Re: Indep. Mages
 

Assuming you're so rich in death gems that finding someone to hold your Skull Mentors is your research bottle neck. : )

Don't get me wrong, I love Skull Mentors, but determining cost-efficiency is not simple when it involves gems as well as gold.

-Max

Re: Indep. Mages
 

I'd argue crystal offers some of the only flying sacred archers in the game (good for helhiem or arcosephale, since they can couple up with other flying sacreds,) and their standard archers have the best precision of any EA inde archer (which is nice for those archer-less nations)

Re: Indep. Mages
 

I am surprised that noone has done the math on the start up cost for national mages vs. the start up cost for indie mages.

Sure, if you are short on gold, you are going to build a mage in your capital first, usually. For many nations, their best mages will be cap only.

After that, however, you have to choose between building a fortress, lab and maybe temple to produce your national mages or just a lab for most indie mages. Obviously, it's a bit more complicated than that since, on one hand, fortresses have other good uses but on the other hand, they also take time to build and have a large enough start up cost that you often can't always afford them as early as you would like.

Re: Indep. Mages
 

This is a real killer if your forced to use lightless lanterns, as after a couple of months your mages become horror marked. If you transfer the lantern on another mage to avoid losing it when the horror strikes, you can quickly run out of expendable mages.

I personally think lightless lantern should be reduced to construction 4 and the skull mentors put upto construction 6. This would be more balanced.

Re: Indep. Mages
 

take a look at the conceptual balance mod. SOMEONE HAD READ YOUR MIND.

Re: Indep. Mages
 

I don't know. In a MP game with Ulm I started forging lightless lanterns at around turn 25'ish if I recall correctly, and ended up making about 40 of them at a guess. (didn't stop to count them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif), for a measly 2 gems each. By turn 60 I had finished my research and thrown them all away, and it's almost turn 70 now. In all that time (40+ turns * 40'ish lanterns = 1600 cumulative turns), while roughly over half of the mages carrying a lantern got horror marked, only one got attacked by a horror. Obviously you don't want to give them to your expensive capital-only heavy duty mage, but I wouldn't hesitate to put them on any other mage, and I definitely see no reason to start shuffling them around to avoid loosing the lantern.

Also, while I agree it's logical to change the research needed for lanterns and skulls around - after all 9RP > 6RP) I have to say that given the respective costs of both items, and given that generally speaking there are more uses for death gems than for fire gems, I would prefer to forge the lanterns in a situation where I had both kinds of magic.

Re: Indep. Mages
 

I don't agree that construction on skulls/lanterns should be swapped.

Yes, 9rp > 6rp, but skulls are twice the cose. 9rp for 10 gems = 0.9 rp/gem, while 6rp for 5 gems = 1.2 rp/gem. Unless you have a fantastic supply of otherwise-unused gems, you're better off putting your resources into lanterns.

And as Amahazir has pointed out, an occasional horror mark is not particularly problematic for small mages with small items.

Re: Indep. Mages
 

(the cost is also changed in CB...)

Re: Indep. Mages
 

How on earth can people agree there are about a dozen good uses for independent mages which they can list off the tops of their heads, and then conclude that they are "a waste"?

Just a rhetorical question. Seems to be the curse of the Dominions forums that people will constantly be incorrectly declaring things "useless" etc.

Re: Indep. Mages
 

i think the curse is that they disagree - the result, of course, of the highly variable way of playing and perfecting strategies in the game.