Mana Burn: Accelerated EA [ LoloMo WINS!!! ]

[Ironhawk]

The general results of Astral Corruption was that it would attack any mage who was forging or casting a ritual spell with what seemed about a 20-30% chance. You would always get your spell or item off (i believe?) but sometimes the mage would be attacked.

As for my experience with AC personally: it was a big problem for me. It hit right at the end of the CTis war and prevented me from summoning, which was the only way I had of producing elite troops! Unsurprisingly that war ran reallly reallllllly long as a result. After that I pretty much just had to put a hold on summoning and concentrated on battlefield-only spell strategies which did not rely on month rituals.

Later tho, I learned from Sensori that Astral mages have a fool-proof loop hole in Astral Corruption. They can just cast Returning at the start of the horror attack and escape immediately. After I learned this, all my magical skills instantly came back online without any real problems (except needing to move mages out of my cap after Returning, now and then). This is in fact the real reason I stopped the 2nd attempt to Dispel AC that I started I probably could have dispelled it as I had a large cache of pearls and recieved 60 or so more from other nations. But with my loophole in place, AC was hurting all other nations more than my own!

[edit]
P.S.
I didnt notice anything about these horror seeds you mention? All I saw was horror attacks on mages doing rituals/forging. Additionally, I noticed no effects from Illwinter - but I think I was too far away for your dominion to effect me.

[LoloMo]

AC really forced me to change my style after the biggest horror I have ever seen ate up my super equipped mage casting a 300 gem Gift of Health. I had converted all my other gems to put into that casting. I later found out that horror attacks are more likely to occur the more gems you spend on a single spell =( I think the likelihood of being attacked is more like 50% for spells costing 20 gems or more and the horrors are bigger. I decided to go blood hunting too after that. Then I experimented and found that leech works quite well, and 2 castings of leech even gave me a pretty good chance of killing even the bigger horrors. So I made a lot of thistles and other small magic items. On the other hand though, everybody else got hit with AC too, so it hampered everybody too. Mictlan was the only nation to really benefit from AC I think, and at that time, he was busy at war already. All in all I lost about 8 350 gold Pans, and maybe 12 independent mages.

The global unrest is pretty annoying too, I had like 80-90% tax rates most provinces. That and the cooling shift probably cost me on the order of 500+ gold per turn.

I didn't notice the horror seeds either but some attacks that I thought were because of AC may have been from horror seed instead. I had a few random curses too on my troops, don't know if its related.

And Ironhawk, I'm sure Tree Hugger can have a place as Divine Beckoner of the Forest ;-)