[Kel]

but how do you get the 2 gems of that colour ?

Either through regular site searching or alchemy. Once you have the ball rolling, you can site search with spells. For death, I usually alchemize for the first couple of site searches. Site search for death in provinces that have a high death scale already for an improved chance of finding death sites, specifically.

so as arco e.g. you could only search nature sites with your regular gem income. but since priestresses have only nature 1 and mystics can't get it you have to have it on your pretender in order to search it.

I usually put some nature on my pretender, as Arcos, but not for site searching. I make one thistle mace and then let a priestess haruspex for them. This is a bit slower than I would like, admittedly...but one nice thing is that you already have nature income to make up, somewhat, for having to wait for a thistle mace.

I hate to assume that I will ever find certain indies, especially in the early game. However, that said, another point is that N2 indie mages are *quite* easy to come by. I don't know the whole list but druids, for example, seem quite common. Again, I wouldn't plan on this but if it happens early enough, it's an added bonus.

but with your nice 4/5 astral pearl income as pythium at turn 5 you can cast 1 accashic , turn 10 2 and so on.

If Pythium started with acashic, that might have some nasty potential.

every ritual like dark knowlegde used and later accaishing is quite a waste .

I agree. I don't tend to acashic a lot, especially in the early game, but when I do, I usually do it only on territories I haven't searched, either newly conquered ones, or ones that had low income and I didn't bother with them in the early part of the game when I needed gold income more.

but you only find about 1/8 of the sides

This is the case at first glance. However, there are some factors that modify those odds in your favor:
1) All sites are not created equal. For example, glancing at the site chart shows that blood sites can give me ~20 gems total where astral is in the 90-100 range. The numbers are probably off but it's still something to consider.
2) You can concentrate on finding the gems you need.
3) You often aren't searching blindly so it's not a straight random chance. Scales can tip you off to the existence of sites, particularly death. Certain terrain is also more likely to contain certain sites, further improving your odds.

All this said, the biggest point for acashic, as opposed to physical/individual spell searching is the loss of research from individual site searchers. That's why I am intrigued to try out a rush strategy in conj. with Pythium.

make a rainbowish mage 2 in every colour ( expect blood ).
search your first provinces with him until accaish record is researched

I would generally rather have the provinces from an SC geared towards early expansion, than a rainbow who can search the few provinces I have.

Also, this seems to assume that you don't need gold from farmland/plains, that you don't need specific gems at certain times, that you have no aggressive neighbors and you need no spells outside of acashic in the early game. Which could be true, with unusual settings and/or SP games.

but for pythium / ryhleh / arco the most valuable spell seems to be accaish record ihmo and the 8 find one element spells are total crap .

That's pretty strong sentiments

Arcos has a lot of flexibility in their mages and, in some ways, can individually site search better than most nations.
Rlyeh isn't particularly good at individual site searches in the early game but they can astral search early and a bit later use Voice Of Tiamat(conj-4, 8 water gems), which is quite nice.
If acashic is good for any of those 3 nations, I would say it would be pythium, since their provinces are likely to be mostly land and they don't have the elemental flexibility of mystics.

- Kel

[ July 02, 2004, 21:30: Message edited by: Kel ]