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Originally Posted by K
Quote:
Originally Posted by Micah
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Originally Posted by K
Even a nation that does not natively get Death can easily alchemize gems, Empower one guy with D1, have that guy cast Dark Knowledge, and have a huge stockpile of Death gems by the time his Pretender arrives. It's not even hard considering the lack of really good uses for gems in the early game. Since this would be your gaming-winning tactic and synergizes hugely with a Blood-heavy nation like Mictlan, it's not even a bad idea.
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Basing a strat around alchemizing 200 gems to empower someone up to D1 to site search so your pretender has D gems is pretty absurd. |
No more absurd than spending the same amount of gems equipping five thugs or casting a single global that won't win you the game, and that's a staple of Dominions play. Spending gems to set in motion a plan that will win you the game is a far better choice. |
Let's think this through here.
* The goal is to have piles of death gems for your pretender to use for casting Utterdark the first turn he pops out. We'll neglect the Research angle in this post. Assume he's going to pop out on turn 37, giving you 36 turns of gem accumulation.
* Base cost to get a D1 mage without national D: 200 gems (or 100 pearls). I'll neglect the indy angle because you mentioned empowerment specifically. This is a fixed cost which generates no return.
* With only one D1 mage, you'll going to be more limited by mage-time than by province-count. Let's assume (optimistically) that you can get an average return of 1 death gem per turn per 2 provinces searched, by targeting swamps and deserts and by getting lucky with multiple-death-gem-generating sites. (In practice I think it's about 1 for 3 or less.) We'll say that half of these are level 1 sites, discoverable by manual D1 searching.
* Assume for simplicity that you can have a total non-death income which scales linearly with time. We'll say that on turn N, you get 2N non-death gems from national mages searching, etc. And we'll pretend getting to this point doesn't cost any gems or research. That means you can have 210 non-death gems by turn 14, which means that you can have a D1 mage and 20 death gems from alchemy by turn 15. That gives you 22 turns of gem accumulation.
* Under these assumptions, it takes either 8 turns of mage-time (manual site-searching), or 2 turns of mage-time and 6 death gems, or 2 turns of mage-time and 24 non-death gems, to generate an income of 1 death gem per turn. Your best bet is to search with Dark Knowledge until turn 31 (14 turns, cost 42 death gems, yield 2*Sum(1...7)=56, net 14 death gems) and then manually search for the 6 remaining turns because mage-searching wouldn't have time to recoup costs. If you get lucky and find the site on your first manual search, that brings in an extra 6 gems.
* That means you spent 200 gems alchemizing to D1 and searched for 22 turns to net 14 death gems and one D1 mage (and an income of +8 death). If you had just alchemized those 200 gems and kept the death gems you'd be 36 gems ahead.
* It should be clear by this point that if you really do want to Utterdark your way to victory by turn 36, bootstrapping your way to a Death income via alchemy + empowerment is not the way to do it. You'd be better off building on your core national strengths (water, astral, whatever) and alchemizing THOSE for your Utterdark. (By turn 37 you'd have an income of +74 non-death gems, a stockpile of 1406 gems, and you can alchemize that to 351 death gems.)
* You could also trade with someone who does have a core competency in Death (Helheim, Lanka, etc.). Or kill them and take their gems. Either way it's better than trying to bootstrap yourself.
-Max