[Nightfall]

While others may disagree, I've found an awake rainbow to be usefull as abysia, using early manual site searching gives you a good chance to open up air/nature/death gem incomes and greatly increses your chances of finding a viable independant mage to diversify into. A properly built a rainbow also gives you access to a lot of forging that abysia normally doesn't have access to.

By the way, humanbred should be your core recruit, as they have awesome cost efficiency. The heavier abyssian infantry are nice, but difficult to field in big enough numbers and are more suited to specialist roles.

If you use humanbred for your core force, you then have the option of whether or not to add heat aura to them by mixing salamanders into the humanbred formation.

Most independants aren't worth recruiting by the way, between the fact that your humanbred are immune to fire arrows and carry tower shield, the lack of national archers doesn't hurt much. And firestorm is a much better alternative to fielding your own archers once you research it.

As far as mages go, DO NOT recruit warlocks until you have the ability to rejuvenate them or put boots of youth or regeneration on them, they die from old age way too quick. Early on you should be recruiting mostly demonbred instead, as they are awesome once you have pheonix pyre and fire shield researched, particularly if you have a minor nature/earth bless. Switch to warlocks once you have the ability to keep them alive.

Also very important is that your PD is probably the best in MA, learn when, where and how much to build against different opponents. Your PD can easily kill armies when you support it with well scripted mages.