Re: Musings on getting the most out of the early g
 

What strength indies do you usually play with?

I usually play high (8 or 9) and it takes awhile to build up an army tough enough to take even the weaker provinces.

As for prophets, while Smite is nice, I usually find that getting the full army blessing and moral spells at Holy 4 is at least as important. So I won't usually prophetize a starting commander unless the nation only has Holy 2 priests. Getting divine blessing is especially important if you're playing a bless strategy, obviously.

Re: Musings on getting the most out of the early g
 

Forgot one thing regarding sitesearching:

Unless you play a <40% site frequency game Pythium should sitesearch via accashic. This way they save valuable magetime.
Arco can also consider using Accashic.

Re: Musings on getting the most out of the early g
 

I'm not so sure about that. Astral gems can be put to so many good uses, especially by Pythium and Arco. They can be used for teleportation, spying, mind hunting, wishing and so forth. IMO With so many good uses for astral it's better to waste the other gem for remote site searching.

Re: Musings on getting the most out of the early g
 

The main advantage of Akashic is in mage time. So that's a trade off. Time/gems. I usually don't use it.

The other advantage is that it can find sites of paths you don't have mages or enough gems to remote search for. Some of those sites might provide mages capable of searching that path, or at least the gems to fund searching.

Re: Musings on getting the most out of the early g
 

best to use it when you cant afford to send out your mages/need a type you cant find

Re: Musings on getting the most out of the early g
 

Most often I play at indies 6, but usually even at indies 8-9 you can find some easy indies to pick off while you build up force.

Taking the most extreme case of turn one patrolling (Caelum or Mackaka on 200%), I worked out some numbers. With all neutral scales they would gain 160-170 extra income that turn, in exchange for 15 gold per turn income. I can certainly see why someone would be unwilling to take that step, it adds up to a lot over the course of the game. On the other hand, by the time the lost income really starts to add up, it is a drop in the bucket anyway, while on turn two it is a huge windfall, likely to snowball simply from gaining the 'turn advantage' over other players.

Re: Patrolling for Dollars
 

I used to wait but I hardly do, anymore. Having an L4 or L5 priest is nice but I find that it is sort of overkill in the early game. If you build your indy-killer forces right you can do fine with SoCs for a long time. Plus you can spend the money you would on a powerful priest (usually expensive!!) and that turn's time at the fort to build another researcher. Usually I will just prophetize my starting military commander. Then later on, if he has no good heroic ability, I just kill him off and prophetize a powerful priest or an SC.

Re: Patrolling for Dollars
 

Humm, I set all my provinces to 90 percent on the idea that I might promote population growth or migration (anyone know if this actually works?). Never bothered to make a prophet until the first ArchAngel, by which time everything on the map was dead or 'gentled down'. This was playing Ulm, indy 9, and I just churned out smiths, spys and Arquebus men/siege bowmen. In a few turns i had my neighbor ai's capitals in raging anarchy, and with little income for the rest of the game. As for sites, I created a special group for that purpose and constantly upgraded them until they could find anything. Thoughest things to find are those pesky level 4 unholy sites. Oddly, the ring of wizardry will upgrade unholy on your basic moundfiend but not holy on your basic holyroller. But that's much later, I just made do with earth & fire for a long time. I do very much agree that hiring mercs early is a must do, if only to kill em off so they don't come back to haunt you later.

Re: Patrolling for Dollars
 

It doesn't improve population growth, unfortunately. It is a good idea to lower the taxes until unrest goes below 5, however. After that, the unrest doesn't affect your income or resources, and you can up your taxes to 100.

F1 screen is a great help on this if you haven't already noticed. Press Tabulator (<- -> above Caps Lock) to change whether you want to see commanders or not. Tabulator also hides researchers on the main map.