Quote:
Originally Posted by Baalz
Not to be argumentative, but what do you use any gems for outside of combat, summoning, and forging? Assuming I've got national air mages to use them air gems are often one of my most strategic gems.
Cloud trapeze - this spell at A2 is generally much more accessable than an S3 for teleport, which means you can move a lot more of your mages provided you've got the gems. Coincidentally, a lot of the national A2+ mages make good solo thugs - Vanheim/Helhiem, Eriu, Lanka, Formoria, etc. If not thuggin', then dropping in to lay down wind guide/arrow fend or more optimistically mass flight/fog warriors/wrathful skies. Or:
Thunderstrike. A2 mages are drastically more common than A3 ones. One owl quill = 5 thunderstrikes = a tremendous amount of damage out of research mages. Or better yet, storm + storm power...
Seeking arrow = pure awesome if you've got mages to spam it and A gems to dump in large numbers.
I've got lots more "good" uses for air gems, but those three are my "great" ones that I tend to jealously hoard my air gems over.
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Now you're just being silly if you're going to compare one owl quill to 5 thunderstrikes when I clearly said I was forging them with hammers.
I don't think forging quills without hammers is very useful, but you can generally trade for the latter in any given game.
Also, I was only trying to enumerate the big air gem sinks. I think it's useful to turn Ballz's statment around, since for the cost of one cloud trapeze, you can get +3 research a turn forever. I have traded air gems for mage mobility (those MA Man crones are ****ing slow), but in general you don't use cloud trapeze that much unless you've got trapeze thugs. Even then,once you launch them, they generally just move around doing their dirty work.
At the end of the day, owl quills are a low priority. I've found that whenever I have free "hammer time" leftover for my air mages, I forge them, and that works out pretty well.
Jazzepi