I am playing classic Master of Magic, still at the beginning of the game (I have two cities and one outpost). That damn witch Kali has already cast twice Death Wish. I didn't even remember what it did so I looked it up on the wiki: It must have been a very unlucky roll! (Lucky for Kali). I have already had my army halved twice, I even lost a Noble hero I had just hired. D:

I am planning how to seek retribution for this inacceptable offense. With my very limited tools, for now I will try to find her homeland and cast Corruption everwhere I see. I am full Chaos books (Tauron) so I hope quite a few destructive spells will come along the way.

Honestly, to my experience debuff spells like corruption or even volcano, that normally harm dreadly human player cities, do little to none to AI wizards.

If you aim for retribution, there are two:

First is out of question, as you play Chaos.

Second: send a quick but strong army and their Kali's capital city. As soon she casts Spell of Return, that that city.
While theoretically, there might seem to be dozens, if not hundreds another solutions, going for their "head" is the only way to keep them from casting stupidly damaging global spells. (and Death Wish is only one of many harming spells... eventually AI will add also city-targeting spells, like famine... despite AI sometimes only goes for your capital city, but it is still irrationally annoying.)

Well, I unerstand, how troublesome it is to have to cope with such problems so early on, as you still are under-developed, and had basically zero time to properly set up your own cities & armies, but no matter in what position you are -> truth remains cast in stone: only effective countermeasures against rabid AI wizards, throwing top-notch harming global spells at you nearly every turn : Level their capital cities.

Everything else will turn futile.

Thank you for your well written advise. In the end, after the sixth or so Death Wish, I got tired of having my armies wiped out before they could reach anywhere so I just restarted... Only to have a small stack led by none other than Kali to target me after I had just founded my second city (still in outpost phase). It was a good day for Kali, not so good for me.

after the restart, another devastating climax early on?

Classic MoM didn't use to be so cruel (well, on impossible difficulty, enemies did throw global debuff spells around a lot, not only death wish, armageddon and such were pretty common, which is why I didn't dare to play non-sorcery builds, just to get suppress magic spell)

but being targeted early on, is pretty nasty.

Aren't you using some mods, like community patch or something alike ? (which are mostly made by hard-core MoM fans, who for some, to me unknown reason, consider classic MoM too easy... while humble me had trouble finishing one out of 4 impossible attempts to victory, and even the victorious one was ridden with countless reloads and struggles. )

Now I stick with the remake, where the flaws are for my benefit (AI wizards nearly never use global debufs.. I encountered it only once, when I started as trolls, thinking that just with little time and effort, due regen, I will become unbeatable, when for the first and last time in my personal mom remake history, random enemy started using death wish, wiping my cities off, most of my units dying, despite trolls do not have lowest RES.

I have to admit, that remake MoM offers comparably more laid back experience (despite AI does cheat in some other ways, like abusing summoning, and spawning regular armies en mass, often lacking the final touch to polish their strategy, and with a bit advanced prowess in tactical combat, you can turn their seemingly flow of armies into food (XP) and have a ton of fun doing so.

No mods or fan patches. Just plain vanilla roughness. I didn't experience anything similar when I've played in the past. It must have been my unlucky weekend.

I plan to try the remake at some point (wishlisted at the moment).

I have some curiosity questions.

1) What are your settings?

2) Are you taking advantage of your summons to help your expansion? Especially if you're going 11 books in a single color, you should have something either very cheap or fairly powerful. If you're at a high difficulty and you're focusing all your expansion on making new cities from scratch, you're going to have a bad time.

3) How much time are you building infrastructure in your capital before building settlers? I wouldn't expect anyone to have a Very Rare spell super soon unless they got lucky with a ruin or node (my child found Sky Drake in an early ruin once, and the game was basically won at that point).

It was Medium Difficulty, 4 other mages, and large land masses. I hadn't played in a long time and I expected a chill game.

I did have some summons, mosty Hell Hounds but I unlocked a couple bigger ones. What I didn't have early in the game was themana to keep up with the summoning and upkeeping costs. But perhaps I should have focused more on those because summoned units are not targeted by Death Wish.

In the first game I build a lot of infrastructure, prioritizing production modifiers and growth before settlers and units. I had a couple of cities that could train military units in one or two turns. In the second game I did rush a settler to build the outpost because I wanted to claim a chokepoint; that's the one that was attacked by the Kali mini-stack.

I can't be sure of how Kali got the spell but that early I suspect it was a ruin.

If it was Medium difficulty, then it had to be a really lucky ruin or a large number of turns into the game. If you have several cities with quite a bit of infrastructure, then it is probably much later in the game than you realize.

I don't know how you handle scouting, so I'll suggest using a few early Magic Spirits. You can divert mana to the Mana wand in the Magic screen to help pay for then, and early gold income can be converted (at a loss) to Mana as well. The magic spirits can check ruins for guards, either giving you a rough idea of whats in there or else giving you the loot (often 50 mana) if it is unguarded.

That mana conversion strategy can also help pay for some early summons to go conquer lightly guarded neutral cities.

The first Death Wish was very early in the game, to the point that I wondered how Kali had enough mana to cast it. Speaking of which, thank you for your suggestions about Alchemy. I have never used it much as I had the impression that the conversion rate was unfavourable, but perhaps this time it was what I should have tried.