Guide to Buff Air Elementals
All credit goes to Shinuyama!
Introduction
Buffed Air Elementals are obviously pretty good. If you want to ride the Iron Whirlwind though you may have noticed that mages hate buffing air elementals and will buff pretty much anything else if they can. This is how you make them do it.
Turn 0
Have absolutely nothing in range of the buff spell other than the mages casting buffs and the mages summoning elementals. Place all mages into each others’ squares, such that they buff each other with aoe1 buffs when cast.
Turn 1
The buff mages cast the buffs they want to cast on air elementals, on each other (in a simple situation, all mages are size 2 and in groups of 3 – earth mages cast Iron Warriors on all the squares of mages, including the elemental summoners). The Air Elemental Summoners start casting air elementals (completing their cast 0.62.5% through the round, and finishing their cast at 1.25% – 25% into turn 2).
Turn 2
When turn 1’s air eles appear, they’ll ‘fly up’ but still count as being on the square they flew from for one full turn. The buff mages now buff the air eles. Everything else in range must have the buffs, or be a ‘worse’ target than a 14hp single-per-square air elemental that mages just seem to hate buffing. So ideally, everything else already has Iron Warriors or Quickness or whatever you’re casting and the mage is forced to target an air ele (perhaps while swearing at how his powerful spell is being ‘wasted’ on some kind of ♥♥♥ local breeze gust and how do we even know if it’s actually helping us at all anyway).
Note: If you have too many buff mages, some will change what they casting. This is fine if it is a random spell like Iron Will or Blade Wind, but if they default to a summoning spell, that will potentially cause the others to redirect their spells to those new summoned units – Horde of Skeletons or Raise Dead or w/e, and then not buff the air elementals. Thus if your mages default to summoning spells then you must not have ‘too many’ buff casters and do the math to figure out ‘exactly how many’ you need.
Turn 3
More of the same. Turn 2’s air eles will be buffed by buff mages, and air ele summoners will start making more air eles to be buffed on turn 4. It’s very rare that you have air mages powerful enough to do this, and usually it’s something like a4 eagle kings with a storm and summon stormpower doing this.
Turn 4
There is a bit of a hiccup on turn 4. The air eles (if you’re still summoning them somehow) will only appear after turn 5 has started, meaning the buff guys won’t buff them (they’ll change spells due to having no targets for the buffs and will instead cast Blade Wind or Horde of Skeletons or whatever they feel like). The 125% cast time has slowly but surely caught up with you. This means that the only way to buff air eles cast on turn 4 (who pop out like 10% into turn 5) is to use longer cast time spells one some buff mages (like Mist or something) so they too are behind the times and thus start casting like 20% into turn 5 or whatever. Something like Mist -> Iron Warriors -> Iron Warriors -> Iron Warriors -> Iron Warriors would result in the last spell in that list being started to cast 50% through turn 5, aka turn 5.5, which means the air ele would exist to be buffed etc.
Turn 5
If you absolutely feel that buffed Air eles are required in even the 5th slot of a script, you will need longer cast time spells (potentially multiple) or spells that cause mages to fall unconscious and only ‘wake up’ in time to cast buff spells on air eles at the exact right moment.
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