Quote:
Originally Posted by Iry
I'll definitely give a try to buying a capital mage every single turn, but how do you keep down the massive upkeep of maintaining that many mages?
Skeli-spam does work on a military level, but getting it to work seems to cost massive upkeep that prevents me from doing other things. Infact, putting 125 into province PD is what seems to let the skeli-spam work because the mages have time to build up a massive force of skeletons while the enemy is whittling away the PD, and when I win I get to keep all the PD. I'm not defending the tactic, because I would like to stop needing so much PD, but I am explaining how I seem to use it.
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I don't understand this second paragraph, and it makes me wonder if you're using skelly-spam to mean something different than I think. For instance, if you mean "raise a whole bunch of skeletons with undead priests and/or gem-costing spells," that's not skelly spam. Skelly spam, as commonly used, means "put several death mages on the battlefield and have them cast Raise Skeleton or Raise Dead repeatedly." Depending upon how many Death levels each one has and what your Reinvig rate is, you may need more or fewer mages, but basically this pumps out a never-ending stream of skeletons which can defeat any normal-sized army.
The way you deal with the massive upkeep of building mages is 1.) expand and take many provinces, 2.) buy cost-effective mages, 3.) live with it. The upkeep for mages will frequently be your single biggest expense, but on the plus side mages generate RP while they're eating gold (unless you have them busy fighting or site-searching) whereas regular armies do you no good at all unless they're fighting. You generally do want to pick mages that get you lots of RP for the gold cost though: upkeep is 1/15 of purchase cost per turn, unless you're sacred in which case it's 1/30. When it's time to get in a war, all or many of those mages come off of research duty and start skelly-spamming or whatever. Frequently a couple of mages can stiffen up PD to the point where you don't need anything close to 125 PD in order to repel attackers.
-Max