[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by Chris Byler:
Many cheap mages can't research at all in drain 3. I generally don't want to use my pretender as a researcher except in the first year or so, and I certainly don't want to be stuck in a situation where he is my only effective researcher ever (or I need to use celestial masters or archtheurgs to research because they are hit least by the drain scale). It's even worse if all your mages are horrendously expensive (Jotunheim except Utgard) or all your mages with decent magic are horrendously expensive (standard Pangaea - dryads can't research in strong drain).

I just had a new idea for making high magic scales more rewarding and cool; I'm going to start another thread with it since this one is supposed to be about luck/order.

I think starting a new thread is a good idea. Your idea's for improving magic are very interesting but would require careful balencing. I think magic is a bit weak in the early game but too powerful later.

The reason I don't care much about drain 3 is that the majority of my present batch of races work on the theory that they start with awesome magic (bless effects) which other players will not achieve anything like for ages. By the time they do hopefully you have found sages who really don't care about scales that much. As long as I can crash up the reasearch ladder later, for wards etc, through mass input of gold the weaker starting scale is ok. My pretender can hit the few improtant early targets. Getting to con 4 for summer lions/fallbears etc is not a big deal anymore while starting with blessed monstrosities is pretty impressive - still its early days yet so its all preliminary assessments for now.

Ciao

Keir