[Saxon]

Just a couple of points to add to the mix. In MP, if people have the graphs turned on, your increased gem income shows like a beacon. Someone with a SC pretender will come after you in a rush, as they know you have valuable income to loot and no tough god to defend it. The solution is to turn off the graphs, though that does take away a lot of information in other areas.

Also, some other threads have talked about the cost effectiveness of searching for the level three and four sites. If I remember correctly, most people argue that the high level sites are quite rare and do not provide that much extra income. As such, a level two search will get the large majority of the sites and the extra cost for the level three and four sites is not worth it. I think Sunray’s site ahs a listing of all magic sites and you can see the percentages of each kind. I am not sure, but I think that around 75% of sites are level one or two. You should run a search on this for more accurate details.

All of that said, in SP, I love having gems and have a lot of fun with this strategy. You can try out the various forged items and summonings that are limited in other strategies. I recommend it to someone who is just starting, as you can play with more of the toys and learn about them. Once you know how cool something is, like a wraith sword, you can go on to build a fancy strategy around it in your next game.