[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Targa:
Let me throw in another question here also:

I've been pretty much using rainbow pretenders for the ability to locate most (if not all) magic sites early on in the game. Unless you go with Arco, or find some other way to have a large pearl income and get a mage-type who has 3 astral (for akashic), there doesn't seem to be a very reliable way to find magic sites of all flavors (since your national mages are going to be limited in paths and levels). Am I placing too much emphasis on finding all the sites? What does everyone else do?

For some nations, it is enough to specialize in the nation's paths only, and holy. For example,
Man can research Thaumaturgy-2 quickly, and site-search in Air and Nature more quickly than with a pretender... and send a sole monk holy-searching. Abysia is much weaker in this respect because Fire, Astral, and Blood search spells are different paths, but you can just cast astral and fire site-searching spells and use a single Demonbred to manually find blood/holy site, or since you'll probably research Blood early, you can use a Dragon to manually search to fire-3 and holy-4 and cast astral and blood site-searches.

Atlantis is set with all (underwater) elemental site searches and water aboveground... never use a rainbow site-searcher with Atlantis. If you use a rainbow mage, give it 4 in the sorcery fields and 1 in the elemental fields... but the combat gods and underwater search spells are so powerful that rainbows are not a good idea.

It varies from race to race. If you want to find most of the sites without acashic record, you need a rainbow mage. But recently I played Vanheim with a water-only Blue Dragon and was able to find most magic sites using search spells... Nature with Druids, Bowl of Blood with a lucky blood-random, Air and Holy with Vanir, water with the dragon (manually searching), Earth with dwarves, Astral with a lucky 1-astral random on a dwarf, Death with an indy Necromancer from a site that lets you recruit necromancers... everything except fire.

If you gain critical mass in searching, you tend to stumble upon sites that let you recruit new mages that can cast search spells in new paths. In that game I found indy nature mages (druids), water mages (hydromancers, 1 and 2 water), death mages (2 death), and witches (worthless). Lizard shamen are also common, and have 1 astral (lets you cast the astral site-search).

-Cherry

[ February 08, 2004, 19:10: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]