Re: are stealth units targeted by flames from afar
 

I think you ignore the circumstantial value of Murdering Winter. It doesn't have to kill the huge amount of troops to be worthwhile. For example, in the recent game formidable army was invading my lands. Murdering winter has killed significant number of troops and about half of mages, on the same turn my release army attacked invaders securing victory with minimal losses due to disorder and death of cruicial spellcasters in the opponent's army. After defeating this army military advantage swung to my side and I was able to drive invader back and conquer a number of his lands and castles. Initial murdering winter wasn't probably worthwhile the number of troops it has killed, but the advantage it created was worth much more than 30 water gems.

50+/100+ astral income looks attractive, but successful expansion can bring you more. How would you fight the nation with 60+ gems income of every kind which would also had much larger gold income? Sitting and clam hoarding is essentially betting that other nations will kill each other and no single nation will be able to emerge dominant. Of course, you can target on the expansion and only forge clams with really spare gems. In this case you're not likely to accumulate that many clams, but that is practical approach, I think.

Again, looking at my example, the single Murdering Winter has allowed me to gain some lands (probably worth 200-300 gold per turn), some forts and 15-20 gems per turn. That's much more than the profit from clams. So in my view, clam forging is for the situation where you have no option to expand, when you actually need more astral gems for your immediate wars or when you have really spare water gems (remember, even if you don't need anything from water yourself, you can forge boots of quickness and trade them for something you need).

Re: are stealth units targeted by flames from afar
 

ok but 60 gems from each looks really high to me .
first only half nations are able to search via accashic record so only they find all sites .
with the standard 50% site frequenzy in mp games you have about 2-3 sites in average per province depending on terrain .
your 60+ gems of every kind would be 400+ gems / turn .
in average i think you get about 3-4 lets say 4 gems / fully searched province .
to get your 400 gems you need so about 100 fully searched provinces .
if you control this amount either the map ( aran , inland , desert eye ) is finished already or almost finished or you control at least half of the map ( karan , other 200-250 province maps ) .

so for a not already almost winning empire or a faerun game i think 100-200 gem income / turn per sites is already quite high .
furthermore this is only fully true for pythium and other accashic Users , e.g. vanheim , man etc. have normally big trouble finding more than 50% of the sites .

you are probably all right that clams are not worth building a strat around but your example looks a bit too good to me http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: are stealth units targeted by flames from afar
 

Personally, I rarely search with accashic anyway, as you expand you find various indy mages, some paths you can cover with summoning, so over the time I could search-cast in all paths. Your calculations are about right, but that game was on Orania, I didn't bother to search conquered lands in paths that I thought the previous owners had searched, so probably income was less than it could be, but about half the map on Orania brings quite a lot of gems.

Usually by mid-game you can get into most magic paths up to level 2 at least (indies, summon, mercs), so you can find nearly every site if you have time and need.

My example looks good, because it was example of successful conquest. However, the clam hoarder needs everybody fail in their conquests, so the whole map is in closely fought wars without anybody gaining significant advantage. This is not impossible and may even be a beter bet for some nation, but personally I don't like to rely on strategy which just awaits particular random outcome and when there isn't much difference I can make myself.

So my point was that by the time one could have had 50/100 astral from clams, the successful conquerer will already be wrapping up the game.

Re: are stealth units targeted by flames from afar
 

yep your points are good .
only 2 small additional thoughts :
-on a smaller map ( inland , aran , desert eye ) having 15-25 well defended provinces + clamhoard is good .
because there when you have 150 provinces as you had you have already won .

-on a big map like orania though your conqueror strat has 1 significant disadvantage :
you need lots and lots of troops + battle mages + small scs etc.
furthermore when you have e.g. 60 provinces on orania and are the biggest power then others will ally against you .

the clamhoarder looks weaker and not of a concern instead and does inner growth .
he has the advantage that he can spend most of his money on researchers and he will have in lategame only very powerful summons / scs etc.

i think the clamhoarder will have a higher research then the conqueror .
and the conqueror has to spend his gems on lots of low-midlevel things too because he can't wait and stockpile and techrush .

furthermore many of the best conqueror nations can't accashic and have bad sitesearchers .
so you have to be lucky and conquer e.g. lots of pythium , arco etc. territory which was already fully searched .

at the moment i like mictlan quite much : they can a bit clamhoard and get lots of blood and with the blood can expand very well in most stages of the game http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif.