ick! Earthquake

[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.

[Baalz]

Counters to earthquake:
Etherealness
high protection (16+)
high defense (16+)
high hit points
take out the casters before they can cast
rely on combat summons scripted to go after the earthquake (elementals, skellispam, etc).

Now, obviously many of those counters are gonna be hard to get on a bunch of units unless you're lucky enough to have the right stuff available nationally. What you'll want to do if you don't have those units is use fairly concentrated squads you can more easily buff. Forge some heavy armor for your mages (encumbrance is gonna suck but it beats dying), outfit some thugs with high defense/protection/etherealness, and generally don't field large armies of tasty targets.

In the realm of stopping him before he can cast it you've got two choices, you could try and assassinate if that's an option, or you can try to outguess where your opponent is moving and have a counter-squad there to meet him, getting the first turn drop. What you do with that first turn drop depends on what's avaible to you and what type of army he's got supporting his earthquake casters. Scripting anti-undead spells will all target that risin oracle if there are no other undead. Scripting flyers to attack large enemy monsters or rearmost could be a good choice depending on his army. Heck, just having a bunch of cheap mages cast body ethereal on some elephants first turn could work.

[thejeff]

If you can throw Robes of Shadows on the mages instead of heavy armor, that'll be better for encumbrance and protection.

[Ozymandias]

Tuidjy said:
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.)

57.7% wounded for 4.7 damage and 47.3% wounded for 3.7 damage is still very bad news. His casters are all sacred with a death nine bless; they have +350% chance to cause afflictions with all damage they do. Just a few castings will badly wreck any army that lacks regeneration.

[Ironhawk]

I'm curious... with that death-9 blessing, do they get afflictions on themselves, as well? Since earthquake damages all units, including the caster.

[Folket]

I would think that they would.