Arcane Nexus
 

Quick question...

Do gems spent on summons or Globals count towards AN, or just forged items?

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

Everything on the strategic map other than alchemy that requires gems adds to gems you get from arcane nexus.

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And of course astral gems and blood slaves used in rituals and forging dont count either

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So if I cast say 'Burden of time' or Utterdark (I know that is death... for 100 gems and 999 extra D gems and I had Arcane nexus...I would recoup some of that back?:confused:

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The description for arcane nexus reads that half of the cost of all spells and forging done on the strategic map is refunded to you. So, for a 999 gem spell you should receive about 450 pearls.

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Well, yeah...but if you've got AN and a 999 Utterdark up I doubt you much care how many gems you're spending....

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

Setting aside the scenario of casting 999 gem Utterdarks, this does have the strategic implication that if:

1) You have an "unassailable" AN up
2) You are planning to alchemize large numbers of gems to pearls (large being defined as "large enough to cast a global")
3) You don't have any other globals currently in effect
4) You can afford to wait a turn to use the pearls

...then you might as well cast the global, hoping to knock someone else's global out of the list. You'll get the same number of pearls back as if you had alchemized them (albeit a turn later.)

Ok, so that's still pretty niche. :p

Also, rdonj, half of 999 is 499.5 - not sure why you'd round that down to 450?

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

That is mean.
I like it :D

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I could be wrong, but I thought it was actually a quarter?

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I rounded down to 450 because I am terrible at maths. :(

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Hrm...not at the game right now, but the spell description for Arcane Nexus on the wiki says half and it's usually verbatim...I've never tried to measure it to confirm though.

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The manual text has "collects one quarter of all gems", the spell text in the game says half.

I did a quick test with the Debug Mod.
Casting Sea of Ice with 150 Water gems total the same turn the Nexus went up earned me 38 gems.
Having another nation cast Well of Misery with 200 total D gems the next turn got 52 gems.

I'm not sure where the extra 2 came from, though the game text does say "absorb some ambient magical energy", but it looks much more like a quarter than a half.

If you want to reconcile the description, assume it collects half the gems, then converts them to Astral pearls through alchemy, cutting them in half again.

Even at a quarter it's a game winner. In a decent size game, you'll have enough gems after a turn or two to cast it again at or near max. Meanwhile everyone else is crippled because they don't want to give you gems.

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

Well, game winner not so much....

It costs 150 pearls to cast it and makes you King of the Hill. It also invites the much-easier-to-999 Astral Corruption to counter it.

In order to make AN unassailable as specified earlier, you have to put a lot of gems in it since, at base cost, it can be dispelled with only 30 pearls, so if you assume that you're using say 300, it costs 180 to dispel and 200 to dispel with certainty.

Once it goes up, people stop casting non-astral, non-blood spells for fear of enabling you to be come God of Wishes and switch to Astral/Blood.

I would say that you should be expecting Astral Corruption, Dispel, or to be imploded by your neighbors unless you agree to pay pearls to your neighbors to prevent attacks.

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

LOL...actually, I was just wondering.

However, IF I was going to put up AN I would wait until I had enough to put 999 in Utterdark AND have 999 to recast AN in case someone dispelled my AN.

If I have Utterdark up, I probably don't care at that point if you cast AC or not, I just don't want you casting wish.:p

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

I don't know what kind of games you all seem to play. I never had anywhere close to 999 gems to put in a global in MP :confused:

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

But at that point in the game, assuming there are more than a couple of nations left, you're going to rake in hundreds of gems a turn.
You can put a couple hundred into it, and brag about how strong it is. If your enemies want to pool gems to dispel it, they'll have to wait a turn - more income for you. If they cut way back, you'll get less but they'll be hurt. Not everyone can go full Astral/Blood even late game. Forging gear if nothing else.

When they take it down, you use the gems you got from it and throw it right back up again, stronger. It does really depend on how much you can get that first turn.

On the other hand Grudge, AN doesn't affect any one casting Wish. Astral and Blood are exempted.

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Arcane Nexus is definitely a game winner...

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Under appropriate circumstances it -can- be. Nothing is certain. It just significantly skews the win in your favor.

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Hmmm theoretically speaking, arcane corruption looks like a pretty good counter to arcane nexus, you may even be able to spin it that way and not attract the wrath of the mob.

Consider how easily you can amass virgins with a blood nation, you should have no problem replacing a random global and putting up a big AC, though if you overwrite AN that would be hilarous and definitely get you mobbed.

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Only to have it put up again, this time with even more pearls gained from the AN?

If you have AN up, you'll accumulate enough gems to dispel AC soon enough. Your chances are pretty good with a caster capable of casting AN in the first place. And with Returning scripted you also have a good chance of avoiding horrors.

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

AN is often followed by Armageddons to stop blood-hunting.
No population - no virgins .

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Taking away people's virgins should be banned (Unless they are other people's virgins of course)!

Never knew that AC can be dispelled with 30 base cast dispel no matter how many slaves you pump in though.

AC seemed like a counter in that it's even more incentive for players not to cast/forge, so AN shouldn't rake in too much? Or that it would slightly deter the AN player's casting, though certainly won't impact any of his astral mage with returning scripted, e.g. he can still cast wish with impunity.

Is AN + wish 1-2 punch doable under CBM without clams? I've never finished a MP game yet so I have no feel for these things, I suppose alchemizing should do it though, I'm probably just naturally hesitant to use alchemy.

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

Only the base spell can be dispelled with 30.
it follows the normal rules of dispel.

CBM made astral a lot weaker, not having clam whoring for wishing, AN etc.

You can pretty routinely get 75 gems a turn with a good size game mid to late game.

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ah okay, thought blood enchantment doesn't follow the normal rules on dispel/overwrite for a moment there.

a good powered AC would be pretty hard to get rid of in CBM, given how easy it is to get lots of blood and no clamming.

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Singling out astral magic is incredibly misleading. Astral is only weaker inasmuch as all of the non-blood magic in the game is weaker. Due to alchemy and wish mechanics the removal of clams DOES NOT have an appreciable effect on pearl availability *in relation to other gem types*. E and F gems, otoh, do become harder to procure for much of the game (until wish is unlocked.)

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

Sorry Micah - you're wrong.

The lack of clams drastically decreases the availability of pearls, especially early.

Can you compensate by alchemizing gems - sure but at a cost that did not exist in the vanilla game.

Clams made bootstrapping in astral - skullcap, astral coin, ros, row a viable strategy. It can still be done - but at a cost to (for example) your thug or SC forging.

Certainly, earth and fire were also affected. But to say all nonblood magic is just not right. Water and nature are certainly not less available - if anything they are more available (no clamming).

I think it is also fair to say that clamming was more widely practised than either blood stones or fever fetishes. Blood stones more or less are precluded for most water nations, for example; and I generally only identify a handful of weaker nations practice FF'ing.

In short - the ratio of other gems
a) does not apply to water, nature.
b) is not as commonly expressed in bloodstones and fever fetishes
c) is not the only relevent metric. Summons such as rudras, siddhe's etc, and forging like ROW do not depend on ratios but rather on raw numbers. Reducing the raw numbers of gems delays the introduction of these items and summons into the game.
Pearls increase your raw gem production (invisibly); and were a good investment. Strategies which therefor require a lot of pearls are therefor strongly affected.

Do you really mean to argue that R'lyeh (MA or LA) is not much worse off under CBM than under vanilla, solely considering the change to gem generators?

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The alchemy cost that you claim didn't exist in vanilla is built into the basic game economy. One pearl = 2 gems once you unlock wish, which was fairly trivial with clams. Alchemy provides the same economy in reverse, but is available from the start of the game, and thus pearls are always available for the same 2:1 rate you get later. Unless you want to argue that unlocking wish nerfs astral magic since it's then so much better to wish away all your pearls into other gems?

Having to give up other options in order to get boosters is due to the tighter gem economy in general, not anything specific to S. Previously the inefficiency in using pearls for things was eclipsed by the sheer size of the game economy, now that things are tighter it's easier to notice the true cost of different options.

Clever little bait and switch there with your question about R'lyeh. R'lyeh, being aquatic and (I believe) having W cap income is, of course, hurt by clams being removed, since they get stuck with a pile of crappy W gems at a higher rate than other nations. They might also be a more gem-dependent nation in general, and obviously have a hard time breaking into blood, none of this translates into a direct nerf to astral magic.

I don't think anyone's going to argue that W magic got stronger due to the change, so I'm not sure what you're getting at with your comment about those gems being more available. W obviously took a pretty serious hit, although its main use (being turned into S gems) remains via alchemy and the Maelstrom global.

As for your 3 points: A is specifically covered by alchemy, B is a side point, and C is the reason you're looking at this wrong. If C dictates that something is a bad investment now then it was a bad investment before, you just had enough gems to not notice...if you've got a billion dollars shelling out 20 bucks for a happy meal isn't gonna even register to you, and is probably worth it instead of haggling over the price and wasting your time, but you still got ripped off. "Strategies that require a lot of pearls" basically boils down to "strategies that are inefficient but require less micro due to using fewer bigger, but ultimately less cost effective units."

And yes, I'm not gonna go so far as to say there's absolutely zero effect, there's gonna be some residual stuff due to overhead and delays in getting to wish and various opportunity costs, so there's some effect on S magic. On the other hand having a soul slay kill an opponent's SC hurts a lot more when they have 5 and not 50 of them running around, so it's a bit hard to say which side comes out on top in that debate. I think it's certainly too close to call, and even if it took a slight hit it's too minor to warrant all this screaming about a supposed S nerf. It's simply not the case in my mind. I used a hell of a lot of alchemy in the games I've played since CBM came out though.

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

I never said alchemy never existed. However, to say that cmb didn't nerf astral because wish exists is ignoring the 2/3'rds of the game before you *unlock* wish.

And most positions are lost WAY before you have wish.

We agree on the facts. Gems are tighter as there are no gem generators. And more specifically S gems are tighter, as there are no clams. As you have no gems, each S action you must take becomes more expensive.

Instead of having 30 astral income on turn 20 - fairly easy in a vanilla game - you might have 10. That makes your availability of doing things like magic duel, gate etc much more expensive.

There is *no* bait and switch. You arguing astral magic didn't get weaker is ridiculous. Pick an astral nation. R'lyeh, Pythium. Kailasa. Whatever. EVERY single astral nation became weaker, by the nerf to gem generators.

In Rlyeh's case, having S mages and battle scripts and rituals that require S gems means the cost of doing those operations went up. Its not even arguable with a straight face.

Sure, you can alchemize two gems to make your make your pearl. now your magic duel is costing you *two* gems.


Alchemy has nothing to do with the point.

So say you. Argued without support.


Ridiculous argument. So according to you we can just remove all astral gems from starting nations - since according to you gem income is irrelevent.

You're wrong on the face of it and trying puerile arguments to support it. You're the one that has it backwards.

Law of supply and demand says that if you remove supply, the item becomes more expensive. Removing a supply of pearls makes EVERY item purchased with pearls more expensive. So rudras became MORE expensive because you removed pearls. NOT the *inferior* value of rudras got revealed.

But even foraking that argument. The alchemy arguement is ridiculous - you can alchemize with generators as well as you can alchemize without them.

Forsaking *that* arguement - the facts are simple. With gem generators, you are more likely to turn pull of turn 20 gates.
you are more likely to pull of turn 30 ROW.

Every single astral option is now deferred due to lower 'cash flow', or scrutinized more closely due to 'higher cost'.

As for 'screaming' this was my entire original quote;

Hardly screaming.

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Wish is needed to turn pearls into OTHER gem types. Wish does not enter into the situation when you are converting TO pearls. I bring up wish because it means that the game considers pearls to be equal to two other gems, which is the same ratio you get from alchemy. Granted the equivalency doesn't appear completely until late game, but that's when clams have the most impact, so a minor quibble. The way alchemy works and gem valuation is why I brought up E and F as having taken harder nerfs, since you DO need wish to get those gem types without paying through the nose.

Um, your point B IS a side point, since we're talking about astral, not earth and fire.

I'm not convinced that S nations actually took the hit you're describing, although since they're almost all human nations they did lose some ground to nations with recruitable thugs, since thug/SC nations do better in a tighter gem economy. I don't think that has anything to do with magic flavor though, just that S nations tend to be human (and I already explained my objection to using R'lyeh as a metric.) In fact, in the last RAND game I was pretty hell-bent on avoiding fighting astral nations if at all possible, and lost something like 300+ gems and 5000g worth of stuff to a 4,000g communion of astral mages played by an inexperienced player. Maybe astral was even MORE powerful before, but it's certainly not hurting now.

As to the bottom section of your post, I have to toss off a quick "wtf" for some of the accusations and arguments you're making there. You do make a good point though, albeit by accident. You could go ahead and remove all pearl income from the game and it would not effect the true cost of astral magic, which is that each pearl you spend is the equivalent of two other gems. CBM doesn't change that, it just makes it obvious.

Granted, having a pile of pearls allows you to defer the extra cost until you could have wished the pearls away into gems, but sooner or later every pearl you spend is 2 gems you don't have, and I am posting from a game-winning mentality here, meaning you will most likely have access to wish by the end-game. (And I already admitted to there being a bit of a nerf in games that last long enough for clams to pay off but not long enough to get wish...that's a pretty narrow band though, and the clams really don't kick into high gear until around the time you can wish, so I consider the effects fairly minor.)

And the "screaming" comment was based on the consistent posting of the supposed astral "nerf" as fact across several threads, not because of this specific instance, or really the tone in any of them. I'm not sure if you are the author of all of the posts on the subject or not, but taken in aggregate I believe my comment was warranted, though perhaps mistargetted.

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ChrisP please empty your PM box! I can't PM you cause it's full...

Re: Arcane Nexus
 

Micah - I win about half my games before I *get* wish. I have certainly cast wish less than 5 times in all my mp games.

I don't care one way or the other playing with or without gem generators, I also don't care if astral is weaker, one way or the other. However, to say it isn't so <shrug> that I can't agree with.

Your idea about the cost of using a pearl is two gems lost is not the only metric of cost - and many times, its not even the appropriate metric.

The real question is - is spending a pear on turn 10 get a better result than having 2 gems on turn 60. There are hundreds of cases where the answer is yes.