AI Archers

[rdonj]

You can use marble warriors instead. Still takes a bit of researching to get to though. And even wooden warriors will bring many units up above 18 protection. You can also try things like battle fortune. You should be able to have any of these things (or weapons of sharpness) by sometime in year 3. I don't think anything I mentioned really needs uber mages either. The biggest spells I've mentioned only require a native level 2 caster with a booster or two.

I'm not sure why you need shieldless warriors to use arrow fend with. Shielded warriors gain just as much benefit as the unshielded. Also, if you're playing with EDM creatures, a4 = summonable a2 casters to cast your arrow fends for you.

[krpeters]

Troops with shields already have arrow protection, and usually cost more resources. Contrast this with Wakizashi wielding Bakemono warriors costing 9 gold and 5 resources in CBM 1.7. If I could get good arrow protection on them, they'd be killer; without it, a team of slingers can slaughter them.

[iRFNA]

I'm pretty sure that against the AI, you could have one small squad (probably want like 10 to make sure they don't break) on one side of the battlefield and close to the front, and your main army on the other side of the battlefield and slightly further away than your distraction squad. Place the distraction squad's commander at the very back of the battlefield with 5x hold. Give your distraction squad the order to guard commander.

If all goes right, the AI archers will all target the distraction squad, which will hopefully not have a morale break as it not only runs outside their range but lures them into slicey death at the hands of your midget army. If morale breaks, they pick a new squad to target, but otherwise they won't.

[NTJedi]

iRFNA is right with the distraction group... I like to call them the decoys. Finding willing units to volunteer and be the decoys on the front line is easy... find any group of units which has been in a few battles select one of them and press W .

Basically this shows all the wounded units... I usually mix the cripple, low morale, limp units for this decoy group.

Also if you can cast earthquakes then you can probably build thugs and even SCs which can buff then fly and attack these archers.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by NTJedi

Basically this shows all the wounded units... I usually mix the cripple, low morale, limp units for this decoy group.

If AI archers are the main threat, there are also some cheap summons that can be very useful. What you want are a handful of traits:
Cheap
High Protection
High Hit Points

If you can do more than this, it gets even better. The traits below are immensely useful:
Regeneration
Ethereal
Immortal

Off the top of my head, the most obvious units are: Cave Drake, Kithraonic Lion, Wight, Bane, Bane Lord, and any Earth Elemental.

[Kobal2]

A neat little trick to mess up enemy archer (and spell) targetting is the Lantern Shield. It summons ethereal units in the enemy's back, usually right next to their mages, before the battle even starts. Archers scripted to fire closest will target them first and a) not do much because the ghost lights are ethereal and b) make a carnage in friendly fire.

The ghost lights probably won't last long, but they only need to last turn 1. On the following turns you can cast Howl, or Will o' the Wisp, or more Corpse Candles, or Mists of Deception to keep the back lines nice and busy while your likely lads thresh through the front lines.