How to play sorcery high elves?

[merlinp]

It seemed that normal units are not particularly strong except longbowmen in the early game and there are no stat buffs. Something like gladiator available at the beginning of the game seems much stronger unit compared to elven lords available after 1406. Pegasus, while initially very nice, didn't seem useful in the later game except for scouting and wind walking.

Of summons, nagas seem decent early game, water elementals ok in the middle game and storm giant very good in the later game but making the whole offensive army of these didn't seem practical.

Support spells, however, seem strong mid to late game.

So in short, I'm looking for some advice how to success with this combo. I think if I had mid game treasure hunted with storms giants it would have went much better.

Background: My game just ended in Myrror wizard casting armageddon, nuking my citadel and then storming it with full stack of doom bats (the one debugged in the release thread for ship code crash).

After this I played a game with chaos barbarians which was a boring steam roll with gladiators, which were also able to take most nodes much earlier.

[Bahgtru]

Gladiators are easy mode, but even videos of steamrolling lunatic don't convince Seravy about it.

Elves: their only advantage is some mana generation that can help with getting started, try to find sorcery nodes and progress on magic, you should have nagas all around the place, FM on your main stack, and move on to water elemental soon. Conjurer and specialist have good synergy with having to start fast with magic. Eventually invisible storm giants. You won't ever build elven lords, unless you want to have an army of flying elven lords for the sake of it.

[Sapher]

Sorcery is good at conquering nodes/lairs but it needs astrologer. Attack something with a cavalry cast confusion and retreat. Repeat until everyone is dead. Sometimes phantom warriors are a better option. After that you will get lots of good artifatcs and big power income so i would advice focusing on heroes until very rare spells.

[merlinp]

Sorcery draconian/dark elf Myrror AI suffered from similar problems as I did here, which was normal units being weak in late game and not enough storm giants/water elementals to make a difference. Also, full stacks of these summons falling to holy word. So I'm going to conclude pure sorcery with some races is not the strongest pick and that sorcery usually works better when combined with other realms.