"before the first fire"
Considering that fire start is one of the most common starts as elementals, that probably won't be for very long. Seems every OvE game I play is them either fire starting or stalling with earths while waiting for a fire.
Plus, let me ask you this. Have you ever lost a spearton in OvO or OvC? Because in theory you can garrison those too, in practice it's possible to lose them.
Fire start probably isn't the most common, I've seen a lot more earth stall in action. It's more reliable and you get more eco.
Well perhaps, although if the swords directly engage with the earths it's quite easy to get stunlocked and killed; but you're probably right, you'll likely have a few swords saved up while they're cheesing earths. Once that fire comes out, though, swords start to die really fast. The thing is that if you're going to have any kind of pressure, you need to have meatshields ready to soak up damage, and that's the role of swords. When swords are constantly soaking up hits, it's hard to keep many alive at a time.
You're quite right about most things you said. This is why you just shouldn't use raging swords in OvE, they just die too fast. One thing I have to say is this, in an earth start, attacking with swords won't get them killed really, earths do very low damage and can be cheesed easily. So it's easier than you guys think to save swords, and maybe, just maybe save up enough swords to rage and kill everything.
