Re: Battlefield spell + retreating?
Alright K, excellent work on running some tests, I'm pleased to see that the bug isn't quite as bad as I thought. That being said, I'm still not overly convinced without Wrathful Skies being cast by the MoD nation. The success of your test seemed predicated on building up a huge amount of summoned units (many with stormflying) that never got whittled down by a BE. Wrathful also only hits 10% of the squares on the battlefield, making it unlikely that it would take out enough phantasms at once to end the battle, as opposed to the 50% figure you give, which only applies to fire storm (and I guess acid storm? I've never seen anyone actually cast it, though). Given that your short test ran for over 25 turns and the longer one until defender auto-rout I think that Wrathful would have had plenty of time to decimate the Lankan army.
Even beside the straight-up power of the spell the problem is that there is very little risk to the user in relation to the payoff. As long as the caster/casters can manage to skitter away from the battlefield with their booster items and their staff of storms after popping 2 spells they've burned something like 8 gems at most (down to 4 if they've got high A paths, 8 will keep even minimally pathed casters under 100 fatigue and ready to flee), plus another 6 for a double cloud trapeze, tops.
Without MoD dropping a damage BE requires the commitment of a blocker unit, which is generally covered in gear, or an army with suitable resists. Either of these represents a commitment of resources that the enemy army can destroy past turn 2 of the battle, bringing some balance back. Just because something is beatable doesn't mean it's balanced. I think this is the crux of a lot of the arguments against the use of the spell, not just the difficulty of overcoming it.
And finally: many of the counters you suggest are damn near useless. Rain of stones? Thanks for wasting gems and stoning your army, 3/4ths of the phantasms will be laughing at you after emerging from their etherealness. Army of gold/fire storm might actually work, but you'll be getting the snot pounded out of you by wrathful every turn now that you added shock vulnerability to your army. You're also burning at least 8 gems to get the combo off, which is the same or more than the MoDers. Archers...well, maybe, but they ran out of arrows in both the tests you have up, and don't do so well in storms.
Air elementals are actually a decent counter, being stormflyers, 100%SR and decent units against regular armies, except for the thing where you have to burn gems to summon them. Again, MoD+Wrathful only takes about 8 gems.
When the *best available* counter to a tactic requires burning more resources than the tactic being countered requires to be used it's generally safe to regard the tactic in question as abusive.
Anyhow, that's my take on the spell. I'm not one to balk at brutal tactics, but I love dominions because 99% of the time there is a reasonable relationship between risk and reward in the tactics available. MoD kind of blows that relationship out of the water.
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