Fire mana required for elves?

Are there any other good siege alternatives for elves besides fire mana? Fireballs can bombard walls and both fireballs and fire elementals do collateral damage. It seems like a "must have". Shadowwalk can get you past the defense bonus from buildings, but you still have to deal with the culture defense.

Air mana (which the Elves start with putting them that much ahead) allows Maelstrom which does collateral damage and doesn't need much in the way of node building (the Ljos can get away with one node). The Pact of the Nilhorn can give Elves the three hill giants Kael, JStrange and Sid (aka Larry, Moe, Curly) for another arty source.

Fire is fun though and needs less micromanaging, and fire elementals more amusing than air elementals, imo if there are plenty of available nodes one could use both Fire and Air, if there are few nodes, I usually go with Air, if an in-between # of nodes, I have a slight preference for Fire.

Yeah, I do like fire as well, it's fun. However, I want to keep an eye out for other strategies in case for some reason I can't get my hands on any fire mana or just to be flexible in mana choices. I'm also worried about fire resistant or immune enemies. I usually play Svartalfar so air mana isn't a freebie, though they do have shadow which can help a little with attacking towns. I'll have to keep air mana in mind though.

I tried mind mana and just dominating city defenders until there were none left, which seems to work ok, but even with Metamagic III I was still getting resisted now and then - which is really a pain for dominate.

Fire Mana is very helpful, but is not always necessary.

The Ljosalfar can often get by using Air II: Maelstrom to damage units in cities instead.

The Svartalfar are probably better using Shadow II: Shadow walk when attacking cities. While the mouseover claims it negates terrain defenses, from what I hear that is inaccurate. It actually makes the unit ignore city defenses so there is no need to bombard the city before attacking.



I am still of the opinion that Treants ought to be given siege abilities. Ent in LoTR were certainly pretty good at bringing down fortifications.

MagisterCultuum said:

It actually makes the unit ignore city defenses so there is no need to bombard the city before attacking.

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That's perfect; something usable no matter what kind of land I've got. From the description the spell sounds helpful, but not as good as this.

It actually makes the unit ignore city defenses so there is no need to bombard the city before attacking.

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It makes the unit ignores palisades, walls, etc. but not culture defence.

For coastal cities there is always naval siege, too. They won't deign to chop down trees to make catapults, but huge freaking ships are totally kosher.