06-05-2004 09:39									#1
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From reading through this forum and its posts, I think I already know which will win the poll. Yea Good's got Torin and an assortment of other cool enchantsments, but evil has such spells as Zombie Mastery. Once I concuer a city, I leave 3-5 units, depending on what they are, in for defense. Along comes some aggressors. I one or more of the units is somthing I want, Life Drain. They will rise as undead, and the others will rise as zombies. Free units!

I could go on and on about the benifets of some spells like wrack, death knights, and regenerating, plane shifting shadow demons. What do you think?

	06-05-2004 17:16									#2
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Assuming you only mean "Life vs. Death," I say life. If you include mildly-evil chaos and sorta-positive nature, it's hard to say.

	06-05-2004 22:15									#3
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Another vote for Life. I've seen Just Cause called the most unbalancing spell in the game, and it's available from the beginning! Heroism is great for the early game, and makes heroes useful immediately instead of having to nurse them through a series of battles. Endurance lets your engineers work twice as fast and is handy for keeping a constant speed in a stack. Healing (and, later, Raise Dead) are almost as good as regeneration. Sure, the summoned creatures aren't much to talk about, but I rarely use summons anyway. Life is perfect for enhancing normal units, which suits my style exactly.

	07-05-2004 07:24									#4
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Life is more powerful with one exception: 11 Death books. This is about equal to 11 Life books. Any other choice will result in Life being stronger.

	10-05-2004 08:50									#5
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Thats how I was thinking of it, 11 vs 11. I can really see more benifits in Death than I do in Life(that is what I ment just a brain fart when I started the post).

	10-05-2004 18:48									#6
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But the extent to which a magic type "plays well with others" is important too. Like the ever-beloved warlord+crusade, or that trick with Sorcery Mastery and Conjuring that lets you summon free Sky Drakes...

	10-05-2004 19:50									#7
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You could theoretically reduce your summons cost to 0 with Color Mastery, Conjuror and enough spell books in that color, but I have never done it (You have to cross over to Myrror and hopefully find enough spell book by taking out the right nodes). I have reduced my summoning cost to 10% of what it should be and Sky Drakes cost only 100 to summon. At that time, I could cast summoning circle and summon 1 Sky Drake in the same turn. But, maintenance cost was still the same (25 per Drake). The really big benefit of the Sorcery Mastery/Conjuror 9 Blue Books combo is the ability to summon tons of phantom warriors early on. Magic spirits explore quickly and can take over neutral towns single handedly with the aid of the summoned phantom warriors. 3 or 4 magic spirits attacking 1 at a time in the same turn can take out an enemy wizard early on. This allows for extremely rapid expansion. This gives you an early lead that allows you to do well until you can bring on flying invisible warships. At that point, you have pretty much won the game. The only thing they have trouble with is blue nodes. But that is what summoned blue drakes are for (or flying hammerhands/palladins).