how to sitesearch effective ?

[Boron]

i know there a 3 ways of site searching :
1. search sites through units ( best with rainbow pretender )
2. spells which reveal all sites of one colour like dark knowlegde
3. accashic record

accashic record is really good but only arco , pythium and ryleh ihmo really excel at it and can rely on it .

atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages . so you need to take at least astral 3 on your pretender . but most likely you would have better things to do with your pretender than letting him cast accashic record quite often .

if you instead search with your rainbow pretender first depending how many points you spent on him you find about 50-8x% of the magic sites with him i guess depending if you have level 1 , 2 ,3 ,4 in all / most paths .
second this is time consuming : 2 turns per search . and with high indeps you don't expand at turn 1 probably so when everything goes really well you have searched 10 times at turn 25.
but it is dangerous since most good rainbows are very weak . so after turn 25 letting him search in border provinces is dangerous .
if you are very unlucky you even could loose your pretender because of a random event attack of barbarians or something similiar .


if i search with e.g. dark knowlegde .
it says it reveals all death sites .
there are many sites which produce e.g. 1 death gem and 1 gem of another kind .
so do i find all sites where 1 kind of the produced gems is a deathgem ?
sites like gold mines and so on are they found always the time the province is conquered ?

how many sites are holy / unholy ? i just want to know a rough percentage value
are there some really good holy / unholy sites which give many gems which i don't want to miss ?

[Endoperez]

Dark Knowledge etc. act just as a level 9 mage of the appopriate magic would search the target province. And in fact, just as well as level 4 mage could as there are no magic sites above that level.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Boron:
atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages .

Atlantis has the S2 Deep Seers, Jotunheim can pull S mages from the multiple sorcery randoms on the big hags in IW and Niefel, and they have S2 Nornas in Utgard.

You're right about Caelum, though. With only the possibility of an S random on a High Seraph, they're not really very innately astral.

[En Forcer]

I focus on getting one or two mages to the 3 astral required to start using akashic record. I find that spell the most time efficient although there is a thread talking about it using too many gems.

Gems- if you are number crunching than I guess Akashic record costs too much to be worth it. But I end up with gems coming out of my ears and if not astral than something else which I can convert to astral so really it's a matter of budgeting your resources and deciding what is important to you. Once I actually have someone who can cast it, the whole game changes because it opens up all these new resources.

I no longer use the search command for my commanders. I don't like how long it takes and that combat can interrupt the search.

my $0.10

[Boron]

Originally posted by Norfleet:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Boron:
atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages .

Atlantis has the S2 Deep Seers, Jotunheim can pull S mages from the multiple sorcery randoms on the big hags in IW and Niefel, and they have S2 Nornas in Utgard.

You're right about Caelum, though. With only the possibility of an S random on a High Seraph, they're not really very innately astral.

---

you are right

but i meant that they can reach astral 3 without empowering / item forging
you can give your pretender 3 + astral no matter what race you play . but normally you have better things to do with your pretender
starshine skullcap : con 6 , 2A
crystal coin : con 4 , but 2E,2A so hard to forge
these 2 are the only easy options i see so far (perhaps i overlooked one ) to increase astral skill quickly .
if you have S2 , S is either ADNB right ?
so you have with S2 only 1/16 chance of getting astral 2.

i dunno which race can easily forge the crystal coins .
for the starshine cap you need to research con 6 first which needs some time especially at difficult/very difficult research and you don't get good benefits other than the items .

while pythium on the other hand is the best accashic race of all i think . + they have even 1 water income + 2 air .

small question: where can i see if the random magic skill is a sorcery or if i get only elemental or all ?

with the arch theurgs you can accashic
if you are lucky you can even get a w2 for clam forging .

normally when you have researched accashic with pythium and saved your astral gems you can immediately cast 2-4 accashics depending on settings and then hopefully you have enough income to cast one every 2 additional turns

so in this aspect they have really an advantage over every other nation ihmo

[Boron]

Originally posted by En Forcer:
I focus on getting one or two mages to the 3 astral required to start using akashic record. I find that spell the most time efficient although there is a thread talking about it using too many gems.

Gems- if you are number crunching than I guess Akashic record costs too much to be worth it. But I end up with gems coming out of my ears and if not astral than something else which I can convert to astral so really it's a matter of budgeting your resources and deciding what is important to you. Once I actually have someone who can cast it, the whole game changes because it opens up all these new resources.

I no longer use the search command for my commanders. I don't like how long it takes and that combat can interrupt the search.

my $0.10

i love the accashic too
but at the moment i want to try ermor ae and after this either ulm or man or vanheim .

all are very bad for accashic

so at the moment my main concern is to find most quickly many sites with ermor .

another question : how do you best defend against banishment as ermor ?
i want to try them in my first mp game but at my tests at sp so far with impossible ai the ai is sometimes not so stupid at all and i ran into a province now with 3 priests 1 of them prophet + only 10-20 units against my 150 but they won through banishment grr.

so i want to find magic sites most efficient and plan to cope this a bit first with e.g. spring hawks and later better need not eat summons

so feel free to post advice