I am still enjoying writing about Dominions, especially since the 6th game was just got released. Last time, I talked about overwhelming your enemies in an underwater battlefield, this time I’ll talk about poisoning them in their sleep.

To recap, Dominions is a game series where gods and their armies fight climactic battles to become the one true Pantokrator, the almighty. In the early game, armies are small and tactics simple, but by the mid to late game, armies can be so ginormous that troops have difficulty even reaching each other through the mass of bodies. In these scenarios, “army wipe” spells, that is spells that do damage to an entire army all at once, are very powerful.

Let’s back up a second, the normal way magic works is just as it works in any RPG you’ve ever played. The wizard casts fireball, it travels to the enemy, and deals damage. That’s how most spells in the game work. Some spells however, are *battlefield wide* spells. The wizard casts them, and now the entire battlefield is effected.

Foul Vapors is one such battlefield wide spell. When the wizard casts it, toxic clouds start to cover the battlefield and all soldiers, friend or foe, begin taking poison damage.

Obviously, killing your own troops isn’t usually a recipe for success. But Foul Vapors can be paired with other nature spells such as “Serpent’s Blessing” which make all your troops resist poison, or can be paired with units who naturally resist poison. That way, even if your own troops die, they die much more slowly than the enemy’s.

In this way, Foul Vapors can make for an exceptional army killing spell. You don’t need the strongest troops or the most fireballs, you just need 1 mage and enough troops to keep the enemy busy. After a few rounds of Foul Vapors, you’ll have killed an entire army no matter how many of them came to the fight.

But Foul Vapors isn’t perfect, if the mage who casts it gets killed it turns off, much to the relief of the enemy troops. And it won’t take many rounds for the enemy to reach your mage if you took a truly paltry number of troops. That’s where option 2 comes into play: Rigor Mortis.

Rigor Mortis is another battlefield spell, but cast by a Death mage this time instead of a Nature/Water mage like Foul Vapors. What it does is deal *fatigue* damage to every living (ie not undead) unit on the battlefield. In Dominions, units die when they reach zero health, but they simply fall asleep when they reach 0 fatigue.

But Rigor Mortis paired with Foul Vapors is an *incredible* combination. Rigor Mortis puts all units to sleep, which in turn protects the Foul Vapors caster from ever being damaged. Then Foul Vapors works to kill the entire enemy army in their sleep without your own army even needing to work.

This is extra potent when your own army is made up of the undead. Undead units are immune to Rigor Mortis (they already passed that point), but are *also* highly resistant to poison. Rigor Mortis plus Foul Vapors backed up by an undead army will see the enemy put to sleep, then poisoned, and finally hacked apart by the undead horde.

Battlefield wide spells are some of the most powerful and fun spells in the game. I love watching a battle where I successfully baited the enemy into a trap and killed them with a few battlefield wide spells. These spells are powerful, expensive, and rare, but if you can pull them off you can win wars against almost infinite enemy forces.