Cheap and easy to get chaff-killers which I use during early game:
- Fire Blast, Fire Cloud, Falling Fires
- Shockwave (perhaps the best spell for early mass-genocide)
- Acid Spray, Acid Rain
- Cold Blast, Falling Frost
- Bladewind, Gifts from Heaven
- Shadow Blast, Raise Skeletons (aka skellispam
)
- Sleep Cloud, Poison Cloud (these two are of very limited use, but when you are defending a fort they can be quite devastating if your gate-holders can take the beating for a while)
Then there are some national spells, like the Iron Darts (not to mention Iron Blizzard, but it is sadly not an early game spell
), which are very nice too to take out lots of opponents. Then there are some special cases, like Fire Darts, which as such is not a great spell, but if you have high level Fire-mages (like, lets say, Anointed Rhuax, or a F9 pretender) they can deal lots amount of damage against lightly armoured opponents from far away (and once the enemy gets closer, they can switch to the close range AoE fire spells).