Strands of Arcane Power

[Loren]

It randomly searches provinces which you own and which have at least one candle. They will not be searched all at once but in time they end up searched. You can only search paths that you have, I've never seen a province searched to more than level 3 by this spell.

Since I've seen provinces searched to level 1 or 2 but later at 3 with the same mage I think what's going on is that it randomly applies one level of searching.

I have never cast it with a mage with one or two levels of a path so I don't know what happens in this case.

Generally you fry or kill enemy mages in provinces you have a candle in, although I have been feebleminded by it when I hit a powerful enemy mage. Note that the spell does *NOT* go down if you're feebleminded, but you will not be able to feeblemind any other mages until your mind is restored.

I suspect that the number of candles you have has an effect on how fast you search a province, it seems the borders don't search as fast as the inner areas. It's also possible I'm seeing some sort of range effect. I've never tried to map it carefully, that's just my observation.

[binarysolo]

My observations after casting it a few times in SP, given that I *really* wanted this spell to work, as I hate micro-ing magic search as well as unnecessary magic searching that the friendly AI does on captured capitals and what not.

1) Strands searches only paths which the mage has... I *believe* this includes priest levels.

2) Strands searches up to 3 levels in any magic path.... I have not seen any searches at lvl4 yet. Path boosters contribute towards any level checks.

Not certain: 3) The amount of path levels you have affects your site searching. If I recall correctly it's MagePathLvl-1, min 1 max 3.

4) Strands only searches in a somewhat probabilistic/die-roll way -- it searches a few sites per selected provinces per turn.

5) Strands searches ONLY if you have at least 1 candle in the territory.

6) Strands can feeblemind or outright kill random enemy mages under dominion. (The effectiveness is... not terribly awesome.)

Not certain 7) If the caster of strands gets feebleminded by an opposing mage (never happened to me personally) the spell still exists as a global, though given that you are feebleminded you have no magic paths and therefore cannot do any remote site search.


Overall thoughts: not a terrible spell at all per se, but if you have high enough Astral to cast this, you might as well save up your pearls and cast Astral Nexus instead.

[Knai]

The obvious exception being when there are very large maps without all that many people on it, or when you are far enough ahead magically to have both up.

Or when dealing with the AI only.