Death Magic on the Battlefield

[MaxWilson]

Addendum: giant nations get giant undead, but not all the time. Don't read that and think that Skullface is a killer app for Niefelheim--I think I've seen maybe 20% of the skeletons raised be giants. Of course that might be because I was killing fewer giants than he was killing of my guys...

-Max

[moderation]

Endoperez said:
It's nation-dependent. Giant nations get giant soulless, C'tissians get c'tis and slave lizard undead, Caelum gets those useless, winged-but-not-flying corpses, Lanka gets different types of monkeys, etc etc.

Yes, casting Blade Wind to kill bunch of monkey PD lets you raise the Markata as Soulless Giants.

Wow.

[Renojustin]

A lot of you have been concentrating on the negatives of Shadow Blast, one of the very best spells in Death. It's an incredible spell, though, and deserves a lot of play.

You can research it relatively quickly and one or two powerful death mages casting this three or four times each during an appropriate battle will do more damage than any other level 5 spell in the game.

1 death gem... come on. It's one gem for a massive effect. Stop complaining about the gem cost; it's negligable. Equipping one D2 mage with a skull staff is more expensive than having two mages cast Shadow Blast a few times each in a big fight and taking out up to 200 enemies. Skellyspam = 30 skeletons maybe; Shadow Blast x 3 = 100 dead foes. I know how I will script MY death mages in midgame.

If you're looking for that lynchpin spell for midgame against most armies, look no farther, this is it. Falling Fires, Falling Frost, Lightning Strike? No other spells near the same level can come close to the same effect, except against undead.

[Lingchih]

As I said before, Shadow Blast is and incredible spell, but it often misses badly. I mean really badly. I have seen it hit four squares from any units. It is useful, but only against a tightly knit army.

[Cor2]

Agreed. I was destroyed recently by Shadow blast spam. Very effective.

[Niarg]

When I tried shadow blast 3 D4 mages set to cast it 3 times killed about 20 enemies.
They targeted areas with few troops in and often missed completely, also they seemed to concentrate on a single mass of enemies and attempt to kill every last one rather than targeting for the most damage.

Any ideas on why it was so ineffective for me?

[MaxWilson]

Renojustin said:
A lot of you have been concentrating on the negatives of Shadow Blast, one of the very best spells in Death. It's an incredible spell, though, and deserves a lot of play.

You can research it relatively quickly and one or two powerful death mages casting this three or four times each during an appropriate battle will do more damage than any other level 5 spell in the game.

1 death gem... come on. It's one gem for a massive effect. Stop complaining about the gem cost; it's negligable. Equipping one D2 mage with a skull staff is more expensive than having two mages cast Shadow Blast a few times each in a big fight and taking out up to 200 enemies. Skellyspam = 30 skeletons maybe; Shadow Blast x 3 = 100 dead foes. I know how I will script MY death mages in midgame.

Have you tried this? Because I don't think it will be as cheap as you think. Say you've got two D4 casters. I project that getting each of them to cast Shadow Blast four times in a battle will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 gems. I had an E9 Cyclops yesterday blow 6 gems casting Earthquake. The spellcasting AI, for some reason, likes to use huge numbers of gems, which makes Shadow Blast a fun niche spell for defending the laboratory and surprisingly good on D2 mages, but not as good as Cloud of Death for powerful mages. (D9 Cloud of Death covers almost 20 squares and does 19 AN damage! Best scalability in the game.)

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Niarg said:
When I tried shadow blast 3 D4 mages set to cast it 3 times killed about 20 enemies.
They targeted areas with few troops in and often missed completely, also they seemed to concentrate on a single mass of enemies and attempt to kill every last one rather than targeting for the most damage.

Any ideas on why it was so ineffective for me?

Poor precision? And, possibly, not a big enough army on your side. You want to combine Precision 14+ with some troops of your own to hit the sparse areas that have just had most troops killed, and to get them to clump up again for another Shadow Blast.

In general, arty AoE spells are not as good in practice as they seem on paper because even with good Precision, the AoE is somewhat randomly-distributed around the target point.[1] You can often improve AoE spells by giving the targets a resaon to stay clumped together (carrying a Bag of Winds is good, because the Air Elemental will attack on round 1 and they'll spend round 2 clumping together to destroy it). Alternately, use a BIG AoE and resign yourself to killing fewer units than you would think with pure spells.

-Max

[1] This makes the battle AI make poor choices because it picks spells by simulating the results a few times in its head, then picking the best result. I know it does this to choose spells and I think it might do this to pick spell targets as well. (Probably targets the center of each squad and sees which one does the most damage.) The randomness of spell AoE makes this a high-variance method in sparse troop formations, which means the naive "do what worked best in simulation" give poor results. BTW, "real" AoE spells like Thunderstrike and Banefire do not tend to suffer from this problem because they always affect a 3x3 square area.

[Agema]

Shadow blast does have an MR resist, doesn't it? Doesn't that limit it quite a lot?

[Ironhawk]

It does have an MR-resist. But most regular units will be effected by it anyway. Its really quite dangerous. I've had entire armies decimated by this spell.