are stealth units targeted by flames from afar..?

[alexti]

Boron said:
yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).

I think you ignore the circumstantial value of Murdering Winter. It doesn't have to kill the huge amount of troops to be worthwhile. For example, in the recent game formidable army was invading my lands. Murdering winter has killed significant number of troops and about half of mages, on the same turn my release army attacked invaders securing victory with minimal losses due to disorder and death of cruicial spellcasters in the opponent's army. After defeating this army military advantage swung to my side and I was able to drive invader back and conquer a number of his lands and castles. Initial murdering winter wasn't probably worthwhile the number of troops it has killed, but the advantage it created was worth much more than 30 water gems.

Boron said:
clams are underestimated but once you reach lots of in late midgame or in lategame and get 50+ / 100+ clam astral income this is huge and probably doubles your total gem income and you don't have to pay too much for it too

50+/100+ astral income looks attractive, but successful expansion can bring you more. How would you fight the nation with 60+ gems income of every kind which would also had much larger gold income? Sitting and clam hoarding is essentially betting that other nations will kill each other and no single nation will be able to emerge dominant. Of course, you can target on the expansion and only forge clams with really spare gems. In this case you're not likely to accumulate that many clams, but that is practical approach, I think.

Again, looking at my example, the single Murdering Winter has allowed me to gain some lands (probably worth 200-300 gold per turn), some forts and 15-20 gems per turn. That's much more than the profit from clams. So in my view, clam forging is for the situation where you have no option to expand, when you actually need more astral gems for your immediate wars or when you have really spare water gems (remember, even if you don't need anything from water yourself, you can forge boots of quickness and trade them for something you need).