A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by aaminoff

Wait, you mean multiple castings of Curse of Stones STACK?

Do other battlefield-wide spells stack?

No, they don't stack, but it's MR easily resists (+4 to the roll), so even MR 10 guys are going to have a moderately high rate of resistance. Casting it several times will let you affect a good portion of them.

[aaminoff]

I see, that makes sense. Hm. Does the effect scale with caster E path level at all?

That must be why I have rarely seen a battle-winning effect when I have cast it: too many enemies make their save.

[Debaser8]

use boosters: void eye, that amulet thing, and runebreaker/smasher with Rain of Stones and it is very effective.

[Squirrelloid]

of course, if you can make void eyes and runesmashers as Pan in any kind of quantity, you got really lucky with indie mages...

But even without boosters, easily resists is a +4 bonus to their MR. Checking our handy manual DRN probability table (the most useful part of the manual), we note that easily resist vs. MR10 (10 vs. 14) is an 18% chance of success. Against any reasonable army size, the Law of Large Numbers comes into play, so think of that as 18% of the enemy army affected. That's not so bad.

Now, you've got an E3 Pan sitting around who wants to cast this, slap some earth boots on and cast Summon Earth Power, and now we're at E5, which gives us +1 to penetration. Now we're up to 24% of the enemy army affected. Even against a respectable MR of 13, you're affecting 11% of the army with an E5 caster.

If you can swing runesmashers, void eyes, and spell foci, that's another 5 penetration. That's 62% of the enemy army affected against MR10. Against MR12-13 you're at 46-38% of the army affected.

Now, lets say you cast 3 of those.

E5 caster, vs. MR 10: (1-.24)^3 = ~44% unaffected, or 56% affected.
E5 caster, vs. MR 13: (1-.11)^3 = ~70% unaffected, or 30% affected.
E5 caster, +5 pen boosters, vs. MR 10: (1-.62)^3 = ~5% unaffected! (95% affected)
E5 caster, +5 pen boosters, vs. MR 13: (1-.38)^3 = ~24% unaffected, or 76% affected.

So, its going to be sensitive to enemy MR, but against MR 10-11 targets its probably worthwhile even without penetration boosters. If you can snag some penetration boosters, it's good even against decent MR. What it won't do is impede high-MR sacreds or thugs/SCs.

[Kadelake]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

But even without boosters, easily resists is a +4 bonus to their MR. Checking our handy manual DRN probability table (the most useful part of the manual), we note that easily resist vs. MR10 (10 vs. 14) is an 18% chance of success.

Actually, the basic MR penetration strength is 12, not 10 as the manual claims. So against MR 10 troops it will be a 12 against 14 check, giving you a 30% of success; much more useful then with an 18% success-rate and making boosters even more effective.

By the way, does anyone know if the probabilities table in the manual is correct? I seem to remember someone doing some tests and claiming otherwise but can't find the thread.