Quote:
Originally Posted by Sombre
Quote:
Originally Posted by Omnirizon
no. reread my post. I specifically stated it was an awake oracle. the off-the-bat pearl income can pay HUGE dividends when it can be used to quickly bootstrap another gem income for a nation that has natural access to that path but no natural income. Additionally, The Oracle can have at least one path that the nation doesn't have too which can be served by the pearl income to build up an economy of; aside from the astral paths and income of the oracle.
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No. There's no need to reread your post.
Do you mean by using the astral search spell? I'd think in the early game you're much better off manually searching with those native astral mages.
It's an interesting tradeoff in CBM. You lose a lot of scale points by taking it awake and gain,... pearl income. Not the most useful thing in the early game, but certainly nice to have a stash of them to rock that first dispel or to use for magic duels, power of the spheres etc. The research you gain is negligible so I'm sort of discounting that.
The second path doesn't make sense to me. How is the awake oracle going to use it in the early game? If it isn't, I would think a sleeping oracle would be better. It definitely sounds like a build that could have problems with early aggression. No SC pretender, no sacreds,... so who is this with? Caelum? Bandar? |
not the astral search spell... the normal site search spells. The pearls can be alchemized to become anything they need to be. I know... laugh laugh because alchemy suxxor... But used in this fashion it is paying large dividends because a nation can increase its per turn gem income by a factor of two in the early portions of the game and can increase its per game income maybe by 25-50% (depending on the length of the game, short games would see higher percents) since it allows gem income to ramp up very quickly.
This works best with a nation that:
1. Can make do without an SC pretender
2. Don't need a bless
3. have no astral mages...
4. no astral income
5. at least one mage that can site search a path that the nation does not have income in. (i.e. good natural diversity. i.e. five natural paths)
6. uses good scales and needs high dom (maybe combined with weak priests, thus making high dom more necessary?)
Essentially, this is only another option for very specific nations that might have gone with an Enchantress, but where the nation has enough natural diversity that the Rainbow's benefits might be superceded by what an Oracle can offer. In these situations the Oracle will provide at least equivalent scales, better dominion, and an (even higher than Enchantress) natural income of Pearls. The main benefit comes from the much higher dominion.
For nations: Shinuyama is a good nation because they already have access to 5 paths naturally, mages with paths but no gems, and lots of good mix ups. All they need is Astral and Air and something they can alchemize early on to start searching out Water and Air (and of course using the pearls themselves for Astral) to be complete.