Re: Gem Income?
 

There's a few rules of thumb, that can help maximize your sitesearching.

forest - search for nature
coast - water (?)
mountain - earth
swamp - death, nature (?)
waste - death, fire

The scales of a province can also help you, the first thing I do is search any provinces with death for death.

Re: Gem Income?
 

Death scaels in a neutral province usually means Well of Pestilence, which required D3 to find. Could also be Dying Forest in a forest province and that's N1. Other death scale sites are rarer. There are several good site searching discussion threads linked from the strategy index, though the bit about how the monthly site searching works is n longer up to date.

Re: Gem Income?
 

Your gem types sound normal.

Some of the guides get a bit carried away with themselves, often giving you the impression, 'look you can do all this', when in reality you have to choose between strategy A or B.

To get mega amount of gems in a game you after plan to produce blood stones, clams, fever fetishes or get 1 or more global gem producer up.

Any province which produces a decent amount of gems, consider a castle there, to guarentee the income.

I play alot and constantly encounter a shortage of astral and nature gems. Even on 50%+ magic sites maps. The nature shortage has become alot more apparent since all those extra sites got added in a patch some time ago. Searched 50+ provinces for astral in 2 MP games recently and only got a lousy single figure astral income. So thats 100s gems in astral searching to get a income of 7s or so. Not good and very annoying.

I never have a shortage of death gems which seem far too plentiful and is usually my highest gem type income or close too it.

Re: Gem Income?
 

search by hand, saves you gems :D

Re: Gem Income?
 

It all depends on:

1. Your magic site frequency setting in options before starting a game.

2. If you are site searching with mages or with spells. I find it easier to get magic economy rolling by using spells instead of searching manually. It also saves alot of time. Try to focus your starting gems onto basic search-spells(Augury, Gnome Lore etc.) before going for other magical things that require gem-usage.

3. The luck scale affects gem income. The higher your luck-scale the bigger is the chance of receiving gems in random events each turn.

4. What kind of terrain you are site-searching in.

Re: Gem Income?
 

manual or spell searching really depends on the frequency of magic sites and the number of paths of the mages.


Site Frequency 40-60% and multipath mages 3+paths: Manual site search.

Cheap N2F2W2A2 mages or S1D1 mages, or mages wth significant research penalties: Spell search.

Re: Gem Income?
 

I'd search manually if I have a mage with 2 path 2's and something on the side

Re: Gem Income?
 

In single player you often can go with researching for search spells while in MP games you should bettter research some battle magic and manual site search evel with lvls 1.
You can miss the 3-4 sites but youll get gems from lvl 1 sites & you are ready first, for ex you may want constr or alteration for a combat pretender or unlock flaming arrows or mind burn to stop an agressive neighbour, they dont wait for you to be prepared.