how to sitesearch effective ?

[Boron]

yeah i know that they are only fodder
but at the beginning i need my gems for other things and the early researches aren't that good too .

so if your enemy decides to attack you in the beginning and if you are worst case neighbored to someone with natural lvl 4 priests like marignon / atlantis .... how do you defend against him ?
if he just has 4-5 priests + some guard troops / perhaps seasonal spirits or something else which doesn't eat how can you defend against this ?
if you didn't take the PoD but a lich / ghostking even your pretender is probably not strong enough to kill them or it is at least very risky .
i mean of course in the first 15-20 turns or so .

edit :
because i like the arch bishops of AE which summon 5 or 6 undead horsemen / turn .
but they are almost worthless it seems to me now .
most likely i should try without bishops
trying to get conj 6 quickly is basically a good idea since the spectres are best ermorian researchers or ?

[ June 30, 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: Boron ]

[PvK]

As usual, hit them as soon (during a battle) as possible, and develop something that doesn't get banished, as soon as possible.

Large numbers of skeletal horse in the front and front flanks are pretty dangerous since they are so fast and have good attacks, even if they die quickly.

Use the national unholy protection spells, since they will help at least a bit - against a large number of attacks, so the total effect is worthwhile.

PvK

[Cainehill]

One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.

[Boron]

Originally posted by Cainehill:
One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.

yeah i would do this with e.g. atlantis

but my main problem is that it seems to me in order to find enough gemincome as ermor i have to take a rainbow pretender ( most likely a ghostking ) to find sites and give him astral 3-4 that after 5-10 searches which equals turn 15-25 he can cast from time to time an accashic savely from the capitol
cause i looked at the magic sites document and there are unfortunately many many sites which produce death gems together with other gems .
i tried a death 10 rest on fire PoD and searched through dark knowlegde but found almost nothing .

so now that you don't have the option of a combatpretender in form of the vq for ermor best option is a first sitesearching than summoning rainbow ghost king would you agree ?

Are you saying that a death mage or Dark Knowledge won't find a fire-1/death-1 site? Not sure I understand.

[Saxon]

Has anyone done a cost benefit analysis on site searching with ashasatic record? At different settings of site frequency? At different turns in the game? Why did Saber Cherry get a life and leave us without such wonderful modeling skills?

My thought is that it is an expensive spell, 50 gems worth. You need to get a common currency to determine value, so I am suggesting two for one astral. It could be adjusted to take into account the frequency of astral sites, modified by clams, but that would make my head hurt.

How long does it take for this to pay for itself? Late in the game, if you find a site with 2 gems a turn, the game will be over before the 25 turns elapse and you have paid for it. At what point is it better to spend the gems on summons and items, rather than on the spell?

This would be determined by the site frequency. The higher the frequency, the faster you are likely to get your investment repaid. Has anyone looked at the code to see how the site frequency figure translates into actual sites? Also, does anyone know how the different terrain types effect the site frequency? In specific numbers? That would help determine where to start your searching.

It will also be determined by how long you think the game will Last. Map size will be important in this decision. Generally speaking, the earlier you cast the spell, the more valuable what you find will be to you.

If you can not model all of the above, which I can not, then just bear those ideas in mind as you search.

[Saxon]

Yes, a Dark Knowledge will find any site with at least one death gem associated with it. This is a nice bonus and applied to the others, like Gnome Lore and so forth.