Indep. Mages

[Meglobob]

MaxWilson said:

Assuming you're so rich in death gems that finding someone to hold your Skull Mentors is your research bottle neck. : )

Don't get me wrong, I love Skull Mentors, but determining cost-efficiency is not simple when it involves gems as well as gold.

-Max

This is a real killer if your forced to use lightless lanterns, as after a couple of months your mages become horror marked. If you transfer the lantern on another mage to avoid losing it when the horror strikes, you can quickly run out of expendable mages.

I personally think lightless lantern should be reduced to construction 4 and the skull mentors put upto construction 6. This would be more balanced.

[Wish]

Meglobob said:
I personally think lightless lantern should be reduced to construction 4 and the skull mentors put upto construction 6. This would be more balanced.

take a look at the conceptual balance mod. SOMEONE HAD READ YOUR MIND.

[Amhazair]

Meglobob said:

This is a real killer if your forced to use lightless lanterns, as after a couple of months your mages become horror marked. If you transfer the lantern on another mage to avoid losing it when the horror strikes, you can quickly run out of expendable mages.

I personally think lightless lantern should be reduced to construction 4 and the skull mentors put upto construction 6. This would be more balanced.

I don't know. In a MP game with Ulm I started forging lightless lanterns at around turn 25'ish if I recall correctly, and ended up making about 40 of them at a guess. (didn't stop to count them ), for a measly 2 gems each. By turn 60 I had finished my research and thrown them all away, and it's almost turn 70 now. In all that time (40+ turns * 40'ish lanterns = 1600 cumulative turns), while roughly over half of the mages carrying a lantern got horror marked, only one got attacked by a horror. Obviously you don't want to give them to your expensive capital-only heavy duty mage, but I wouldn't hesitate to put them on any other mage, and I definitely see no reason to start shuffling them around to avoid loosing the lantern.

Also, while I agree it's logical to change the research needed for lanterns and skulls around - after all 9RP > 6RP) I have to say that given the respective costs of both items, and given that generally speaking there are more uses for death gems than for fire gems, I would prefer to forge the lanterns in a situation where I had both kinds of magic.

[Ewierl]

I don't agree that construction on skulls/lanterns should be swapped.

Yes, 9rp > 6rp, but skulls are twice the cose. 9rp for 10 gems = 0.9 rp/gem, while 6rp for 5 gems = 1.2 rp/gem. Unless you have a fantastic supply of otherwise-unused gems, you're better off putting your resources into lanterns.

And as Amahazir has pointed out, an occasional horror mark is not particularly problematic for small mages with small items.

[Wish]

(the cost is also changed in CB...)

[Meglobob]

Ewierl said:
I don't agree that construction on skulls/lanterns should be swapped.

Yes, 9rp > 6rp, but skulls are twice the cose. 9rp for 10 gems = 0.9 rp/gem, while 6rp for 5 gems = 1.2 rp/gem. Unless you have a fantastic supply of otherwise-unused gems, you're better off putting your resources into lanterns.

And as Amahazir has pointed out, an occasional horror mark is not particularly problematic for small mages with small items.

Errm...however skulls are constuction 4, 360 research points, lanterns construction 6, 1,040 research points. The skull mentor will zoom ahead of you for some considerable time in research.

Thats one of the many reasons death magic is so great!

[VedalkenBear]

For myself, I find the poptype mages more or less not worth the cost if I have the path on my national mages. That seems to be a consensus among the posters here.

However. There are certain indeps that are nothing less than amazing.

Ruby Amazons are great, because they give _anyone_ Blood Hunters, and not only that, sacred Blood hunters that compare favorably to national Blood hunters. For some Blood nations (e.g., ME Abysia), they are superior to any national summon.

In general, if I can build indep. mages (generally from sites, but I won't turn down poptypes) that have paths I don't, I will. Of course, I generally play on Luck-3, Magic-1 (and Growth), so I tend to get a lot of random gems from events. While painful, Empowerment is not out of the question to get them to a remote site-searching level.