Tips for Vanheim

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Trumanator

Its CBM, and I was sneering at quills. How worth it are they?

I don't want to threadjack, but I suppose this is on topic. Owl quills are just plain bad in almost all situations. I'm speaking in general here, not just about Vanheim. Consider that the gap they're trying to fill is very early research which means also that you're very gem constrained. This means not only for the quills, but for dwarven hammers. If you've got a hammer, you're unlikely to have 2, and you're likely to have other things you'd like to use it on. This means, generally, the cost of the quill is often 5A (not 3) and you've not had time to build up a stockpile or income of them. For 5A you're probably getting a research boost less than one more cheap research mage (3RP +1 for a magic scale)....but you've used up a mage-turn forging (another if you insist you managed a hammer) and possibly many more if you're out manually site searching to try and get some early A gems for quills. All this to do the work of (generally) one extra castle spitting out research mages.

Compare this to my suggestion in my Helheim guide where 3 castles are doing the research output of 10 while picking up points being in a drain-2 environment - it's a completely different scale. Obviously it's an apples to oranges comparison, but my point is why it works for the strategy I suggest is because of the point of the game you're at (you've got gems to use) the fact you can have sufficient hammers (because you've got gems to use and need less hammers to process gems into research points) and because of the research concentration (you don't need many forgers or research mages for impressive results). Owl quills are too little bang for the buck, and too hard to output at the point of the game they fit because of your constraints.