Any Man Advice

[MaxWilson]

You've convinced me that you can't do Master Enslave with a 4-man Communion and have any hope of the slaves surviving. That's the main point and I agree.

On the other hand, you *already* have to wait till the second round to cast Master Enslave unless you're using a Crystal Matrix and casting at the end of the first round. Having another astral mage cast PotS and/or LotNS before ME goes off does not require an extra round, merely an extra mage and/or extra Crystal Matrix. If you don't happen to have 32 Communion Slaves available (say you had 32 but 3 of them died), making one of them a <Communion Master/PotS> and another a <Communion Master/LotNS> could save you a lot of fatigue. That's all I'm trying to point out, that those spells shouldn't be overlooked.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Ironhawk,

The fatigue of the spell is split amongst master/slaves *before* skill in magic paths is factored in. A 200 fatigue S3 spell distributed amongst a S4 master and three S1 slaves will be 50 fatigue to each of them, adjusted for Astral paths at each mage *individually.*

50 fatigue to the master, but he's got +1 from 3 slaves and it's an S3 spell, so he takes 1/3 of that = 17 fatigue.

50 fatigue to each of the slaves, but they're S1 with a +1 bonus from being in a 3-slave communion so effectively S2. This is one shy of the S3 requirement, so the 50 fatigue allotment is doubled for each of them. Each one takes 100 fatigue.

I'm not entirely sure where encumbrance fits in, whether it's just the master's encumbrance that gets divided up or whether slaves take encumbrance from each spell that a master casts. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the latter and maybe later I'll check it out.

So you see, the skill of the communion slaves can matter quite a bit.

-Max

[DrPraetorious]

Each communion member takes encumberance individually. The relationship between encumberance and skill level is still not entirely clear.

This is a big deal if you're pythium, because it puts an absolute limit on the number of Enslave Mind spells that your communion masters can spam. No matter how many communion slaves you may field, each slave will take a minimum of X fatigue per spell, where X is their encumberance (4 for a communicant.) Thus, after 50 Enslave Mind spells go off, your communicants start popping, no matter what you do.

[mivayan]

MaxWilson said:
50 fatigue to each of the slaves, but they're S1 with a +1 bonus from being in a 3-slave communion so effectively S2. This is one shy of the S3 requirement, so the 50 fatigue allotment is doubled for each of them. Each one takes 100 fatigue.

Great explanation. I'll add what my testing showed on encumbrance:

The slave's encumbrance is added to the 50, so with enc 4 they'd take 108 fatigue in stead. And opposite, if they had astral skill 20 each one would only take 54/18=3 fatigue. (more realistic example: if the spell cost 20 total, the slave gets 5+4, so only need skill 5 to reduce it to 3. Easier done in big communions).