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Originally Posted by Squirrelloid
The Traverse the Sea spell being the same level as gateway and requiring W5 compared to Gateway's S4, while being more limited in effect, is really poor design. Yes, its 3 gems cheaper, but that doesn't even begin to make up for a more limited ability to use it. Now it has some advantages over gateway, but is still strictly inferior to astral travel. (Honestly, Astral Travel is too high level as it is, because by the time you have it, you don't care about armies anymore).
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Stritcly inferior to Astral Travel? Astral Travel is researchlevel 9 and costs 25 astral gems. It's not a valid comparison. And for why it's harder to cast than Gateway, it's because the spell, althought necessary is sort counterinituative to this mod number #1 goal: to make access to water easier. There is no way for a land nation to attack UW if the uw-nation can just use these spells to cheaply teleport an army on the magic phase at the path of the invading army.
With W5 it can't be reached without boosters, requiring both thaumathurgy and construction research (there are some expections,like MA Atlantis and EA Oceania). The intention of the spell is to allow movement in UW over that non-moddable 1 province restriction. It is costed and pathed for that use.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Squirrelloid
Why not give it the same limitation as the Ride the Currents - must be to a friendly province (without the lab requirement).
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Well, if people deem it that unusable, I might consider it. But this spell does something quite new, I first want to see how the 'conservative' version works before turbo-charging it.
As for you comparisons to Gateway and other astral travel spells:
1) Remember that these cost water gems. With gem gens out of the picture water gems will be perhaps the most useless gems in the game. If you can use the water version over the astral version, you will likely do so.
2) Water nations are a lot better at water magic than astral. (expect for R'lyeh, of course)
3) Water magic is a *lot* easier and cheaper to boost than astral magic.