Magic Items Question

[das123]

Hello,

I'm a newbie to the game but feel I am making progress thanks to the great support from the forum. I have come across another small 'annoyance' and couldn't find an answer by searching.

Magic Items
I am frustrated with the interface and was wondering if anyone had a better way of picking items to forge.

As an example, lets say I want a specific item such as a The Flying Ship which requires Construction Level 8 and a mage with Air 4 to cast it. Continuing the example, I have Air 3 mages so I need to get a boost to my Air rating. Let's say I have the pretender decked out with Fire and Water magic, he can cast Staff of Elemental Mastery, give the staff to one of the air mages and then The Flying Ship spell can be cast.

The problem I have is that the only way I have of knowing what is available outside the level of my mages is to thumb through the manual - which makes strategising difficult. With spells and summoning you have a thorough compendium resourced within the game but I haven't been able to find something similar for items.

Does one exist? Or is there a keyboard shortcut that shows the items ranked by Construction Level in a detail list similar to the way the spells?

Even the item descriptions don't show the magic levels required to cast them - only the gem cost.

How do the rest of you work out what you want to forge?

Thanks once again.

[Edi]

There is no in-game compendium in the style of Civilopedia. You are limited to what your mages can do with their current levels. Gem cost is directly related to levels, being 5, 10, 15, 25, 40, 60 (i.e. Fibonacci series, each level costs as much as the two previous ones put together).

If you want a complete list of items and levels, take a look at the Dom3 DB spreadsheet file. See the FAQ for details about waht it is. Relevant links are also in my sig. There's a page with all of the items and their level requirements, gem costs and other properties there.

[llamabeast]

Basically the manual's the only option. It's worth sitting down with and browsing the items. To start with it's overwhelming, but after a while you start to remember roughly what exists. It's quite fun spending time looking through the lists and trying to concoct an ingenious combination of items to make your guy invincible.

[das123]

Thanks Edi and Llamabeast,

Edi said:
Gem cost is directly related to levels.

Nice to know - so you can gauge how far along in the magic tree the item is from.

If you want a complete list of items and levels, take a look at the Dom3 DB spreadsheet file.

Wow! What an incredible resource. Thank you for putting this together and making it available.

I was looking up Fire Brand because I have mage with F2E1 and he can't forge this item. In the book and your DB it says it only requires F1E1. My Pretender has F4E4 and he can forge it. Is this an error or am I missing something?

EDIT: I was missing something! I was getting confused between Earth magic and Nature magic. Oops.

llamabeast said:
It's quite fun spending time looking through the lists and trying to concoct an ingenious combination of items to make your guy invincible.

I was away with my laptop over the weekend without the manual so I was lost regarding reference.
I know what you mean though, I'm surprised with the depth of the game. When you first start playing you really aren't prepared for the changing state of the game and the rich strategy required against particular enemies.

[NTJedi]

If you want an in game complete list of items you can forge then play a SP game where you start with a rainbow pretender. Then as you start winning use your gems to EMPOWER up your pretender and equip your pretender with magical boosting items. Then don't delete the game after winning and you can always return to view a list of items for forging. All you'll need to do is save n exit your future game then return to your victorious game with the rainbow pretender.

[lch]

It's easier to wish for "magic power" a couple of times with an all-astral pretender. Or just mod the Wish spell.

[jutetrea]

Somewhere in the wish list I "wished" for an interface of:

Everything forgeable as normal
Everything forgeable +1 level as greyed out (current in use artifacts, or some other different color)
In-use artifacts with a big X or something over them

Ideally I'd also like to be able to sort via primary and then secondary path or gem type.

For instance, I may have lots of forging options (such as EA TC) but I only have lots of nature gems. I can choose a nature mage and hit N (as in the f5 spell list) and only see primary path nature items. Then if I know my nature mage has fire magic I can then hit alt-F or something to get only items with primary path nature and secondary path fire.

As an aside, Ballbarian's RanDom has an interesting feature. When selecting magic items for commanders you can select P1 (path 1) and P2 (path 2) and the various levels needed to start weeding out items. I think the purpose was to simulate a specific nation and their forging capabilities, but its still a pretty good resource. Unfortunately its an outside program and requires and alt-tab.

As an example I could be building an LA Marignon themed province and only want to show items possible to make with vanilla LA Marignon. I'd show P1 Fire or P1 astral and if I wanted to drill down further I could show P1 fire and P2 astral.

[NTJedi]

lch said:
It's easier to wish for "magic power" a couple of times with an all-astral pretender. Or just mod the Wish spell.

Not really... a starting rainbow pretender can have 3 or 4 in all paths, items will do most of the boosting. The rainbow pretender will find magic sites more quickly in the beginning as well.

But the fastest cheating way would not be modding the Wish spell, but editing the map file giving yourself an 8 everything rainbow pretender and using the #startspell for each necessary construction level. However, #startspell only works for one turn so don't hit end turn.

[Chris_Byler]

Or you could mod one of your nation's national commanders to have 9 in every path and a +100 research bonus. Then recruit as many as you want and set them to research construction. Once you reach Cons-8, forge whatever you want. You also can get a bunch of site searchers this way, not just one (so you can build up some gems without running into problems with #startspell).

Don't forget to disable this mod before playing real games where the AI is playing that nation...