Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

Take a look at how cheaply you could make soul contracts.

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

And then with that nexus up you could easily wish for both hammers and for magic power, forgeing practically any magic item in the game for free (soul contracts, rings of wizardry, artifacts ect). Alot of effort to put in (in a mid+ sized game youd only need the nexus up a few turns to do this) but getting practically free items is worth it (1 free soul contract per turn adds up)

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

Forge Bonuses round in your favor. So having one guy with the Hammer of the Cyclops making a 25 gem item saves 13 gems. Having another character with the Hammer of the Forge Lord making another 25 gem item saves... 13 gems. So if you have one guy with both hammers make an item for free, that saves you 25 gems - 1 less gem than you would save if two forging mages were making items with a hammer each that turn.

So really, what's the deal?

Sure, you can make free Rings of Wizardry or something crazy, but so what? You're already using the Hammer of the Forge Lord and a Dwarven Hammer together - you're making those rings for 16 gems a piece (8 if you have the Forge of the Ancients, 6 if you have the Steel Ovens). Is it really that big a deal?

You're saving 16 gems, but you're tying up the Hammer of the Cyclops on your main guy, which means some other forger is going to have to settle for a Dwarven Hammer this turn. Your production of Skull Faces (or the like) is going to cost 18 gems instead of 12. Your production of Rings of Sorcery is going to cost 20 instead of 30. In short, while you are saving 16 gems a turn by making free Rings of Wizardry, you are also costing yourself 6-10 gems each turn.

So your grand master plan, which generally requires Construction 8, Alteration 9, and a heavily Astral four armed pretender (no four armed pretenders start with any Astral magic) is generating a total of 6 to 10 Astral Pearls a turn. And it cost over a 100 to set up. Is the fact that it can't be dispelled (only Wish stolen) enough to make it that much worse than Stellar Brilliance in terms of gem output?

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Seriously, the only thing that justifies this is the "surprise" factor of being able to mass produce magic items that correspond to no magic type that you do. But honestly, by the time you have Contruction 8 and Alteration 9, I refuse to be surprised by anything an Astral character can bring to the field.

-Frank

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

But that one guy making items for free, if forging the same amount of items would save you 50 gems rather than 26.

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

Who gives a crap? You don't have unlimited time. In the same time that you could save 50 gems by having the Destroyer of Worlds make all your stuff you could have two ordinary recruitable mages use the same equipment and save you 52 gems - and put twice as much equipment in your lab.

In forging, as in everything else in this game, time is the limitting factor. In the long run, everyone will research through to level 9 in every path. Everyone will find magical gems sufficient to empower themselves up to level 9 in every path and even battle vestals wil die of old age. But that doesn't matter, because the game is over before it hits turn 200 even in the longest of games. 1 item a turn is nice, but in the big scheme of things it doesn't matter.

-Frank

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

You should probably use 40 gem items, since that's what you'll want to be forging.

You'll never reallyneed more than one ring of wizardry, so that's not a big deal. The thing that is a big deal is the ability to permanently boost your blood slave income by 7 per turn for every turn that you are forging items.

No, it's generating 7*n blood slaves per turn, where n is the number of turns that you've spent forging soul contracts. And since astral pearls are still evailable by the hundreds to the water nations, the cost in pearls becomes much less of an issue.

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

By the time you can be doing this, Soul Contracts aren't worth 7 blood slaves per turn per turn.

You have level 9 spells, if you really cared about making Devils with blood magic, you'd make them with Infernal Forces, which comes with an army of imps and may very well be cast through Mount Chaining or even the Summoning Circle for a tremendous cost savings and the Devils come now instead of 7 turns from now which is a huge help.

No, if you want to make blood slaves with Forging, I suggest you make Dousing Rods. Each one increases the chance of your blood hunters successfully coming back with blood slaves, and it adds 1 to the number of blood slaves each comes back with. Those things are actually worth 2-3 slaves per turn.

Soul Contracts are great, but if you have the ability to Wish for unique magic items they aren't worth 7 slaves a turn - not even close.

-Frank

Re: Indy commanders with magic items
 

Soul contracts are _always_ worth 7 blood slaves per turn, because that's the cost of the devils. You can't build a strategy around a site that you'll probably never find such as mount chaining. On the other hand, you can build a strategy around dwarven hammers, because you can guarantee access to them.

The infernal forces spell only produces 7 devils per turn per B5F2 mage, so once you have seven soul contracts it becomes more mage time efficient to build another one instead of casting infernal forces. The mass summoning spells are for when you need the forces right now, soul contracts are an investment in the future growth of your nation.

Why on earth would you make a B1 item, an item that all of your blood hunters have had since the turn after you researched construction 4, with a mage that could be making a B5 item for 5 slaves? What kind of strategic advantage are you hoping to gain by forging dousing rods one at a time with your wished for, astral empowered, then magic power wish boosted Nataraja? Further, why do you really care that an item that would normally cost 40 gems now costs five gems instead of zero?

Soul contracts are always worth seven slaves per turn, because that's how much the devil they produce costs. They are the most cost efficient way to create devils, and they, along with the other gem producing items, are the (almost only) reason that forge of the ancients is a worthwhile spell. There's a reason that a wish for blood slaves is one of the best wishes you can make, and that's because it's much easier to turn that wish into an effective gem income than it is for many other wishes.

Re: Indy commanders with magic items