Acashic records vs. separate spells

[Micah]

Baalz: it's somewhat nation specific, but I tend to manual search with at least the "big gun" mage of whatever nation I'm playing, and then fill in the gaps with remote spells when I get access to a new path, or if there's a path that the big mage misses (like for Bogarus: starets don't have E access, but the alchemists do, so if I have an E booster I'd probably opt to cast gnome lore after manually searching with the starets), especially since I'll usually have a limited mage supply of whatever type it is, or they'll be far away from some portion of my empire, so it'll make sense to remote the far away bits. This approach means that you're not getting a very good return from acashic, since provinces are manually searched in 3-4 paths before I'd really think to remote search them at all. It's pretty rare that I'll be without path access long enough to consider blowing 20-25S on an acashic though, since my normal priority would be saving my pearls for the booster rings and then diversifying with their help.

I've done remotes from the get-go with, say, mictlan, since they're very scattered in terms of paths per mage, but that's very much in the minority for me.