A couple of questions
 

Hi everyone, I have a couple of questions, I hope you won't mind.

1) Are there any battle spells to increase penetration? I thought someone mentioned one, but I can't find any. Are there any other ways to increase penetration apart from the items below?

Rune Smasher (seems a bit expensive and hard to make)
Spell Focus (seems useful)
Rings of Wizardry and Sorcery
Some Unique (lvl 8) items I can't face tracking down

2) Is this a viable strategy? Since longdead and soulless have very high morale, and the effective morale of units seems to be the average of the units they're made up of, can it be good to just mix some undead into a normal unit to effectively increase their morale? Even a few undead would make a large difference.

Cheers!

Re: A couple of questions
 

1) Few more, like Eye of the Void.

2) I think mindless and normal units' morale won't stack.

Re: A couple of questions
 

1) There are some others. The staff of many hands, for another example. Also, increasing the skill level in the main path of the spell.

2) No, units with special morale don't add to the group's morale. I think it's actually counter-productive to a group's morale to mix with morale-30 & morale-50 units, because they can get hurt, but I think they contribute zero morale, whereas if they were in their own group and they got hurt, they wouldn't affect any routable units.

Re: A couple of questions
 

Okay cool. Eye of the void is good, I hadn't spotted that.

So to confirm, there are no penetration-boosting spells?

That's interesting about the morale. So, is it possible for just half of a unit to flee? i.e. the humans in a mixed unit flee, leaving the undead behind?

Re: A couple of questions
 

There are no spells for boosting just the penetration, but since higher magic levels add to the chance of penetration (manual page 86), casting Power of the Spheres and having someone cast Light of the Northern Star would give an S2 mage a +2 chance of penetration when casting Paralyze. Of course, you could also change to cast Soul Slay or Enslave Mind...

Re: A couple of questions
 

Would it just give him a +1 penetration because the bonus is (extra levels)/2? Doesn't really seem that much...

Re: A couple of questions
 

Oops... Yes, it would only be +1. It isn't that much, that's true, but if you check the table on manual page 5, even a single point can make a difference.

Re: A couple of questions
 

In addition to the already mentioned Power of the Spheres and Light of the Northern Star, there is also Summon hellpower (tricky, but power comes at a cost), also the various individual magic boosters if casting a non astral spell (ie, Strenght of Gaia for nature...) and finally, Communion.

There is also a spell that boosts penetration, through indirectly: it's Nether darts. Any dart that succeeds in beating its target MR will feeblemind it, and a feebleminded critter gets -4 or -5 to its MR, so any ufrther spells have a much easier time getting through. Seeing as a Nether darts casting throws a couple dozens of darts your chances are pretty good for one of them to succeed.