how to sitesearch effective ?

[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

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Boron:
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.

Well, depending on your Ermor theme, the usual way you "defend" against Banishment is that you don't. While spells like Antimagic can help, especially on top of SG Ermor's superior magic resistance, this comes as little consolation to AE, where your undead will just die messily no matter how hard you try.

So ultimately....you don't. How much did you really pay for those troops anyway? Just accept that win or lose, your forces are going to be pummelled, and there's plenty more where that came from. Just try and kill your opponents faster than they can kill you. In the end, all your freebie undead are just fodder for your more important summonables anyway, and if they're getting wasted, your good units aren't.

[Boron]

yeah i know that they are only fodder
but at the beginning i need my gems for other things and the early researches aren't that good too .

so if your enemy decides to attack you in the beginning and if you are worst case neighbored to someone with natural lvl 4 priests like marignon / atlantis .... how do you defend against him ?
if he just has 4-5 priests + some guard troops / perhaps seasonal spirits or something else which doesn't eat how can you defend against this ?
if you didn't take the PoD but a lich / ghostking even your pretender is probably not strong enough to kill them or it is at least very risky .
i mean of course in the first 15-20 turns or so .

edit :
because i like the arch bishops of AE which summon 5 or 6 undead horsemen / turn .
but they are almost worthless it seems to me now .
most likely i should try without bishops
trying to get conj 6 quickly is basically a good idea since the spectres are best ermorian researchers or ?

[ June 30, 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: Boron ]

[PvK]

As usual, hit them as soon (during a battle) as possible, and develop something that doesn't get banished, as soon as possible.

Large numbers of skeletal horse in the front and front flanks are pretty dangerous since they are so fast and have good attacks, even if they die quickly.

Use the national unholy protection spells, since they will help at least a bit - against a large number of attacks, so the total effect is worthwhile.

PvK

[Cainehill]

One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.

[Boron]

Originally posted by Cainehill:
One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.

yeah i would do this with e.g. atlantis

but my main problem is that it seems to me in order to find enough gemincome as ermor i have to take a rainbow pretender ( most likely a ghostking ) to find sites and give him astral 3-4 that after 5-10 searches which equals turn 15-25 he can cast from time to time an accashic savely from the capitol
cause i looked at the magic sites document and there are unfortunately many many sites which produce death gems together with other gems .
i tried a death 10 rest on fire PoD and searched through dark knowlegde but found almost nothing .

so now that you don't have the option of a combatpretender in form of the vq for ermor best option is a first sitesearching than summoning rainbow ghost king would you agree ?

Are you saying that a death mage or Dark Knowledge won't find a fire-1/death-1 site? Not sure I understand.