Offensive Rituals vs Summoning?

[Aleph]

You can definitely triple up on rain of toads to instakill an enemy's unit production, severely hurt gold productions, and slam them with misfortune (which may cause further economic chaos). That's what, 12 blood slaves for all that? Granted, you need three people who can cast it, which makes for a fairly short list of armies outside of Mictlan and Lanka (Sauro, maybe?), but if that doesn't make the good list of offensive rituals I don't know what does. The 3 chances to disease enemy units is just added frosting. Rating: As good as it gets.

As far as attack spells go, to continue with the blood theme Infernal Disease is a bargain - 5 blood slaves kills almost any commander that's heavily protected, and even the exceptionally tough almost always still end up diseased. Rating: Good.

Send Horror in its various forms really needs to be cast multiple times on the same enemy army to pay off, but 2-3 of them can usually rout an enemy army even without getting lucky and shredding a commander, and they can also jack up an enemy pretender with horror marks. I'd say they are not as efficient as the preceding two, though, since they may not end up inflicting that many casualties before routing the enemy, and don't work well in offensive siege warfare. Rating: OK - not a great spell most times, but sometimes exceptionally useful in counter sieging when you've cut off all escape routes but can't defeat the sieging force.

[Teraswaerto]

One of the best offensive rituals is Raging Hearts. Lots of unrest, just two castings will put a province over 100 unrest -> no more recruiting.

Especially useful against an enemy with capital only troops or mages.

[SlipperyJim]

I had a fair amount of success with the Beckoning in my last game, but it's a very situational spell. In my case, AI Vanheim had a couple of fortresses in forest provinces that it was using to build an army. So I had a couple of enchantresses with Treelord Staves, Rings of Sorcery, and Spell Foci who just pounded away with Beckoning every turn. POOF: No more army buildup.

For commander-killing spells, my favorites are: Infernal Disease, Earth Attack, Wind Ride, and Winged Monkeys. For some reason, Winged Monkeys doesn't seem to work very often, but it's still fun. I mean, c'mon! Winged Monkeys?! Who doesn't like Winged Monkeys!

[Meglobob]

TwoBits said:
Here's another question regarding this topic - are rituals that affect "economics" stackable? For example, if I cast Locust Swarms, Blight, Rain of Toads, and Hurricane at the same time, in the same place, will the target suffer unrest +100 (20 for Locust, 15 for Blight, 40 for Toads, and 25 for Hurricane) and lose 8% of its population (I think 3% for Hurricane, plus 5% for Blight), in addition to the various gold loss and negative scale hits?

Yes they are, this is one of those 'killer' tactics, pulled it off playing EA T'ien Ch'i. Hit my enemies capital with raging hearts, hurricane, blight and locust swarms in 1 month. I then did the same next month and every other month after. He could not recruit any more troops, mages. So my armies just went in and moped is nation up. The war was won at the beginning.

Hurricane btw seems to work on any province, not just coastal ones.