[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Sandman:
You have to rely on getting the right random picks, as well as relying on finding sources of air, death and fire gems.

Getting the right random picks won't be very hard, since Black Priests are cheap enough that you can build multiple per turn. Getting the right gems can be done, but may take a little while for them to start showing up in quantity.

And regular Ulm can also make research items, whilst still having an average researcher to fall back on.

Regular Ulm can't make lightless lanterns till construction 6, and then they still have to find a source of air gems.

If you want variety, indy mages are a lot better. Admittedly, they're not 'guaranteed', but pretty likely, especially with a rainbow pretender.

The independent mages that you are most likely to find are probably going to be jade amazons, shaman, and druids. These can take care of nature and water searching. Your own black priests can handle death, earth and astral. That leaves only fire and air to search with in some other manner if you really want independent mages.

But with a rainbow mage you can find more, and better, independent mages, often with a free lab or even fortress. Once those indy mages are given dwarven hammers, they can keep a good supply of items coming. Regular Ulm will not gain any blessing benefit from having a caster pretender, either.

Bless effects are not going to be worth it on the black lord, unless you get both air 9 and astral 9 to cover their weaknesses.

I find rainbow mages very overrated, for any nation. It is just as easy, and usually faster, to site search with your national mages and site searching spells.

I don't think that it would. It has these two weaknesses, but it doesn't gain enough strength in other areas. A drain-immune Iron faith would still have limited mages.

They certainly aren't any worse than the standard Ulm mages, since they have much more versatility.

A 2 earth Iron faith would still suffer from drain. Plus I advocate a higher cost for the upgraded BPs, a new associated weakness. [/QB]

It's not much of a weakness, since even at 200 gold they could afford multiple mages per turn.