Why are Sages fair? Opinions wanted!

[tinkthank]

Hey, nice post Chazar!

I will give you some of my reasons, even though I am not voting in this poll. (I think you will need 4-6 questions with more choices to do it right, sorry.)

1. Sages are important to a number of nations in MP: certainly.
2. This fact is not entirely "bad" in the big view: It really makes it important when choosing scales.
3. Libraries are 0-level sites, so spies can find them quickly in provinces you havent captured and, of course, for those you do capture. When I play a nation with spies and which I feel benefits greatly from sages, I send them out looking asap.
4. I do not think high magic site frequency is the answer, nor nerfing the sage. I will probably never play another MP game with more than 40 or at the most 45% site frequency; I prefer 30ish or maybe lower. This gives equally bad chances to everyone.
5. *IF* you are indicating (and it is not clear what you mean) that *EACH* nation needs to find sages or they are screwed, then keeping MF low could help, OR there may just not be a problem at all. *IF* however you mean that only *SOME* nations will be screwed if they do not find sages (because these really need them), then I think that this may be a good feature: Nations which "need" sages may have other advantages that those other nations do not have.
So....
6. In general, I disagree with the very global statement "I am already screwed...", since
a.) if no-one finds them, I am not less screwed than they
b.) I may not need them -- in fact, I try not to rely on them when building my nation. (So yes, I choose bizarre builds sometimes.)
c.) In general, I do not find sages to be *that* much more game-winning than finding other really nice sites fairly early on (lots of gold, big gem sites, or bonus-to-cast sites).