Burden of Time

[PvK]

If it's multi-player, convince/help someone else to cast Dispel, and/or persuade Ermor to not cast it.

Or:

Get someone to Astral-3 (empower/item/hire mercenary) to dispel.

Kill/assassinate the caster of the spell by various means (assassin, magic, steath commandos, non-stealth attack).

Bump the spell off the enchantment list using your own global enchantments (be sure to enjoy your other enchantments while doing so).

Go kill/maim Ermor after they cast it. Use cheap rebuildbale and/or unaging units for a while.

PvK

[Zapmeister]

Hmmm, OK, thanks. In practice, against a strong Ermor (and having no idea who or where the casting mage is) and without relying on help from others, the best suggestions seem to be Gift of Health and using cheap unit.

Maybe I can hang in there after all

[velk]

As a somewhat related question, if you 'kill' an immortal mage in his capital with, say, a seeking arrow, does it dispell the ritual spells he was maintaining ?

[Zapmeister]

as usual there is more than just a couple of ways to skin a cat in Dom!

Well yes but, in fairness, many of the entries in the list of 16 either:

1. Violate my assumption that the victim is a "non-astral nation", by which I meant that the pretender has no astral and the nationals could only get it by random pick, at best; or

2. Rely on someone else solving the problem; or

3. Contradict each other (#6 and #16 can't both work).

Add to that the practical difficulty of wiping out Ermor while suffering BoT, being lucky enough to find independants with astral or knowing where and how to kill the casting mage, and the list of practical options becomes somewhat shorter, I think.

[moodgiesanta]

Sure, there are ways to combat it, but at 70 pearls, it is both too cheap for its effects and too difficult for non-Astral mages to dispel. In my experience, not only Ermor but also Jotunheim and even R'yleh cast it like mad, which ends in every time I dispel it (at absurd cost) it gets cast again right off by the same nation. I think it is a rather overpowered spell. It should be a super-expensive hard to get spell, but it isn't.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by moodgiesanta:
Sure, there are ways to combat it, but at 70 pearls, it is both too cheap for its effects and too difficult for non-Astral mages to dispel.

70 gems is _not_ cheap. That's 7 turns of Ermor's base gem income.

[moodgiesanta]

Considering how it, in a few turns, cripples the armies of all of your enemies, I think 70 gems is very cheap for what it does.