[Kel]

Originally posted by Zen:

I mean, is everyone overlooking the tremendous advantage of gem income if they are able to Last long enough to use it?

Given that an SC pretender means more provinces to search and more income to build mages to search with, it's hard to see, losing the ability for a single pretender to run around searching seems to be, at best, an even trade off and, at worse, totally inefficient. (Note this is why I made the suggestion of letting them auto-search a province without spending a turn on it)

Originally posted by Zen:
The advantage in forging and rituals is significant mid-late game.

I am sure this depends, somewhat, on the SC but I think its not hard to build an SC that gives you the advantages of the forging and the rituals that your nation doesn't normally provide while still being an effective SC. I like to use a 4-5/4 N/E Nat, for example, playing Arco. With natural mages covering gaps, that leaves only D/B paths weak. I realize that arco lets me use Nat with less fear of afflictions so take the VQ, so much under scrutiny now, which is half rainbow in addition to being an effective SC. Maybe for a nation that has both poor natural mages and no access to effective rainbow SC's, like the VQ, AND is playing in a game with conducive settings/map, could fully benefit from an RB pretender.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want everyone playing rainbow pretenders either I don't think there is a lot of danger in that right now, though, unless we truly over-compensate.

- Kel