Controlling Your Manahoars If your wizard is killed, the spirit of your wizard will hover above the ground. In this state, you can control your movements and even your creatures, but you cannot summon creatures or cast spells. You must locate a mana source to regenerate your wizard's life and health by standing beside it. Your manahoars, because they are simply mobile sources of mana, can suffice. Since you can give them orders while you are in spirit form, you can request that they guard your spirit, and they will replenish your health. In a raging battle, it is best to order your manahoars off to one side and then join them there. Speaking of raging battles, it is often in your best interest to simply remain in a battle in spirit form and give commands to your creatures, rather than abandon them to their fates as you retreat to a mana supply to recover. As a spirit, you are invulnerable, so you can concentrate more easily on giving orders; further, you are likely to make better decisions than your creatures are. Climb hills to get a good strategic look around you. If you are going to enter a battle in front of your creatures (for example, if you want to cast a disrupting spell upon your enemies before your creatures arrive on the scene), you should leave your manahoars behind until your creatures have engaged the enemy. Cast a shielding spell on yourself (like skin of stone or ethereal form) and run near the enemy to cast your offensive spell. As you cast it, order your units to attack and then your manahoars to guard you. If you time it right, the enemy will choose targets among your fighting creatures instead of your manahoars. Generally, it is wisest to keep your manahoars behind you, and the phalanx and semicircle formations are good ways to accomplish this. You should also group your manahoars into a control group and always use the same number (for example, control-1 or control-9). You do not want them to always be guarding you, and giving them orders will be much easier this way. Organizing Your Troops For novice players, just keeping everyone organized is half the battle. If you have every creature in your army guarding your wizard, every twitch will cause your units to jostle around for position, and your flying creatures will often gum up your camera view. Rather than having your creatures guard you, have them guard each other. Use control-key assignments to give your creatures orders. These two methods will save you many, many headaches and will make it a lot easier to control the action. As the manual states, you may quickly assign your selected units to groups by holding down the control key and then typing a number. From that point on, you may select that group at any time by typing just that number. In general, you will do fine if you simply group each type of creature into its own group. Use some kind of consistent plan to assist your memory; for example, always assign your lowest-level unit to group 1, your next-lowest unit to group 2, and so on, or assign your melee units to group 1, ranged units to group 2, and air units to group 3. The steam rising from your manahoars' heads indicates how quickly they will recharge your mana. When assigning your creatures to guard one another, bear in mind that air creatures are generally both your fastest and most vulnerable units. If air units are the first to enter a battle, they are likely to die before the rest of your army even engages the foe. Your melee units, on the other hand, ought to be the first to make contact with the enemy. Therefore, one effective way to set up a defense is this: Put your ranged units in line formation and your melee units in phalanx formation to guard them. Your melee units will arrange themselves behind your ranged units, and they will thread through your ranged units once the enemy approaches. Put your flying units in semicircle formation and have them guard your melee units. This ought to let your ranged units soften up the incoming enemies and your air units engage only after your melee units have. Variations on this include having a special group of quick melee units, which you maneuver around the battle and to the enemy back lines to take out their ranged units, which are most likely firing from a distance. Another option is to assign a unit or two to target the enemy wizard. More on this in our combat chapter.   « Previous Page General and Combat Strategies (cont.) »