Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

Wrong !
In a rather normal setting (50%) you'll find 1-3 sites producing an average of 1.5 gems each, so you'll get 3 gems/turn, refunding you in 10 turns or so...

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

50% is rather normal ONLY for Early Age. And I'm not sure if the default is 45% or 50% even there.

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

You also have to factor in the option of a manual search...if you can find half the paths in a province with a 0-gem local search with your nationals then all of a sudden your refund time has doubled. It depends on the nation you have though...Shinuyama's bakemono mages have something like 10 magic paths they can manually search for, while it'd take Ulm a small army worth of mages to find a level-0 site.

You also need to have conj 5 researched and a really large pile of pearls to make this feasible, since even if all of those sites you're finding with the search produced pearls you'd still need about 150 stockpiled to cast acashic every turn until you were making the 25/turn it's costing you.

-Micah

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

Uh, you do realize that lv 0 sites are automatically visible? It's lv 1-4 that you have to seach for and effectively only lv 1-3 because there are so few lv 4 sites and almost all of them rare to boot.

Edi

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

Yes, it was hyperbole, along with the 9th and 10th path of magic that those shinu mages are looking for. I guess some people may have been genuinely confused though if they didn't know the game that well, so probably a fair comment on my post =)

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

45% EA, 40% MA and 35% LA. I personally usually play my SP games with max (70%+ sites), cause they are fun...

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

Hey, it's 10 pm and I'm on helldesk duty, do you really expect me to think straight? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Edi

Re: Strategy advice wanted
 

Yes it was 40%; not 50%, but it doesn't change the numbers much... Anyway I didn't say that Acashic everywhere was a good idea, just that it can pay for itself if you cast it from time to time on a high magic freq province (waste, swamp, "magic rich if marked on map..).
Manual searches don't cost gems but cost valuable mage-time and are a lengthy process, evreything has its pro and cons (hi Gandalf ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif ) and I usually use all methods - first "manual" searches, then magic, and possibly Acashic if I have the resources later on.