Iron Faith: Comments and Suggestions

[Sandman]

Getting the right random picks won't be very hard, since Black Priests are cheap enough that you can build multiple per turn. Getting the right gems can be done, but may take a little while for them to start showing up in quantity.

Mass producing priests for the right random pick is horribly inefficient. You'd need multiple fortresses, for a start, which is hardly cheap.

Regular Ulm can't make lightless lanterns till construction 6, and then they still have to find a source of air gems.

That's why I use a rainbow pretender for Ulm. To find air mages and air gems (although laterns require fire gems). The rainbow pretender is much more dependable that a 1 in 8 air BP.

The independent mages that you are most likely to find are probably going to be jade amazons, shaman, and druids. These can take care of nature and water searching. Your own black priests can handle death, earth and astral. That leaves only fire and air to search with in some other manner if you really want independent mages.

I wasn't talking about searching. Whilst Iron Faith has more variety in its magic, regular Ulm can easily gain the variety they lack by employing a rainbow pretender and getting hidden mage sites. And regular Ulm has a good, dependable mage available even if nothing is found.

Bless effects are not going to be worth it on the black lord, unless you get both air 9 and astral 9 to cover their weaknesses.

????

I find rainbow mages very overrated, for any nation. It is just as easy, and usually faster, to site search with your national mages and site searching spells.

OK, well I consider a rainbow mage to be an effective way of countering Ulm's weaknesses.

They certainly aren't any worse than the standard Ulm mages, since they have much more versatility.

One random pick does not equal 'much more' versatility. They can forge low-level items cheaply, sure, but their role on the battlefield is limited to casting weak attack and buff spells at maximum fatigue, as well as priest spells.

Can you give some examples of their great versatility? How does this help their cause as much as being able to reliably cast blade wind, strength of giants, legions of steel and other powerful earth spells?

It's not much of a weakness, since even at 200 gold they could afford multiple mages per turn.

Oh come on. Cost is important.