Murdering Winter

[Zenzei]

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.

[Renojustin]

Practically mandatory.

[Cor2]

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.

[Tuidjy]

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.

[AdmiralZhao]

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.

[Agema]

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.

[llamabeast]

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.

[DonCorazon]

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.

[Zenzei]

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.

[Beorne]

How much is effective versus undead troops?