Re: Why are Sages fair? Opinions wanted!
Interesting post, Truidy, and food for thought. It just so happens that I have recently played those same three races in MP and behaved nearly exactly like you did:
1. Pythium. This is one of the races that simply does not need any sages. I think I built maybe 10 sages in my game by turn 40, mainly for the random pick. Normal research meant a zero need of sages for me.
2. C'tis Miasmi. I never built a sage. They die to disease and I always would rather have another shaman instead of a dying sage. This was set on hard research, but I still didn't need any sages to be the third nation to finish all research (Pythium was first, Caelum second to complete).
3. Abysia - I built sages by the boatloads from two libraries. I must have built 80 of them, probably more. I quit building them for a while, lost some to fires from afar, and then started building some more. But this game was very hard research and I really, really wanted to get to ghost riders after getting the blood 9 research done plus my needed construction and evocation research. The cheapest Abysian capitol-only national mage was much too busy with blood hunting to waste time on mundane tasks like studying.
Also, there is 4: Atlantis. I have built maybe 20 sages (turn 68) and only because of the very hard research setting. Otherwise, my 60 gold amphibous acolytes work just fine, thank you very much. Capitol only is a drag for the acolytes, though.
One thing is for sure, the need for sages is strongly dependent on your race and theme selection as well as the hardness of the research setting. The real problem with sages is that it evens out the research ability of the various nations and they take away the sting of hard or very hard research.
The drawback to nerfing sages is that it would just make the strongest race even stronger. Pythium is already too powerful as is and does not need any help by hurting the other races through limited sages.
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