Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

The title says it all. How do you turn your researching death mages into battlefield contributors. Shadow blast stood out in the manual as a good looking spell, but the research requirement was high. Any other ideas?

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Summon Skeletons.

There may be other spells, depending on which nation you're playing.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Raise Skeletons, from Enchantment. You need several D3 (or D2+Skull Staff, but that's expensive) or better casters, but they can spam large enough armies that most armies will just fall down from fatigue against them.

S1D1 mages, like LA Jotunheim's Siethkona, can spam Nether Darts.

Another way, which takes longer to pay off, is via casting Dark Knowledge, summoning Bane Lords and forging Wraith Swords.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Omikron, I thought the same thing as you however my mages quickly ran out of gems and it wasn't that effective. Then the ai decided to keep casting summon skeletons and I started beating even large armies with a few mages.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Dang, I didn't notice the gem requirement for shadow blast. Yeah, that changes things. So, summon skeletons, eh? I'll try that out.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Raise skeletons works wonders against the AI.

Unless heavily massed, a dozen mages or more, it'll be ineffective against a decent player. Good troops or thugs cut through skeletons like butter, priests are cheaper than death mages and banish doesn't use fatigue.

It's good, but not a long term solution. The real strength of death is in summons.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Shadow Blast is great if you can stand a little micro (very little, really) and your opponent is using massed elites.

Shadow bolt can actually be half decent against expensive troops too.

Fear and terror,.. not generally much good.

Darkness is a total killer of mundane armies. Darkness + skelspam will take down almost any mundane army.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Death has some better AE spells costing 0 gem in higher levels if you can have D4 or more powerful mages. Namely the two cloud spells, Cloud of Death and Leaching Darkness. Their precision is low and they often kill some of your own troops but they offer a good synergy with the spam of skeletons, as your undeads are totally expandable and their numbers should block your ennemy in the clouds. Their fatigue cost is so small you can easily cover all the front with 2 D4 mages.

There is also disintegrate usefull to kill ennemy thugs or high hp units, when you reach alteration 8 (of course if you have astral mages rather search thaum 5 for soul slay).

But the main strength of death on the battlefield is the battle enchants like Darkness (all ennemy archers become useless, and living ennemies without darkvision become crappier troops than your undead chaff), and Rigor Mortis (unresistable fatigue for all non undead being).

There is also Bone Grinding (3 dammage to all units on the battlefield + a possible "crippled" affliction) very good if your own troops are ethearal like ermorian vestals (as it's mundane dammage they have 75% chance to resist) or if you have a powerful air mage to cast fog warriors on your army (your troops take 1 dammage per cast of Bone Grinding, when the ennemies take 3).

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

If you can get a high death mage(preferably 7 or higher), perhaps with a communion or your pretender, shadow bolt can get insane. If you also give the caster a spell focus, eye of the void(assuming he has enough precision to take the hit from losing an eye), skullface and runesmasher+shield or a skull staff then things get... fun.

The damage, AoE and range and penetration(I think D6 gives +2 penetration and D8 gives +3) all scale nicely, so if you end up with a D7-D10 caster you can decimate any non-undead without insane magic resistance. And if you happened to use it against massed ulmish infantry... any square hit would end up empty.

D8, spell focus, eye of the void and runesmasher grants +8 penetration. Anything that survives that must be either undead or have crazy MR. That's the point at which you pull out wither bones and drain life.

This works great with skelespam too, as they are immune to friendly fire from this spell.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Drain Life is probably the best Death spell as it removes fatigue from the mage(or skull Standard user) as it kills units, meaning in a long battle you are casting it every round.

Summon Skeleton is best for those times when you are tossing down big evocations (which can be Leeching Darkness). you want dumb chaff to slow down the enemy while AoE spells are raining down and killing everyone. Also, as a defense in castle sieges, it can plug up the entrance indefinitely.

Shadow Blast is a desperation tactic as it blows Death gems, but it can be an effective way to kill a large army.

Terror is a good spell as long as you don't mind facing your enemies later rather than now. Like most players, I usually prefer to kill an enemy now rather than fight them later.

The battle spells like Darkness, Rigor Mortis, Winds of Death, Wailing Winds, and Bone Grinding are nice, but they are only really good for very specific kinds of armies.

If you can get a little Fire together, Banefire is an awesome killer of things like Super Combatants (SC).

Disintigrate is Death's SC killer, so most death nations shoot for it. Its great for big low Mr things like elephants and Dark Vines.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Nether Bolts are nice, but they hardly ever hit the Commanders that you want them to hit. When they hit in the middle of an army, they usually only take out a couple of troops. If you are facing a lone SC though, you can spam them with a bunch of mages and hope that a few hit (chance of feeblemind).

And I agree, Shadow Blast is only effective facing a large army. The cost is high, but several cast into a large army can cause devastating damage. Against SCs, it is a waste of gems, since it usually misses badly.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Nether Bolt isn't great, and is usually much less effective, but it can be great against troops with big shields(nether darts can be stopped like arrows).

A few nether darts casters with decent precision(and possibly penetration items), particularly behind skele spammers, can really hurt enemy SCs relying on buffs from their own magic. Nothing like feeblemind a Seraph or elemental royalty. Nether Darts in general is a really nasty spell - particularly at higher levels, and since anyone who can cast it can be in a communion...
I love MA Ermor.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

I love death magic. Mainly because I find battlefield uses for it in all stages of the game, even when skill in death is low.

Skill Level 1 Death Magic:

• Versus the Undead use Dust to Dust (Thaumaturgy 1)
• Versus low moral units (such as elephants] use Frighten (Thaumaturgy 1)
• Versus anything use Ghost Grip (Conjuration 5)

Skill Level 2 Death Magic:

• Versus Super Combatants and Tramplers use Disintegrate (Alteration 8)
• versus the undead you can use Control Dead (Thaumaturgy 5)
• Versus most other things spam raise Skeletons (Enchantment 3)

And don't get me going on the wonders of Death 3. Every level of death up till Death 4 brings you something new and wonderful.

Shadow Blast is a great spell but don't use low level casters. The spell scales in both damage and on area of effect, so it is meant to be used by high level death mages, which is actually rather easy with some death gems and research into Construction.

Possibly my favorite spell in the whole of Dominions is Ghost Grip. It is easy to spam and can be deadly against anything when the fight is drawn out. Also, don't be shy about using it against the undead, it effects them too.

Good luck and die well.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Many Death nations also have access to either Air or Nature (EA C'tis, Helheim, Lanka come to mind). Aim and Eagle Eyes benefit Shadow Blast/Cloud of Death significantly. Waiting a couple of rounds for them to advance into your chaff and/or skelly spam is also potentially advantageous. Consider that the main advantage of artillery spells is to thin out formations so your troops can gang up and overwhelm defenses.

-Max

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

How do Raise Skeletons and Raise Dead compare to each other? I get the rough impression that Raise Dead provides higher HP units and more of them, but you need create some corpses by getting some units killed first.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Skeletons also have better attack/defense than Soulless do. If you've got Darkness or something, Skeletons are much better. You're correct that Raise Dead requires corpses, although I think PD corpses work fine.

-Max

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Units killed in that battle also provide corpses for the Soulless. They get better equipment (shield, sword, some armor) if the corpses had high resourcecost.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

That is so cool the IW guys bothered to code that. Every day there's some new level of detail I learn about.
I can't imagine how involved the feature list QA was for this product.
-SSJ

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Has anyone been able to raise giant soulless on the battlefield?

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Wow. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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?

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

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.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

The AI uses ALOT more gems if you have your mage well stocked. If you only give him a few, he will be far more careful about using htem.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Shadow Blast is best for tipping the balance in big-army-vs.-big-army combats. At least, the times when it devastated me have all been in a castle assault or something when the defender unexpectedly strafes my army with Shadow Blast on the first round of combat. Doesn't always win the battle for him, but it sure can even out the casualty count.

-Max

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Yeah, but if you want multiple Shadow Blasts you will have to make sure he's well stocked. That E9 Cyclops had 7 Earth gems in the hopes that he would use 3 on the first Earthquake and 3 on the second, with 1 extra in case he went a little overboard on the first. If you give a D4 mage 6 Death gems I bet he'll only get off two Shadow Blasts.

-Max

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

YOu can't boost with more than one gem right? Unless I'm not correct I don't get the cyclops example

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Right, far more effective to give 1D to 4 mages than 4D to 1 mage and hope he casts 4 times. (Of course that requires 4 mages...)

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Aezeal,

You can boost with more than one gem for fatigue purposes, but only one of them counts for path purposes. A D5 mage can use 5 death gems to let him cast a D4 spell at +6 (for 1/7 fatigue, not sure if it helps penetration), but he still couldn't cast a D7 spell.

This is contrary to how Kristoffer has described it in the past, so it may be a bug. I sure *wish* it were capped at +1, it would make battlefield gem spells so much more economical.

-Max

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

It appears that the common assumption, held at least at one point by KO, that you can only boost with one gem is wrong.

My current working theory, that is by no means fully tested or confirmed, is that 1 gem can be used to boost your level to be able cast a spell, others, up to the total of your path level, can reduce fatigue. I think I've seem mages use more gems than their level, but I haven't been able to duplicate it.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

DO others agree with tehjeff and max.. cus it's the first time I heard of this

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Hmmm, I guess those shadow blast detractors haven't seen how effective it can be. I've seen it be very effective when properly used.

1) As mentioned above it's just for large battles - just like most any gem requiring spell

2) Having one powerful D mage is nice, but I find it's also very effective to spread out and have 2-3 mid level D casters each cast it once. Opening round of a fight, have 3 D2 guys with eyes of the void fire shadow blasts from the front line (each only has 1 D gem). The effect on human level MR troops is absolutely devastating even if some of it misses and it cost you three gems plus risking some cheap mages. Not bad at all for a big fight.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

Since it's resisted and low precision, the efficacy of Shadow Blast is widely variable. If the enemy army is so big you can't miss, or coming through the gate in a siege you're gunna nail a bunch of targets, but if they have high MR and/or Antimagic it won't do that much. In a game i'm in right now i got two mages into the HoF in a single battle by spewing SB. In another one awhile back shooting it at some MR 14 sacreds had no discernible effect.

There's a pretty short list of big AE blasto spells- Falling Frost, Falling Fire, Shadow Blast, Acid Rain, Blade Wind, Nether Darts, Magma Eruption and Astral Fire. Acid Rain is clearly superior, but rare's the mage that can do it. Among the rest it just depends on what you are fighting. Shadow Blast has some advantages- it works underwater, it does not work v undead, and it's AN damage.

Since it's unlikely that you will have many mages dedicated to casting it, those that are should always have a Spell Focus, and optionally a Void Eye if you think you can get away with it, and a Rune Smasher if you got one.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

The problem with gearing up mages to cast SB with high penetration is that you now have to try to arrange for the few geared up ones to cast it as many times as possible. Which means loading them up on death gems, because they will overspend. And then you're still only going to get 5 before the script runs out and they do something else. All that penetration gear won't help when they start spamming Raise Dead.

Unless I'm trying to get it to work on high MR targets, I'd much rather get more mages to cast it in the first round or two, which can be easily done with a death gem or 3 each, than a few to keep casting it. It's only D2. For anybody with death mages it's easy to get quite a few of them.

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

The paralyze effect is also potentially nice.

Cloud of Death belongs on this list, too. Sauromancers love Cloud of Death.

-Max

Re: Death Magic on the Battlefield
 

You make a good point here, and it obviously depends on the
situation, but i generally prefer to use 4D mage scripted SB, SB, Drain Life, SB, Drain Life. It's pretty hard to get them to shoot 5 times unless you just flat load them down with gems. But, if you have a bunch of 2Ds and you are just trying to cover alot of frontage with a big alpha strike, your way would be better and i wouldn't use the penetration boosters for that.