[Boron]

Originally posted by Skolem:

quote:

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Originally posted by Alexi:
And I'm not a very patient fellow, so I won't wait a dozen turns for my Pretender to forge my armory.
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.

You don't use only your pretender for forging. Untill midgame you use him as a sitesearcher. Believes me the amount of Gems you will have has no comparison to any other strat. After this you can forge one or two magic boost to summon Mage with the path you don't have, with the time you will have a lot of Mage with a lot of different path combos and they will allow you to equip (in the mid-late game) 2 to 3 SC fully in one turn. It will be no problem because the amount of gem your pretender gives you is really amazing.

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with pythium rushing to accashic gives you the gems a bit later but no need for a rainbow . you can so faster expand and with standard settings of 40+% normally accashic is just fine

for ermor ae/sg i like a strong rainbow . either ghost king or frostfather because they need gems so bad .

but for every other race than ermor i either don't care tooo much about gems ( only the national thaumaturgy sitesearch spells i cast there ) or i have accashic or i have a semirainbow sc pretender .
2-3 in every path only you find lots of sites by searching but that's slow .
and you have to take a nonscpretender . forging ring of wizardy and the like is too expensive earlygame .
so while you have one of the highest gem incomes you have no access to highlevel summons while the others only have about 1/3 of your income but access to highlevel summons / items without empowering .
given that their pretender is already a sc + they can get more your additional gems you get are almost wasted .

furthermore clamhording can be nice too .
a rainbow needs at least 2 turns per province searched . midgame letting him search your outskirts is a really dangerous choice anyways

conclusion : rainbows are fun in sp but in mp they are probably not very competetive .