Curious :Lategame questions. I never was so far :(

[Boron]

How can ulm default produce Soul contracts ? They require blood 5 !

You are correct if you say that each nation can hoard clams with either a random * + a water bracelet or by summoning spectres .
But nations like pythium don't require a rainbow pretender while e.g. man should have otherwise it finds only the air + nature sites . Thats what i meant nations that have little abilities . They have the abilities but normally 10-20 turns later than e.g. pythium/arco

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
How can ulm default produce Soul contracts ? They require blood 5!

Use scouts to hunt for blood in provinces with 5000 people. Empower a master smith to blood 3. Have him forge a brazen vessel and blood thorn while using a hammer. That's a total cost of 145 blood slaves to get started. Then they only cost 40 blood slaves each.

You are correct if you say that each nation can hoard clams with either a random * + a water bracelet or by summoning spectres .

Which they all can start by about the same time as a clam hoarding nation can get started.

But nations like pythium don't require a rainbow pretender while e.g. man should have otherwise it finds only the air + nature sites.

You must not be very effective at site searching if you only use your pretender to look for sites that your national mages don't have immediately. Take your mages that have their randoms in a path you want and have them site search.

[Cainehill]

Graeme Dice said:

You must not be very effective at site searching if you only use your pretender to look for sites that your national mages don't have immediately. Take your mages that have their randoms in a path you want and have them site search.

Not to mention that Man and Pangaea (as nature nations) can always summon Lamia Queens for some randoms. If you pick a nation that doesn't have randoms (Ulm or New Age Pangaea, for instance) then you would be well advised to craft a pretender accordingly : #1, magic paths that complement your nation's hard-coded magic, and #2, at least one of the following : death, nature, or astral. Any of those three give you the long term potential to find all magic sites.

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[Boron]

Yeah i said you can always use a rainbow . But hey this is expensive and the pretender can only search 1 province every 2 turns .

If you search with those 1 point randoms first it takes you a very long time to get them and second you find only lvl 1 sites this way . And your research is hurt if you search this way .


At least with my special no-rush setting i have in mind Pythium accashicing everything should have his gemincome earlier than other nations . And they could take rather good scales this way or a strong SC pretender .

[Cainehill]

No, you could use a sturdy half-rainbow. One with, say, 3 paths the nation doesn't get, each at least level 3. It travels with an army of conquest, meaning that it 'wastes' every other turn searching, but the other turn is conquering a province.

This also gives the benefit of being able to forge path-increasing items, so when you get a random in the appropriate area, you can forge something to take the mage to ?2, which lets it cast the site-searching spells. (Actually, a single random in Astral or Death covers those paths.)

And frankly, this line of instruction came about because you said, "Man only finds the air and nature sites".

[Boron]

I know Caine that you can do this but Pythium can e.g. just Accashic . Blood hunt nations can start searching later and begin with forging soul contracts instead .

Man has severe problems doing all these things .
It is of course possible but you should never reach Pythium's gem income .

[Huzurdaddi]

It is of course possible but you should never reach Pythium's gem income .

You make it sound like Acashic Record is free or something. It's freaking expensive 25 astrals is a lot of gems.

I'm playing with Pythium in a game with you and let me tell you I would love to cast Acashic Record but it's just very expensive!