How do I beat army spam with death magic?

[Sick Puppy]

Keep getting stomped by numbers. My sacred Calvary breaks due to moral for some reason (15 moral) and my lines just collapse when facing 1k armies of low tier untis. Fires from afar is a waste of gems since they only hit like 8 units per cast which does nothing vs 1k armies. I've got mostly death magic to work with.

[Janohito]

Death magic has basically 4 major spells to deal with armies - Darkness (reduce attack/defense and accuracy by 6 if opponent has no dark vision/spirit sight), Rigor mortis (Constant encumberance to everyone not undead/inanimate), Shadow blast (massive damage, really good vs chaff) and horde of skeletons (summons 6 skeletons immune to darkness/rigor mortis).
If you combine those, you should be good to take almost everything your opponent throws at you

[Bumc]

1k armies is where you pull out battlefield enchantments.

Rigor Mortis is an obvious choice for death magic, but stuff like Heat from Hell also works.
If you have more inanimates (aka spam skeletons) and can hold your ground for some time, enemies will eventually collapse and get rolled over.

[timlagor]

Soul Vortex can also let a big (HP) enough death caster wipe out an army of (living) 'chaff'.

[Sick Puppy]

Originally posted by Bumc:

1k armies is where you pull out battlefield enchantments.

Rigor Mortis is an obvious choice for death magic, but stuff like Heat from Hell also works.
If you have more inanimates (aka spam skeletons) and can hold your ground for some time, enemies will eventually collapse and get rolled over.

So how do I stop MA Arcoscephale from rolling over my skeletons? I still have 200 chairiots and a ton of elephants.

[Antpile]

If you have the fire magic to cast fires from afar, then you have the fire magic to be dropping rain of fire and the like in fight. A few mages spamming that can do quite a lot of damage to tightly packed enemies.

Unless it is just your pretender that has the high fire magic. In that case it isn't really a solution as he'll be the only guy on the battlefield dropping it; Helpful I guess, but not enough.

I'm assuming it is your pretender with the fire magic, since everything else you mentioned is about death magic. In that case a bunch of mages spamming shadow blast and maybe a battlefield wide enchantment like the other have suggested should do the trick.

Also, fear can be powerful against a swarm of low tier stuff. Death has access to fear through the fear helmet on thugs, spells that frighten enemies, or summoning things that have fear built in.

[TheMeInTeam]

Rigor is still good but keep in mind it's a hard MRN check now...it doesn't automatically add the fatigue on hit from the effect. As a consequence, rigor vs relief is much less one-sided in favor of rigor, especially if the living side has antimagic up.

For a regular MR troop with antimagic (14 MR), rigor mortis will be in the rough neighborhood of half as effective as it was in Dom 5. However, something like an Arco mystic will go from 15 to 19 MR with antimagic up...in the neighborhood of 20% as fatiguing. This is *soundly* in the territory where relief will more than offset rigor mortis!

You should probably still cast rigor; more fatigue is bad for your opponent. But don't consider it the "all-in" shutdown spell it was in Dom 5 where after a while, everything not immune to it or stacked with crazy reinvig would just stop moving. Once antimagic and relief are in play, it won't be doing that...not even close.

[Demonsthenes]

It's worth mentioning that penetration bonuses apply when casting Rigor Mortis... So if you boost that by +5 or more, it'll be quite effective against low to average MR units... But still significantly weaker than Rigor was in Dominions 5 against mages with Relief and Antimagic up.

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah true, if you can get them things like run smasher and spell focus at minimum are helpful, same for higher than min path. +3-4 should be attainable in most cases. At +4 you're still ~coin flip territory against many types of mages once antimagic is up, and thus around the same fatigue damage as relief removes (give or take, depends on exact values).

Vs troops, hitting them 3/4 of the time or 4/5 of the time is way better than 50%, so anything to improve pen is worth putting on if you can manage it for sure.