Curse of Stones worth it?

[BlueWolf]

I was wondering if the battle spell curse of stones is worthwile to cast. I have been playing both EA Atlantis and Agartha and it is pretty easy to cast for both nations but I am not sure that I have really much effect when it is cast. I wanted to know if anyone else had any thoughts.

[Ica]

It can be worth it, but you may want to have some penetration boosting when you cast it since MR negates it easily. It makes your opponent's units accumulate fatigue really fast and also slows their movement, which may or may not be relevant.

[zest]

Amazing, but situational. For instance it is VERY good against EA atlantis which has a ton of low MR low movespeed units. Cast it andhave your whole army far back set to hold and attack and by the time the enemy army gets to you they'll be tired and easy to kill. It particularly hard counters living pillars which are typically hard for a bunch of nations to deal with(they drop to only 2 move speed, which means they arrive super late the the party, close to fatigued out).

combines very well with other fatigue spells as well of course.

Typically only really worth using if the enemy units have lower MR then yours though.

[Twogun]

zest, it doesn't hit your units though, right? so your MR shouldn't matter? manual says it only fatigues out enemy units.

[zest]

Huh, right you are, Guess I only read the manual entry back in the day and never realized it was enemy only. Mod Inspector definitely has it listed as enemy only. Looks like I get to learn something today too!

In that case, I'd say it's a good use of gems in most big battles.

[Mormacil]

It's also a nice counter to a W9 bless if the enemy has low MR. Sure it won't totally stop the storm of murder but it tired them out that much quicker.

[Morsigil]

A few castings makes MA Ulm a sad panda.

[Zonk]

Worth copy-pasting the spell's desc from the manual:
"Units suffer an extra d6 of Fatigue when attacking, and an extra d4 of Fatigue for moving
one square, and each square costs an additional Action Point."

Units here should be understood as 'Enemies who fail a MR + 4 check'.
This is potentially a great spell, but really needs penetration boosters.

For instance it is VERY good against EA atlantis which has a ton of low MR low movespeed units.

No idea if this is actually good against Atlantis, but might be among the best at USING it, because they can forge both Rune Smasher and the astral penetration boosters.

A shame they don't have ranged units to benefit from the enemy's slow advance by shooting at them, but you can always use Evocations instead.

[Morsigil]

It's interesting that it says an extra fatigue for movement. I thought only attacking and spells accrued fatigue outside of magic. Am I really unobservant and units do take fatigue when moving, or is that confusing terminology on the manuals part?

[Zonk]

Regular movement does not cost fatigue. So the 'extra' here means 'compared to taking no fatigue at all'

[Angelo Dante]

One more reason to take Earth magi. I didn't know CoS caused that much fatigue.

[Staythecourse]

It's the earliest "hit all enemies" spell and I believe the only one without friendly fire and should be remembered because of that. But it shouldn't be overhyped. An unboosted cast, or a pen boosted cast when the enemy casts anti-magic might affect around 20% of enemy chaff and few if any mages. Unless the battle is exceptionally large, spending those gems on 3 casts of Maws will almost certainly do more damage one step higher in research. And of course Earthquake can hit mages.

[Shinuyama]

MR negates easily

Nope.

It used to be good, now it hits so few things that the weak effect isn't really worth using. If you're pen-boosting there's better stuff to cast. If you have a surfeit of earth mages, and pen gear in the lab, and you're already pursuing a fatiguing-out strategy, well sure, cast it, but you might be better off just leaving that gear in the lab and spamming earth elementals to buy more time for your other fatigue spells to do their work, overall.

[Gregstrom]

...or, since it has been MR+ since at least the days of Dom3, we could assume that it's as good as it used to be.