Best Province targeting ritual?

[NTJedi]

Depends on what the player wants to get done.

Black Death works great at killing population.

For a surprise attack the Ghost Riders is the best deal for most damage per gem. So powerful the people I play multiplayer with have Banned this spell. 5 gems for a wraith lord and large group of pale riders ! KaBang... the other summon attacks don't even come close.

[Norfleet]

Generally, attempting to specifically kill population is a counterproductive exercise in the long run: It's hard to even tell what the population of the province *IS*, unless you have dominion there, and unless you are losing, that province will shortly be yours anyway, so you're just killing your own population: As such, Black Death can be considered to be the tool of either the dead, or the desperate: At the point it's available by in the game, any opponent that is sizeable enough to make you that desperate will not be greatly harmed by it unless you cast it an unreasonable number of times on a large number of provinces....but if you're losing, where are you getting that many death gems to waste just trying to kill population? If you're Ermor, on the other hand, it's certainly more attractive, but you also have so many other uses for death gems than frivolous killing of random population.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by NTJedi:
For a surprise attack the Ghost Riders is the best deal for most damage per gem. So powerful the people I play multiplayer with have Banned this spell. 5 gems for a wraith lord and large group of pale riders ! KaBang... the other summon attacks don't even come close.

Ghost Riders has basically zero effect on an army holed up in a fort, and will not inflict any real destruction if you have one in the province....which you SHOULD, because otherwise, that province would burn down regularly anyway.

[Cheezeninja]

Ghost Riders does great as a counter-insurgency measure though, when someone gets a army into your territory and you cant/dont want to guess where its going next turn. Cast it 4 or 5 times on the province with the army...weeeee
I doubt its as effective against SC's but lack the experience to be certain.

[ May 22, 2004, 01:51: Message edited by: Cheezeninja ]

[Norfleet]

Yes, yes it is: I find it highly effective as a point-defense weapon, especially when combined with castles, so that the Ghost Riders...and marauding enemies, aren't inflicting much harm on YOU.

[Yossar]

Ghost Riders do well against any SC that relies on life stealing (ie. a whole lot of them) since they're all lifeless. Anything with positive encumbrance and insufficient reinvigoration will eventually fatigue out. Helps a lot if they also don't have fire shield.

At 5 gems a casting, you can throw a whole hell of a lot of them at one SC and still come out ahead of your opponent in terms of gems spent.

[ May 22, 2004, 05:58: Message edited by: Yossar ]

[PDF]

My fave is Horde from Hell, which is at least 5 times more effective than those crap CoW-s