Early game slingshot w/ alchemy

[PhilD]

Originally posted by PDF:
Playing Ulm I never had too many Fire and Earth Gems, forging and Construction "summons" eat up your gems steadily !
However Pocus described me a "financial" Alchemist strategy : with Nature & Fire a RB can forge a boatload of Fever Fetish (give' em to Scouts) producing many Fire gems, that you can sell for cash. Only problem is that this requires your RB himself to forgeing items, so you lose on research/site searching (that's what the guy should do else...)

What are you using to make sure you have the Nature gems? A Master Druid?

(Also, if you add Death you can give the Fever Fetishes to undead summons so you don't even have to lose upkeep and recruiting costs on scouts)