[chrispedersen]

Depends AoE.

Some circumstances where a rainbow makes a good searcher:

- You have good recruitable everywhere mages, with a good gp/rp ratio. For example EA-Ermor. The research you lose from your god researching is easily made up on national mages.

Scales go a long way to figuring this as well.

- Single path mages. Tien Chi doesn't need a rainbow to search - he has celestial masters for example. However if your nation has predominantly single path mages... Nicht var!

For example if it takes 4 mages to equal the search of your pretender, or you don't *have* different path mages.

Finally- there are some strategies which are heavily gem dependent - Caelum for example. Early site searching may be required despite it not being optimal.