Remote attacks are rituals that directly and negatively affect remote provinces. These can be divided into a few categories: army killers, assassinations, province attacks and province killers. Although remote attacks are usually expensive for the effect, they provide a safe way to harass opponents that does not involve direct military action. Since rituals occur in the magic phase, remote attacks have the potential to snipe commanders and prevent any units under their command from moving that turn. Remote attacks are countered by domes.

Who do army killers hit when targeting a province where an enemy army is sieging a fort owned by another enemy?

• Casts by a nation involved in the siege appear to consistently target the enemy, regardless of position.
• Third-party casts of Leprosy, Murdering Winter, and Flames from the Sky struck the army inside the fort in 10/10 tests.
• Third-party Melancholia struck the army *outside* the fort in 1/1 test.
• Unknown: how do disciples interact, either as casters or as a third army present in a sieged province?

Army killers target enemy units and commanders in a province. Despite the name, not all army killers deal direct damage; some merely apply status effects that may kill enemy units indirectly.

Alteration
Baleful Star	Alteration 5	3 • 7
	Curses some of the enemy army. Curse is debilitating for thugs but mediocre against casters (who are unlikely to survive direct combat anyway) and troops (on which individual injuries are generally less significant). Since Curse adds a flat 15% risk of affliction on damage, combos well with Bloodletting and Earthquake. Doom is a combat spell which curses 100% of the enemy army, making it a more efficient spell for this kind of effect.
Evocation
Fires from Afar	Evocation 3	3 • 10
	Deals 15 AP fire damage to a small proportion of the enemy army. Relatively weak and entirely useless against units with decent armor or giant hp. Shots are only guaranteed to hit against very large armies, but can also be used against a single unit to almost guarantee 1 hit as part of a snipe.
Murdering Winter	Evocation 7	5 • 40
	Deals 8 AN cold damage to 75% of the units in a province. Deals +2 damage per cold scale and -2 per heat scale. Fails if cast into a province with 3. Commanders take 3 less damage. Wolven Winter can be used to force cold scales. Devastating to human-hp nations in cold scales.
Flames from the Sky	Evocation 9	5 • 30
	Deals 15 AP fire damage to 75% of the units in a province. Damage is independent of heat scales. The bane of human-hp nations in the late game.
Thaumaturgy
Melancholia	Thaumaturgy 6	5 • 20
	All units make an MR check vs. 10 and a morale check vs. 10. If they fail both, they desert. Does include commanders. Rarely effective against elite units, but ~20% of average human infantry will desert. Potentially devastating against monkeys, slaves (including slave mages), or starving armies. : do MPen boosters apply?
Melancholia	Thaumaturgy 6	5 • 20
	All units make an MR check vs. 10 and a morale check vs. 10. If they fail both, they desert. Does include commanders. Rarely effective against elite units, but ~20% of average human infantry will desert. Potentially devastating against monkeys, slaves (including slave mages), or starving armies. : do MPen boosters apply?
Leprosy	Thaumaturgy 6	5 • 10
	50% of the units in the targeted province make an MR check or get diseased. All but guarantees killing half the army, but is very slow-acting. Sine disease disables healing, this pairs well with other remote attacks or low-damage battlefield threats like Earthquake. : do MPen boosters apply?
Beckoning	Thaumaturgy 6	5 • 20
	50 + (5 × additional caster level) units make a difficult MR check and a difficult morale check. If they fail both, they desert. Units with forest survival ignore the spell.

Remote assassinations target a random commander in the enemy province with an assassination or direct attack. The global Vengeful Water causes massed assassinations, though these occur in the event phase after ordinary movement and battles rather than in the preceding magic phase. Spells that cause assassinations can pull in bodyguards.

When cast by third parties, Mind Hunt and Seeking Arrow are confirmed to target randomly among both sieging/sieged commanders.

• Conjuration 5 32 for 10: Winged Monkeys
  Expensive and awkward to cast, and killing non-mages is rarely worth 10 gems. However, the predictable targeting can be used to eliminate generals and Mound Kings so that mages move without their armies.
  what is "too heavy"? Are priests counted as mages? What happens to picked up commanders, do they fight PD/patrollers on arrival? Does this use Wind Ride mechanics, and can it target friendlies?
• Conjuration 8 5 for 5: Earth Attack
  Sends a size 6 Earth Elemental to assassinate. Does not affect floating commanders.
• Conjuration 8 5 for 4: Manifestation
  Assassinates an enemy commander with an Ashen Angel. If no commander is found, the caster suffers the assassination. The Angels are tough to kill and exceptionally deadly, bypassing Water Bottles via flight and dealing 30 damage with a magic sword at high Atk. Relatively common since Well of Misery draws high-death nations to Conj 8 and funds the attacks.

• Evocation 6 4 for 2: Mind Hunt
  Attacks a random commander with Mind Hunt or Soul Slay, depending on which has been researched. Every enemy astral mage in the target province has a (40 × astral level)% chance of feebleminding the Mind Hunt caster, even if stealthed. Can catch stealthed commanders, is relatively cheap and instantly kills its target, provided they fail the MR check and Soul Slay has been researched. The ability to bypass stealth is valuable against stealthy raiders, but also means scouts of any nation can intercept hunts.

• Enchantment 3 3 for 4: Seeking Arrow
  Deals 8 AN negating damage to the chest of a random commander. Can be negated by air shield, twist fate, and some other conditions. Dangerous against human hp or lower, much less deadly against giants.

• Thaumaturgy 4 31 for 3: Vengeance of the Dead
  The commander in the target province with the most kills is drawn into an assassination battle in which they fight one Soulless for each kill. Can be negated by Magic Resistance. Mostly kills via the turn timer due to sheer number of Soulless.

• Blood 6 5 for 5: Infernal Disease
  Assassinates with a Disease Demon. Relatively tough to cast, but highly valued for being cheap and low-level. Unreliable against thugs and ineffective against SCs, though any damage inflicted will cause disease. Otherwise tough to stop with bodyguards or items due to flight.

• LA Atlantis. Enchantment 5 31 for 5: Send Tupilak
  Sends a flying, scary Tupilak to assassinate.
• LA R'lyeh. Thaumaturgy 6 4 for 4: Dreams of R'lyeh
  Pulls the caster and target into an assassination duel with no bodyguards. Units without Void Sanity take massive attribute penalties, including halved MR, usually permitting a kill.

Some ritual summons can be targeted at a remote province; if the target province belongs to an enemy (or the remote summon is neutral rather than friendly), the summons will attack the province. With a few exceptions, most remote summons are too weak and/or expensive to be practical for province attacks; using magic phase-capable thugs is often a more efficient option.

• Conjuration 3 2 for 10: Call of the Winds (1×Great Hawk, 40×Black Hawk)
  More often used to summon expensive patrol chaff, the hawks are fairly weak and unreliable, though they may pick off PD Commanders.
• Conjuration 3 3 for 12: Call of the Wild (1×Werewolf, 30×Wolf)
  Only half as effective when targeting a non-forest province. Wolves are not very strong units either!
• Conjuration 9 6 for 5: Ghost Riders (1xWraith Lord, 33xLongdead Horseman)
  The riders are neutral, not friendly, and will not stick around after the attack. On the bright side, they're quite cheap (Gem-wise).

• Alteration 4 3 for 8: Arouse Hunger ([30+3/lv]×Ghoul)
  The ghouls are permanent units. This also works underwater!
• Alteration 7 4 for 8: Phantasmal Attack ([25+5/lv]×Phantasmal Warrior, 20×Phantasmal Archer)
  The phantasmal army is neutral, not friendly, and will not stick around after the attack.

• Enchantment 7 3 for 10: Carrion Reanimation (1×Soulless Leader, up to 100×Soulless)
  Reanimates up to 100 corpses in the province as Soulless.

• Blood 5 4 for 44: Horde from Hell (1×Devil(commander), 25×Imp)
  These are permanent units, though they're expensive at that.
• Blood 5 23 for 9: Send Lesser Horror
  See the dedicated page for more details.
• Blood 7 5 for 88: Plague of Locusts (9×Demonic Locust)
  Demonic Locusts are fairly beefy units which rapidly decrease dominion. (They're permanent, too!)
• Blood 9 45 for 30: Send Horror
  See the dedicated page for more details.

• EA Rus and later incarnations. Conjuration 5 4 for 5: Send Bukavac (1×Bukavac)
  Sends a temporary size 6 trampler to attack the province. The Bukavac is neutral, not friendly.
• MA Pythium, MA Marignon, and LA Marignon. Conjuration 7 5 for 50: Angelic Host (1×Arch Angel, 6×Angel of the Host)
  Sends an Arch Angel and six similarly-equipped-but-smaller troops. These are permanent units, and are often better-off kept at home.

Province killers change the properties of the target province to damage its economy, often by causing unrest or sometimes by killing its population directly. For unrest-increasing province killers, the critical threshold at which recruitment is blocked is 100 unrest. Rather than occurring in the magic phase like the previous kinds of remote attacks, most province killers generate events and thus occur in the event phase after ordinary movement, battles (and most rituals!) are resolved. They are usually reported as random events, but the aggressor can often be guessed based on the path requirements.

• Alteration 4 21 for 5: Blight
  Unrest +15, Population -5%, Gold -80. Comes early for a population killer, and the -5% can stack up with multiple castings. Fairly gem- and mage turn-intensive to chain cast, however.
• Alteration 4 3 for 5: Wolven Winter
  Decreases heat scales by 3. Often used to set up a province for Murdering Winter. Can also counter cold-blooded units, improve Grip of Winter, or strengthen Ice Armor. Note that temperature scales change in the event phase, which occurs after the magic phase. This means that, if cast on the same turn, Murdering Winter will trigger before Wolven Winter has the chance to make the province colder.

• Evocation 4 31 for 5: Breath of the Desert
  Increases heat scales by 3. Sometimes used to make provinces more amenable to cold-blooded units.
• Evocation 4 3 for 5: Hurricane
  Unrest +25, Population -3%. Air gems tend to be a valuable gem type for nations which can cast this, and the unrest effect is low for the cost. Can still contribute to locking down the recruitment of important provinces.
• Evocation 9 43 for 15: Volcanic Eruption
  Unrest +30, Population -30%. Deletes a substantial proportion of the population in a province, but the research requirement is prohibitive for a fairly narrow effect.
• Evocation 9 5 for 15: Tidal Wave
  Unrest +50, Population -30%. Has a similar effect to the other Evocation 9 remote attack, Volcanic Eruption, but produces more unrest.

• Thaumaturgy 5 4 for 10: Raging Hearts
  Unrest +60, Population -5%. Generates a huge amount of unrest, can completely lock down the recruitment of any province when combined with Rain of Toads
• Thaumaturgy 6 5 for 20: Melancholia
  Sets production scales to 3, decreases Dominion by 1-2. Can help reduce recruitment of key resource-intensive units such as Ahiman Anakim, but is very expensive when not benefiting from the desertion aspect.
• Thaumaturgy 8 5 for 15: Black Death
  Unrest +10, Population -50%. Far more popkill-focused than the fire/water/air counterparts. As a result it has low tactical value and tends to destroy the value of captured land, but is the spell most often used in the lategame specifically for economic damage. 1-2 casts can slash recruitment of recruitment-point intensive cap-onlys. Sometimes used to deter attackers or destroy capitols someone else will take in a 2v1. The cost can be slightly defrayed by consuming the corpses with Raven Feast, Carrion Reanimation, or a Corpse Eater.

• Blood 5 31 for 20: Rain of Toads
  Unrest +40, Misfortune +3, disease chance 4%. Blood slaves are cheap and the unrest effect is substantial.
• Blood 5 13 for 15: Wrath of Pazuzu
  Unrest +35, Population -4%. Another cheap way to raise unrest in blood.

• Abysia. Alteration 6 4 for 10: Hellscape
  Substantially more popkill and unrest than Breath of the Desert, but equal heat change for twice the price at a higher level. Generally only useful because Abysia lacks the FA cross for Breath. Technically anonymous since a random event exists, but in practice clearly Abysia's fault.

• Dominions 5 Strategy: Remote Attacks - Army Killers and Dominions 5 Strategy: Remote attacks (Province Killers) by Perun