Carrion Woods

[Baalz]

So, I'm working on a guide for LA Pangea and I wanted to see if I'm missing something. Carrion woods is a really neat spell that would be fun to make work, but it seems like it's unplayable in a way that's impossible to overcome. It kills your population. That by itself is not that bad, all the autospawn dominions kill your population. The difference is that it can be dispelled, and in MP it most certainly *will* be dispelled as soon as you start looking like you've got a competitive shot at winning - people will pool their gems, pearls are easy to get through alchemization and dispelling is just easier than putting it up in general. After you've had it up for any length of time having it go down (with the implicit threat of more dispels if you try and put it back up) is completely game over - you've got no population now. I don't see how you could possibly cast this in any MP game you wanted a shot at winning. Anybody see an angle I'm missing?

If it's a dispellable global I can't see how you can reasonably have it kill your population for this reason. Maybe it could instead raise the unrest in your dominion - that way it would axe your income only while it was up, along with a recovery period afterward. There's a big enough detriment of having planned your strategy around this spell and having it not there, but having the inevitable dispel meaning you're irrecoverably out the game is impossible to overcome even if the spell only cost 1 gem (what exactly do you do when all the global slots are filled? Happens every game I've ever been in.)