Empowerment
 

A question on mages, empowerment and strategy:

I've played a lot of SP dominions, but I've rarely taken much advantage of the magic in the game. My usual strategy is to take maximum scales (Order-3 Prod-3 etc.), build a massive army of medium infantry, and stomp the poor AIs flat. This works most of the time because I can build up my army and kill him before he has time to research enough spells to stop me...

I'm now trying more magic based strategies -- presently, my EA Ctis armies are reinforced by gem-laden Reborns tossing around Shadow Blasts with devestating effect. Because this is only a D2 spell, I can easily get lots of cheap mages to cast it.

What I'm wondering about is the usefulness of the higher magical spells. Most of the really powerful spells require skill levels of 4, 5, or higher. Flaming Arrows is an excellent example of this -- F4 required. I don't see any races that can recruit both national archers and F3 mages, which makes the spell difficult to use effectively. (I'm intentionally ignoring Marginon... long story there)

So after all this prelude, my question is, is empowering mages to higher skill levels a common strategy to employ high level spells? I noticed that EA Yomi has an F2 mage and lots of national archers. Would empowering those snake women to F3, giving them some gems to cast F4 Flaming Arrows, and having them tag along with large archer armies be a common or effective strategy?

Re: Empowerment
 

Before someone much more experienced than I answers your question fully, I'll just say the more common method is to use magic-boosting items to get them to that level. Generally Empowerment is too costly.

Re: Empowerment
 

For that situation, I'd just have them cast Phoenix Power on the first turn and then Flaming Arrows on the 2nd. Give him 2 or 3 gems per battle depending on how much the AI uses to cut fatigue.
If you really want turn 1 Flaming Arrows though, just drop a fire booster on him with Flaming Arrows scripted first. It should only take 2 fire gems per casting.

Re: Empowerment
 

I believe machaka may be a good nation for this, especially if you reach con. 6

I flaearrowed them a lot on dom 2

Re: Empowerment
 

Common means for casting higher-level spells include:

Boosters. Skull staff (+1 D), Earth Boots (+1 E), Flaming Skull (?) (+1 F), Water Bracelet (+1 W), Robe of the Sea (+1 W).

Spell boosters. Summon Earthpower (+1 E, 4 Reinvigoration), Phoenix Power (+1 F, 50% Fire resist), Staff of Storms + Storm Power (+1 A). Underwater, Summon Water Power (+1 W).

Gems, as you mentioned.

Communions. Pythium for sure, and I've done it with EA C'tis.

C'tis doesn't actually need many boosters to cast some devastating combat spells. Cloud of Death has a huge area of effect and is armor-negating; its biggest drawbacks are the high research level and path cost and the low precision (-3). EA C'tis can get around the precision problem with the Nature spell Eagle Eyes, and 25% of Sauromancers can cast it without any boosters at all. Storm of Thorns isn't bad, although it's more a support spell for the entangling effect than an army-killer like Cloud of Death. Don't overlook the battlefield-wide spells like Rigor Mortis. C'tis doesn't have any undead national summons that I can think of, but you can still use Rigor Mortis with regular troops as long as somebody is spamming Raise Dead/Skeletons at the same time. Or you can get a bunch of Pale Riders (pretty cheap for C'tis) and a Wraith Lord. It's a great spell for making sure that a defeated enemy army gets dead instead of away.

-Max

Re: Empowerment
 

The more common forms of boosting your magic paths are as described above. For in-battle, you can use booster spells, gems, and communions (if you are capable). For out of battle your only recourse are booster items.

Generally speaking, due to its high cost, empowerment is only used when you have no other options. For example you might not even have a mage with the magic path you want and thus you would need to empower one so that it could in turn buff or boost itself to higher levels. Perhaps the most common empowerment is blood 0 -> blood 1 so that you can bootstrap a blood economy. Another reason to use a mage might be to get over a "booster-hump" like getting from Air-3 to Air-4.

Re: Empowerment
 

I use empowerment as Ulm (usually in either blood or nature) to let smiths use their forge bonus on different kinds of magic items. I wouldn't ever use empowerment with the intention of casting a battlefield spell. I think just giving your mages the gems in their inventory before they go into battle is effective. For every gem they burn, they get +1 path for that casting only.

Edit: I guess if you intend to do this a lot, it may be cost-effective to empower instead of using a gem every time. But it would have to be a lot of times, right? And then you run the risk of that mage dying and wasting your investment, too.

Re: Empowerment
 

Empowerment can also be better than booster items in the case of immortal mages. Sometimes. If you expect your mage to die repeatedly, e.g. a Phoenix or Vampire Queen is single-handedly repelling an assault on your capital.

-Max

Re: Empowerment
 

Thanks all for the advice -- I had forgotten about the skill boosting spells, definitely a worthwhile way to gain access to higher level spells. Magic items are a bit more micromanaging involved, but I can see how they'd worth the effort to get another bonus level.

So it looks like the order is:
1) Gems
2) Spells
3) Items
in order of ease of use.

Thanks all!

Re: Empowerment
 

My tendency is to use spells to boost paths if the caster is going to spam something like a nuke.

For example, an earth mage casting Summon Earth Power can significantly improve the number of times they can spam a nuke spell by both reducing the casting cost of the spell, and providing reinvigoration.

If I'm going to cast a spell that is better the longer/earlier it's on (fire arrows is a good example) I try to use item boosters or gems to get that spell cast on the first turn instead of buffing to it.

Jazzepi