how to sitesearch effective ?
 

i know there a 3 ways of site searching :
1. search sites through units ( best with rainbow pretender )
2. spells which reveal all sites of one colour like dark knowlegde
3. accashic record

accashic record is really good but only arco , pythium and ryleh ihmo really excel at it and can rely on it .

atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages . so you need to take at least astral 3 on your pretender . but most likely you would have better things to do with your pretender than letting him cast accashic record quite often .

if you instead search with your rainbow pretender first depending how many points you spent on him you find about 50-8x% of the magic sites with him i guess depending if you have level 1 , 2 ,3 ,4 in all / most paths .
second this is time consuming : 2 turns per search . and with high indeps you don't expand at turn 1 probably so when everything goes really well you have searched 10 times at turn 25.
but it is dangerous since most good rainbows are very weak . so after turn 25 letting him search in border provinces is dangerous .
if you are very unlucky you even could loose your pretender because of a random event attack of barbarians or something similiar .


if i search with e.g. dark knowlegde .
it says it reveals all death sites .
there are many sites which produce e.g. 1 death gem and 1 gem of another kind .
so do i find all sites where 1 kind of the produced gems is a deathgem ?
sites like gold mines and so on are they found always the time the province is conquered ?

how many sites are holy / unholy ? i just want to know a rough percentage value http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
are there some really good holy / unholy sites which give many gems which i don't want to miss ?

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

Dark Knowledge etc. act just as a level 9 mage of the appopriate magic would search the target province. And in fact, just as well as level 4 mage could as there are no magic sites above that level.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Atlantis has the S2 Deep Seers, Jotunheim can pull S mages from the multiple sorcery randoms on the big hags in IW and Niefel, and they have S2 Nornas in Utgard.

You're right about Caelum, though. With only the possibility of an S random on a High Seraph, they're not really very innately astral.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

I focus on getting one or two mages to the 3 astral required to start using akashic record. I find that spell the most time efficient although there is a thread talking about it using too many gems.

Gems- if you are number crunching than I guess Akashic record costs too much to be worth it. But I end up with gems coming out of my ears and if not astral than something else which I can convert to astral so really it's a matter of budgeting your resources and deciding what is important to you. Once I actually have someone who can cast it, the whole game changes because it opens up all these new resources.

I no longer use the search command for my commanders. I don't like how long it takes and that combat can interrupt the search.

my $0.10

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Atlantis has the S2 Deep Seers, Jotunheim can pull S mages from the multiple sorcery randoms on the big hags in IW and Niefel, and they have S2 Nornas in Utgard.

You're right about Caelum, though. With only the possibility of an S random on a High Seraph, they're not really very innately astral. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">you are right

but i meant that they can reach astral 3 without empowering / item forging http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
you can give your pretender 3 + astral no matter what race you play . but normally you have better things to do with your pretender http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
starshine skullcap : con 6 , 2A
crystal coin : con 4 , but 2E,2A so hard to forge
these 2 are the only easy options i see so far (perhaps i overlooked one ) to increase astral skill quickly .
if you have S2 , S is either ADNB right ?
so you have with S2 only 1/16 chance of getting astral 2.

i dunno which race can easily forge the crystal coins .
for the starshine cap you need to research con 6 first which needs some time especially at difficult/very difficult research and you don't get good benefits other than the items .

while pythium on the other hand is the best accashic race of all i think . + they have even 1 water income + 2 air .

small question: where can i see if the random magic skill is a sorcery or if i get only elemental or all ?

with the arch theurgs you can accashic http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
if you are lucky you can even get a w2 for clam forging .

normally when you have researched accashic with pythium and saved your astral gems you can immediately cast 2-4 accashics depending on settings and then hopefully you have enough income to cast one every 2 additional turns http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

so in this aspect they have really an advantage over every other nation ihmo http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">i love the accashic too
but at the moment i want to try ermor ae and after this either ulm or man or vanheim .

all are very bad for accashic http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

so at the moment my main concern is to find most quickly many sites with ermor .

another question : how do you best defend against banishment as ermor ?
i want to try them in my first mp game but at my tests at sp so far with impossible ai the ai is sometimes not so stupid at all and i ran into a province now with 3 priests 1 of them prophet + only 10-20 units against my 150 but they won through banishment grr.

so i want to find magic sites most efficient and plan to cope this a bit first with e.g. spring hawks and later better need not eat summons http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

so feel free to post advice http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well, depending on your Ermor theme, the usual way you "defend" against Banishment is that you don't. While spells like Antimagic can help, especially on top of SG Ermor's superior magic resistance, this comes as little consolation to AE, where your undead will just die messily no matter how hard you try.

So ultimately....you don't. How much did you really pay for those troops anyway? Just accept that win or lose, your forces are going to be pummelled, and there's plenty more where that came from. Just try and kill your opponents faster than they can kill you. In the end, all your freebie undead are just fodder for your more important summonables anyway, and if they're getting wasted, your good units aren't.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

yeah i know that they are only fodder http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
but at the beginning i need my gems for other things and the early researches aren't that good too .

so if your enemy decides to attack you in the beginning and if you are worst case neighbored to someone with natural lvl 4 priests like marignon / atlantis .... how do you defend against him ?
if he just has 4-5 priests + some guard troops / perhaps seasonal spirits or something else which doesn't eat how can you defend against this ?
if you didn't take the PoD but a lich / ghostking even your pretender is probably not strong enough to kill them or it is at least very risky .
i mean of course in the first 15-20 turns or so .

edit :
because i like the arch bishops of AE which summon 5 or 6 undead horsemen / turn .
but they are almost worthless it seems to me now .
most likely i should try without bishops http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
trying to get conj 6 quickly is basically a good idea since the spectres are best ermorian researchers or ?

[ June 30, 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: Boron ]

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

As usual, hit them as soon (during a battle) as possible, and develop something that doesn't get banished, as soon as possible.

Large numbers of skeletal horse in the front and front flanks are pretty dangerous since they are so fast and have good attacks, even if they die quickly.

Use the national unholy protection spells, since they will help at least a bit - against a large number of attacks, so the total effect is worthwhile.

PvK

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">yeah i would do this with e.g. atlantis http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

but my main problem is that it seems to me in order to find enough gemincome as ermor i have to take a rainbow pretender ( most likely a ghostking ) to find sites and give him astral 3-4 that after 5-10 searches which equals turn 15-25 he can cast from time to time an accashic savely from the capitol http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif
cause i looked at the magic sites document and there are unfortunately many many sites which produce death gems together with other gems .
i tried a death 10 rest on fire PoD and searched through dark knowlegde but found almost nothing .

so now that you don't have the option of a combatpretender in form of the vq for ermor best option is a first sitesearching than summoning rainbow ghost king would you agree ?

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

Are you saying that a death mage or Dark Knowledge won't find a fire-1/death-1 site? Not sure I understand.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

Has anyone done a cost benefit analysis on site searching with ashasatic record? At different settings of site frequency? At different turns in the game? Why did Saber Cherry get a life and leave us without such wonderful modeling skills?

My thought is that it is an expensive spell, 50 gems worth. You need to get a common currency to determine value, so I am suggesting two for one astral. It could be adjusted to take into account the frequency of astral sites, modified by clams, but that would make my head hurt.

How long does it take for this to pay for itself? Late in the game, if you find a site with 2 gems a turn, the game will be over before the 25 turns elapse and you have paid for it. At what point is it better to spend the gems on summons and items, rather than on the spell?

This would be determined by the site frequency. The higher the frequency, the faster you are likely to get your investment repaid. Has anyone looked at the code to see how the site frequency figure translates into actual sites? Also, does anyone know how the different terrain types effect the site frequency? In specific numbers? That would help determine where to start your searching.

It will also be determined by how long you think the game will Last. Map size will be important in this decision. Generally speaking, the earlier you cast the spell, the more valuable what you find will be to you.

If you can not model all of the above, which I can not, then just bear those ideas in mind as you search.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

Yes, a Dark Knowledge will find any site with at least one death gem associated with it. This is a nice bonus and applied to the others, like Gnome Lore and so forth.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">sure ?
i read the excel chart from sunrays excellent dom site .

there is e.g. :
academy of high magics , lvl 1
type air .
produces 1 air + 1 death gem.

corpse candles marsh , lvl 1
type water
produces 1 death gem + 1 water gem

ebony tower , lvl 2
type blood
but produces 3 deathgems

and so on and so on

in a brief esteem i would say 1/3 - 1/2 of sites who produce death gems aren't death sites .

but dark knowlegde only does a search like a lvl 9 deathmage .

so all the sites like the listed examples aren't found by dark knowlegde right ?

this makes dark knowlege ihmo a pretty bad spell . at least the cost is 3 death gems und you often get luckily a d4 dusk elder which can search for deathsites as efficient as the spell .

so as a conclusion for myself if i want much magic sites i am almost forced to make a rainbow ghostking right ?

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">you'll need a level-1 air mage to find this,

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">.. a level-1 water mage here..

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">and a level-2 blood mage to find this site.

Gems produced have nothing to do with what kind of mage you need to find the site, ATOWR .

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">right.
It's just the same with the other path-specific site searching spells.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I wouldn't say it's a bad spell per se. As nearly everything in DOM, it depends. If you have a 3gems/turn income and level-1 death mage (e.g. you're playing TienChi S&A), you'll prefer casting the spell to moving the stratmove-1 commander around. With death-4 dusk elders, things look quite different.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Not necessarily a Ghost King, but a rainbowish pretender for shure.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">.. you may want to search this forum thoroughly, the following is just off the top of my head:

For each province and each magic path there's a (general %tage + terrain %tage) chance that there is a magic site.

general %tage is set in the game options.

terrain %tage depends on terrain (guess!!), the highest number is used when mulitple terrains apply.
numbers are something like this:
high magic (code 1024): 30%
mountain, swamp, : 20%
woods 10%
grass -10%

or something similar (wouldn't be on the numbers)

[ July 01, 2004, 10:30: Message edited by: Arralen ]

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

From Sunray's magic site database, if all sites are equally probable then:
Level 1 mage finds 40-50% of gems in a province
Level 2 mage finds 70-80%
Level 3 mage finds 90-95%
Level 4 mage/Spell finds 100%

So...a Rainbow mage (level 2 in 7 types of magic) will find 5 times (75%x7) more gems than a specific spell - they won't necessarily be all as useful though!

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

The problem with taking a Rainbow Pretender as Ermor is that your Pretender will be the only mage you have who can make use of the gems that you find, since Ermor's mages are among the most limited that I'm aware of. So most of these other gems will probably just get converted to Death gems. That's useful, but at a 4x1 cost (2x1 for Astral gems) is it really worth building your Pretender around? Probably only over the very long run.

My advice is build a Pretender that helps you more over the short-term, and find your magic sites by taking over someone else's territory. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

If Ermor can get to Conj 6, Spectres (D-1, two independent random wizardry picks) will help dispose of other gem types; and if one has a surplus of non-death gems before that empowerment or alchemy is an option as well. Plus, there are non-Death sites that can offer substantial benefits; for instance, there are non-Death sites that offer free fortifications (very nice since Dead Ermor may be hurting for gold), and sites that offer forge bonuses will be very helpful for boosting research via mass-produced Skull Mentors.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

illuminated ones and members of second and third tiers find magic sites quite easily when walking trhough provinces. no matter if its your own, neutral, or enemy. i`m not sure if all spies are able to do this. black forest ulms are, thats for sure.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

thnx for the advice http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

conjuration / construction are the 2 most important magic classes for ermor anyway or ?

@ vynd what would you suggest that helps me short term more ? only real choices for ermor are a lich , a PoD or a GK right ?

i hoped since i planned to research conjuration quite quickly to be able to summon some support mages for an additional path or 2 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
hopefully i get some of the queens of air but ermor is slow in research unfortunately http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif
but i think you are right the only really cool summon i see at the moment are really the queens of air .

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

Hmm, that is good to know. I did not realize that each magic site had a type, which determined what path of magic was needed to find it. I thought that it was determined by which gems were produced at the site. Thanks for letting us know and sorry for stating that spells like Gnome Lore would find all sites producing earth gems.

As others have said, a spell like Gnome Lore can be used to search two provinces in two turns, while a moving searcher can only search one. This is a big advantage, especially as the sites are worth more, the earlier you find them.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Other potential choices, for the short term, are two human rainbows. The Frost Father starts with W1 and is immune to cold, meaning that a Cold-3 dominion doesn't hurt him, nor does enemy cold spells.

Great Enchantress starts with Astral 1, and generates 1 Astral gem a turn. This means that you can use her for a manual site searcher early (while it's relatively safe, as long as she has bodyguards and a small army), and helps pave the way for Akashic Records later.

Both of these let you get a _huge_ rainbow - 3 or 4 in everything as Ermor. Alternatively, drop a path or 2 in order to get a higher path, and a potential blessing, in some of the others.

The nagas are also an option, for combining combat and site searching / magic rituals. Only problem with them is that, imo, they get shafted on potential equipment and have too high a native encumbrance to be worth the 100 point cost, for any nation.

Re: how to sitesearch effective ?
 

thnx cainehill

my concern against nonundead pretenders was the following :
if i would cast burden of time my nonundead pretender will sooner or later die right ?
if i summon a harvester of sorrow in the province my pretender is in he could get diseased or ?
this 2 spells are quite unimportant though and i can not remember another one like these 2 so if they are the only 2 you are right http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
a frostfather ... is the far better magic allstar than a GK http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif


perhaps even the main reason which spoke for me against this is a roleplaying one :
a human semigod didn't fit for me as the leader of an undead nation http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif human necromancers and so on are ok as lackeys but not as the highest leader which becomes the mightiest god http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif
this has to be an undead http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif