ick! Earthquake

[Gevaudan]

I'm currently playing marverni in a 10 player map, and am closing in on argatha. This is early game. much to my surprise, argatha has developed earthquake and badly mauled two of my armies (hundreds of casualties). Any advice for a counter to this spell? The argatha pretender is a pretty beefy pale one undead with D9E6N4S4.

I'm thinking about trying out a dominion kill or spending a few turns researching enough construction to pimp my E9 Cyclops and just stomp him.

thanks!

[sum1lost]

Spam horror marks on him one battle. 20 or so will make him functionally useless. Even if you don't get him, your opponent will suddenly stop using him in battle to avoid the horror marks.

[Micah]

That'll work against the pretender, yes, but Agartha has plenty of mages that can cast earthquake, so it's not a solution.

Defense gives a save against earthquake though, so the Eponi knights should hold up alright, especially since high defense works well against Agartha anyhow. You can try to script twist fate for your druids, although that won't help if the earthquake goes off first turn when you attack, so if you can get him to attack you and then cast twist if he's not multi-casting it you should be ok.

[Warhammer]

Does protection help against Earthquake?

[Gevaudan]

the slaughters occured because he was multicasting. 3 casts in a row caused a massive rout.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

As well, it is a mundane spell, like most earth magics.
You may try casting body ethereal and luck on a thug, if you've got a worthy chassis, and Agartha doesn't have much support/bodyguards. Protection helps as well (but only slightly) since it's AP and not AN. Shields generally won't help.

[Warhammer]

But how does it penetrate any armor? If it only does 8 damage, how does it penetrate any armor, or am I missing something? Even if is is AP, armor would still get halved and get its die roll, right?

[LDiCesare]

8 damage is actually 8 + d6 (open ended ) - ( half of the armor + d6 (open ended) )
So with the open ended rollsyou can get 344 damage if you're unlucky. I'm not sure whether there is an armor roll if you have 0 armor, though.
On a large army with armors along 10-12, you can expect damage of 2-3 on average with many taking 0 damage and many takind 5,6 or even more. So this can be devastating with several casters.
Spells like protection/barkskin/ironskin and such should help a bit if you can cast them prior to your opponent.

[Tuidjy]

Assuming the targets have 10 hit points and armour 10, the earthquake will fail to
injure 31.6%, kill 10.7%, and cause an average of 4.7 points of damage to everyone else.

If the armour is 15, the respective numbers are: 46%, 6.7%, and 3.71 damage to
the remaining ones.

(The above assumes everything hits. Defense has not been taken into account.)

[Gevaudan]

Thank you for the actual numbers. that helped a lot. The problem with my first two routs was that my parmies were 0-6 armor archers in bulk plus a few big units. I'll focus on some tough guys and SC next.