Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

I'm going to make an educated guess here and say that your Oracle was burning pearls to boost his chances of victory in the duels rather than to reduce what little fatigue it would cost it. I haven't heard of this special case for Magic Duel before, and it is not listed in the Wiki page I linked to above. But, I've got to believe that is what was going on.

There is good nugget of advice in this little epiphany, if you are sending a mage in to battle with the intent of spamming Magic Duel, dump some pearls on him if you want to increase his probability of survival.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

Magic Duel is based on the unboosted S levels of the mages.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

Yes, there would have been no point boosting the S level even if it worked: I was S9 and facing S2 adonim so had 100% chance of success. But to make sure I could retrat in time, I had tested the magic duel-returning combo in SP several times until I found out how many pearls the oracle actually used in battle.
I think that's the best thing to do: Setup a test game, check how many gems your mage will use to cast the spells you want to use. (Of course, magic scale affects fatigue casting, so the test may need to take thhat into account, but I haven't found the scale really relevant with reagrds to gem use).

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

There would be no point if your mage knew the level of Astral of his opponents. But, the coders may not have written the AI code with the premise that your mage would know that. This could still be true, and consistent with some coherent concept of how battle magic in Dom3 works, even if the AI is written so that he targets the highest level opponent Astral first.

On the other hand, if Deathblob is right and that gem boosters don't help, then this could actually be a bug. I just can't think of any reason other than increasing the likelihood of success, even when the exact probability is not known, for your A9 Oracle to use Pearls for Magic Duel.

It is a good case for testing. I would be particularly interested if you set up a test with A9 astral mages on both sides of the duel but only one having the cache of Pearls. Run the test a few times and we should have a pretty good idea if the Pearls affect who wins.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

May I ask (politely), if you care so much about discovering whether/when/how/etc gems are cast, why don't you run the turn with -dd debug ? Does that not tell you what you want to discover?

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

Because the question (or rather the answer) we all want to know is "OMGWTFBBQ WHY!?!?" And sometimes "Why not?".

Unfortunately neither of which is in the debug log.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

For magic duels, pearls and items don't affect who wins. Only the base, raw level of the caster.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

In that case, you should report it as a bug.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

Why would it be a bug? It's the ai gem usage, the ai decides to use it however it wants. If the wiki gives an inaccurate description of how the battle ai works, it's that site which is wrong, not the game which is bugged. It may as well be working as designed for all we know, and it's not an issue once you have done your homework of checking how many gems you actually need before going to battle.

Re: Gem Usage in Battle
 

I'm not sure, but it appears that the "corner" part of the corner-self-blessing idea was suggested because a unit by itself in the corner wouldn't be close enough to other sacred units to decide to bless them instead of itself. But if the unit is alone to begin with, there's no reason to put it in any particular spot just for the sake of blessing--it'll very likely hit itself on its first try no matter where you put it. (I think it's still possible for the blessing to miss, in spite of the maximal precision of the spell, but even if I'm right about that, it's still unlikely enough that you can safely ignore the possibility in most cases.)

My experience suggests that the 1-or-0 gem-use switch that shows up in the debug log is the extent of the influence that the enemy's strength can have on gem use in this situation. Especially with a self-targeting spell like Soul Vortex that works no matter what enemies are present, I wouldn't expect enemy strength to have anything to do with the per-spell gem use decision. But I'm only speculating with little evidence. Can anybody confirm this one way or the other?