Tried something cool, found some cool magic sites!

[deccan]

Boron said:
Especially with Abysia i am normally quite sloppy in sitesearching .

Same for me when I played Abysia in Musical Chairs. Generally, I think I'm pretty bad at site searching. Making a RP is no brainer, but what else? Do people generally think that taking a researcher's time to do a level 1 search is worth it (e.g. a sage)? Acashic is cool but very expensive. Or do you cast the single path search spells, focusing on the gems that you lack most?

[Edi]

I use single path spells all the time, typically when I can afford it, I designate a group of mages that contains most (sometimes even all) of the required magics as a radar squad and when I get a new province, it gets hit with everything.

I'm almost religious about site searching whichever way I can get it done, because it directly impacts on survivability.

Astral and death are easiest to get, you need just one magic to get lv 9 search and you can do it every turn. Nature is also easy (as long as you find druids if you don't have it natively). The elements are generally rather difficult to get if you don't have native mages who can do the searches. Of course, it's possible to find a site with indie mages who can give you some capability, but most of those are already lv2+ elemental sites, or nature (Enchanted Forest, Flowering Forest etc, N### Enchantresses will eventually produce radar mages).

Edi

[Boron]

Edi said:
I use single path spells all the time, typically when I can afford it, I designate a group of mages that contains most (sometimes even all) of the required magics as a radar squad and when I get a new province, it gets hit with everything.
Edi

If you play e.g. Arco/Ryleh do you then Accashic or still search every province with your single path spells ?
Pythium is imo designed for searching via Accashic but with Arco it is already a bit more complicated especially since their Mystics can get the elementals quite quick and Pythium has slightly higher starting astral income .

In SP i like accashic record most while in MP if i play a blood nation i normally don't focus too much on site searching or i play Ermor or Pythium or Arco which have not so big difficulties in sitesearching .

I think at least in MP i could never play a nation like marignon base , man etc. cause my sitesearching would suck then completely . In my single marignon MP game i failed promptly then as i assumed .

[Edi]

I prefer radar to Acashic scanning, because it wastes less gems and I can use the astral gems for something else. Of course, after some time the micro involved in it just gets tiring and I'll start throwing Acashic around if I can afford it. Arco usually has no need of Acashic Record until expansion rate outstrips radar scanning rate, which doesn't happen very early, usually.

Edi

[Wauthan]

Usually go with Edis' strategy and assemble a squad of searcher-finders asap. Most of the time this just means sending one of each highest tier national mage out to search each conquered province. Once the spellresearch meets the needs I hopefully have enough resources to create a minimum casting group that tosses spells at one province at the time. Starting with the welldefended core provinces and work their way in a spiral towards the frontier. In the mid and late game I tend to revert to Achasic record though since spellcasters are too valuable to waste on site searching. It's expensive, yes, but saves a lot of valuable time and manpower.

That said I don't think I ever do a dedicated blood, holy or unholy search. Would such a search even be rewarding? Just about all the blood sites cause unrest and can spotted that way. I never found any good holy/unholy site and they seem to be very rare as well.

[Boron]

Wauthan said:
That said I don't think I ever do a dedicated blood, holy or unholy search. Would such a search even be rewarding? Just about all the blood sites cause unrest and can spotted that way. I never found any good holy/unholy site and they seem to be very rare as well.

The summoning circle gives 60% discout on all blood spells . It is a blood 3 site .
I dunno how sites are assigned but there are 435 different sites in sites.xls shown and the special nation only sites are included . So something like a total of 350-400 sites .

Does anyone know a bit about the probabilities of sites ?
Is it like a site is with 50% possibility a lvl 1 site , with 25% a lvl 2 , 15% lvl 3 and 10% lvl 4 e.g. ?
Would be interesting to know

[Taqwus]

Some of the unholy sites let unholy priests enter to summon ghouls, mummies, possibly others (there are undead-summoning sites for shadows, CW undead, banes as well, but I think these might belong to death magic). The ghoul sites are of somewhat limited use to most nations as they're not likely to get any unholy priest other than a Mound Fiend, which can reanimate ghouls without a site at a similar rate IIRC.

I don't remember any holy site giving discounts or summons, just gems / unrest reduction / perhaps a local Purgatory (?), but I can't claim to have seen them all.