damage to me than the enemy!

The only tactic I found that really made a dent was to play Pythium/Serpent Cult with a 4+ nature pretender for the Beserk blessing. This was great in that it drove the hyrdras on like the maddened poison spewing powerhouses that they should be. But bad in that it also did the same thing to my priest, who was promptly poisoned and killed :}

Can you more experienced players advise me on the use of poison cloud units? How to get them to attack effectively? And how (if possible) to use them in armies with normal troops?