Murdering Winter
 

How effective is it?
I'm pondering about using the said spell in MP game and I'd like to know what kind of kill percentage I can reliably expect before I spend 50 water gems into it.

Target army is composed of humans and temperature scale is neutral. Wolven Winter increases the effectiveness but how big is this increase, is it practically mandatory to use WW before using MW?

I don't need any super accurate results but some general thoughts from players that have actually used MW would be nice.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Practically mandatory.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

I have never found the spell to be cost effective. But that is just me. I might spend 20 or 30 gems, but 50? no thanks.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

I have not been impressed by this spell, either. I once used it to attack
R'lyeh's sages in a province that his dominion kept at 3 cold. It did not
kill even 20% of them. As Cor2 says, "No, thanks." True, unless you are
clamming, water gems are not terribly useful. So get clamming.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

It seems to kill about a quarter of human troops, given a cold scale of 1 or 2. Don't bother to use it if there is any heat scale.

The spell is extremely expensive, but it does give you a mid-game option to deal with armies that you don't have any other counter to. For instance, 150 shadow vestals and 20 shadow blast spamming Ermorian mages. If you do hit an army with Murdering Winter, make sure to follow up with an attack by your own army. The enemy army will lose commanders and will be disorganized and wounded. At the very least, you will catch any enemy troops that were abandoned when the rest of their army moved away.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Against ordinary human troops, it doesn't do a lot of damage in terms of kills. What it does do that's more useful is hand out a load of afflictions, so that army will be permanently weakened. Plenty of those afflictions may well be diseased, and die later of course.

If you're lucky you might catch some commanders, leaving the army a bit rudderless, but commanders are generally tougher than ordinary troops.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

If you cast two at the same time I think the kill rate will be far higher (as in, much more than double). Obviously that's pretty expensive, but it might be very handy against a tough enemy army. After all, there's pretty much no counter.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

I have used it to good effect against large human armies with low HP mages (like TC).

WW is well worth casting in advance - I think its only 5 gems and given the cost of MW, it makes MW much more effective.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Thanks for the replies guys.

I went and cast the WW boosted MW (effective temperature cold 3). Out of the ~240 enemies about 90 died(38%) including a stack of mages. I'm quite happy with those results. Should I had had an extra 50 gems for simultaneous second casting or some of my ice devil SC's nearby for mop up fight, I'm pretty sure I would have wiped out the whole thing.

At least in the light of this experiment I agree with DonCorazon. Murdering Winter seems to be quite effective against low HP troops/commanders, in my case the enemy was Jomon.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

How much is effective versus undead troops?

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Not very, as they're immune to cold.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

I know, has someone previous experiences throwing murdering winter to undeads?
I have a 1500 undead army in front of me so I'd like to Know If I have to start research it.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Cold damage doesn't work against conventional undead. If you get lucky, you might get few living mages targeted, but it's not worth the gems unless you have nothing else to use them for.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Flames from the Sky is your best bet.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

I'm R'lyeh, I have big difficulties to acces F ... I have access to S,E,D,W and a bit of N and A.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

How many non-mindless undead/chaff are you facing? Mind Burn, Soul Slay etc can't affect most undead, so they'll go to non-mindless commanders, thugs and chaff first. You might be able to defeat his armies by killing everything BUT chaff, first.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

After a couple of times I tried this trick he has filled his ranks with some starving archers ... what a poor life that of a human recruit of LA Ermor.

Re: Murdering Winter
 

Ghouls are the real problem. They're not mindless and LA Ermor autospawns them.