I’m saying it over and over again, age for age. So here’s the blogged version, so I can just link to it every age. T/Ms are usually pretty uneffective. To be effective, they must coordinate their spells and ops optimally. What No-nos and best practices are there, I’m trying to explain here.
General advice
Attacking vector - A province is best attacked in one and only one point. If you kill its pezzies (and income), you shouldn’t kill its buildings (as then jobs don’t get filled and BE lowers) and its troops (as these are needing the money you just cut). Same other way round: If you kill troops, you don’t need to kill anything else; same with buildings. Choose an attacking vector for all your T/M targets. Either make it troops (MS, NS), pezzies (kidnapping, fireballs, MS) or buildings (tornadoes, arson) and let every T/M and hybrid contribute the correct ops and spells to the target. Another option is foodkilling, if you see a province thats no shepherd and doesn’t have much food (tornadoes, arson for farms, steal granaries, droughts and the foodrotting spell). DON’T USE MORE T/M-TARGETS THAN YOU HAVE FULL T/Ms! (If you don’t concentrate well, T/M ops and spells are easily ignored by a good player).
Antagonistic spells: Just to make this clear again … if you use NS and fireballs on one province, you effectively cancel yourself out. Fireballs –> lesser income , fewer troops –> fewer income needed. Therefore either use pezziekilling OR troopkilling, but not both.
General spells / ops: Mehul didn’t create all spells and ops equal when he built the game. Therefore, some spells and ops should be used no-matter-what. Meteor-shower is the singlemost reason T/Ms exist in the first place. It deals massive damage and should generally be spread onto all enemy attackers before any targeted action takes place. Yes, 20 Meteor Showers are worth much more than a pezzie-less province. Its the only exeption where you can use troopkilling and pezziekilling together with, as it kills massive number of both. After MS, all main targets should get Greed, Incite Riots (if they’re not immune) and storms (only foodkilling should use droughts). Attacker targets must get pitfalls.
Building-killing: If enough buildings are destroyed, the pezzies produce no more money due to missing jobs, and of course the buildin-bonusses are gone.
Attacker support - As long as attacker have not much to do (pre-war and in the first few hours of war where gains are small), attackers can support T/Ms. Buidingskilling can be supported using razes and peziiekilling with massacres. Troops-killing should not be supported till the province is down in military power, and then just take the acres.
Just to make one thing clear: Attackers shouldn’t help T/Ms often. The best attacker-option is the tradmarch always. It kills land, buildings, troops, takes away living space for pezzies and gives your attackers some more land to play with. If you combine enough marches on one province (like 6 in 6 hours), you have the equivalent of a full tornado-, pezzie- and troopkilling-spree from T/Ms added to the land loss and the land gain.
Supporting the attackers: The main attacker targets should have MS of course and should be supplied with pitfalls, which in this case is a stronger version of nightstrike.