Curious :Lategame questions. I never was so far :(

[Kristoffer O]

It was an openended d6. It wasn't supposed to be. Now it's an ordinary d6.

A mage with astral lvl 7 is now fully immune to astral lvl 1 duels.

Equal slays both.

[Boron]

Yeah i said you can always use a rainbow . But hey this is expensive and the pretender can only search 1 province every 2 turns .

If you search with those 1 point randoms first it takes you a very long time to get them and second you find only lvl 1 sites this way . And your research is hurt if you search this way .


At least with my special no-rush setting i have in mind Pythium accashicing everything should have his gemincome earlier than other nations . And they could take rather good scales this way or a strong SC pretender .

[Cainehill]

No, you could use a sturdy half-rainbow. One with, say, 3 paths the nation doesn't get, each at least level 3. It travels with an army of conquest, meaning that it 'wastes' every other turn searching, but the other turn is conquering a province.

This also gives the benefit of being able to forge path-increasing items, so when you get a random in the appropriate area, you can forge something to take the mage to ?2, which lets it cast the site-searching spells. (Actually, a single random in Astral or Death covers those paths.)

And frankly, this line of instruction came about because you said, "Man only finds the air and nature sites".

[Boron]

I know Caine that you can do this but Pythium can e.g. just Accashic . Blood hunt nations can start searching later and begin with forging soul contracts instead .

Man has severe problems doing all these things .
It is of course possible but you should never reach Pythium's gem income .

[Huzurdaddi]

It is of course possible but you should never reach Pythium's gem income .

You make it sound like Acashic Record is free or something. It's freaking expensive 25 astrals is a lot of gems.

I'm playing with Pythium in a game with you and let me tell you I would love to cast Acashic Record but it's just very expensive!

[Cohen]

It's right 25 Pearls.
For all the 8 paths you'll spend 15 gems and 2 slaves. And usually you lack of some king of magic to site search via magic and you've to waste time sending your random pick guys to site search for 1st tier magic sites.
Then you use 8 mages, so on 8 research/forging/battle round wasted for that/those mage/s.
Then you don't site search for Holy and Unholy sites, but they're so few that usually they're not so important. (however having the luck to find tha undead burning site in a chokepoint of your borderline with Ermor is useful but it works even if you don't discover it).

[Vynd]

I think that SCs are better than armies of mages at pretty much any stage of the game. But it's not like the two are mutually exclusive. If you want to do well, I suggest you aim for as many SCs as you can get, and plenty of mages too. The SCs mostly require gems to summon and equip, the mages mostly require money, so there's no reason you can't have both.

There are other spells besides Banefire and Gifts from Heaven that I would worry about late in the game (although I'd certainly worry about those). Long before the end game I could have an army of level 1 Water mages casting Quickness and then cast Frozen Heart over an over again. That ought to make an impression. If I was C'Tis or Ermor I might go for hordes of Life Draining mages.

So the points is, there are options beyond Fire and Lightning. And if we're seriously talking about a situation where I've researched everything (something I've never even come close to, although I'm sure it's been done), well then if you've any sort of variety in your supply of mages then you ought to be able to find something your enemy isn't prepared for.

[Boron]

Cohen said:
It's right 25 Pearls.
For all the 8 paths you'll spend 15 gems and 2 slaves. And usually you lack of some king of magic to site search via magic and you've to waste time sending your random pick guys to site search for 1st tier magic sites.
Then you use 8 mages, so on 8 research/forging/battle round wasted for that/those mage/s.
Then you don't site search for Holy and Unholy sites, but they're so few that usually they're not so important. (however having the luck to find tha undead burning site in a chokepoint of your borderline with Ermor is useful but it works even if you don't discover it).

Yeah exactly my reasoning
The only nation with which this works ok is though pythium and to a much lesser degree with arco / ryleh / tien chi .
You need to be lucky but when you start in the provinces with landscape that gives better sitefind chances it normally really works .
If you are really lucky you already have an archtheurg who can forge clams so you have +1-5 extra astralincome furthermore