Clone
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School: | water magic | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Level: | 4th | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cost: | 24 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Duration: | 1 rnd/sp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Clone is a 4th level spell in the School of water magic. It creates a clone of a stack, which has all of the original stacks abilities. The clone will be destroyed as soon as it takes any damage.
In the late game, with hordes of troops at your disposal, this can be a much more effective "damage" spell than even implosion if cast on a large powerful stack.
Units without enemy retaliation like Nagas or Vampires might benefit better from being cloned, or simply having the stack attack enemy units that have already been attacked and are not Royal Griffins that always have passive attacks safe perhaps for being Expert Blinded.
Of course it might make sense to destroy cloned units as opponent first if they can be reached (requiring only one point of damage no matter the health total of the stack) as they could make quite some damage as long as they exist.
Force Field might prove useful to defend ranged cloned units, making them persist longer on the battlefield than melee units could be.
Clone might work better than the summon water elemental spell and its 3 other variants belonging to the the state of matter (solid, liquid, gas and plasma) schools which creates creatures that stay the entire encounter - especially in the late game when using Clone for a even a single attack might be better than Implosion as Clone scales with the number of original units it is used on.
There are no spells that would give a hero creatures that also stay past encounters and thus would make it possibly to exchange refreshable mana points with creatures instead of using gold and regrow timers although there is an encounter type called Griffin Conservatory that randomly results in angels addded to the troops without payment like in towns or creature hangouts on the map, and the Necromancy skill which adds skeletons to the own troops (which is one of the slowest units in the game and may slow down the army) - and then there's Diplomacy and random monsters on the map that might join.