Indep. Mages

[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.