[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
There's no way that you will have built 700 clams by turn 35, which is what is required if you want to build 35 clams per turn. To get to 100 clams, you never need more than 5-7 mages, and that's only for the very Last turns of the progression.

That's probably right, and I've said in my post that you'll use them for clam forging only as much as you have gems for them. But you would stlll likely to build 1 priestess each turn, if for no other reason than because they are such great and cheap reseachers, much better than almost all national mages, save few nations. (from cost/efficence point of view). So you just use whanever priestess are not forging clams for your reseach. And later, when your clam production will be catching up, you'll be switching more priestess to forging, leaving rest at reseach. At some point not too down the road (but later than turn 40, agreed) your claim production is bound to outrun your pristess production, since clams grow is geometrical and priestess can only be recruited one per turn. Than you'll have to start using your national ones, but up until than your pristess will take care of all your forging for you. However at that time you'll have such a massive gem income, than game is likely to be won anyway.


You have to remeber that the discussion with Zap started that with him saying that since R'leh, and other nations have 2 water national mages available, than changing clams to nature 5 water 5 would solve clam-hording problem. I disagreed, saying that it would not, and in fact could be counterproductive in some cases. So you are actually adding weight to my argument, that priestesses, who could be relatively easy recruited from forest provinces with minimal luck and some scouting, will be more than enough to handle all your clams forging for you up to mid game at least, and at reduced cost.

[ April 05, 2004, 20:44: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]