[Lex]

pretty new myself, but i've found that 'all-paths' (or 'rainbow' as its references on the forum) isn't all that useful. But its probably just my playstyle. I like to mass equip all my main units. Even by midgame that means at least a dozen or more of everything. And I'm not a very patient fellow, so I won't wait a dozen turns for my Pretender to forge my armory.

Rather, I prefer forging items that my national casters can forge (even if it means equiping them all with a level boost). I've read that some people like to go after a handful of items that only two or three of their casters can produce. That's also reasonable. But when the only one who can produce the items is your Pretender, that's means if you lose an army, it'll be quite a while before you can get re-equipped. And that's a big risk.

Then again, you could also use Alchemy to convert gems you don't need into ones you do need. But I'd much rather spend the points on better scales and use my casters to search sites using spells (that also makes it possible to search all your provinces alot more efficiently if you a group of casters taking breaks from their busy research to cast the right spell to search all your provinces for the gems you need.

Also, in my even limited experience, i've found that searching EVERY site with your pretender is difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes you wish your pretender was doing better things so early in the game. Whereas its extremely easy to search every province, as you gain them, with your casters. The trade off is you can only search (cheaply) for your 'national' gems (the gems you start off with in your capital).. other types of gems you need to send some guys out to search manually, until you get a bit of them, and can start casting the spells. But once you get going, its very easy to get really high gem income.

[ August 03, 2004, 19:00: Message edited by: Alexi ]