Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

I've recently gotten hooked on this game, and read through the forum guides I could find and the strategywiki. I've managed to win a few games across the ages in SP, but it always seems like my gem income is low. It's especially telling in my current game as EA Abysia, where I've got maybe 20% of the map (Aran) and found no sites whatsoever, possibly because I've been busy fending off Sauromatia and Yomi. Should I be expanding more slowly so that a battlemage can search each site, or try researching up and setting a low level mage to burn gems on the spells? Any help getting my magic up and running would be appreciated.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

It's highly dependent on the particulars of a situation. I tend to use the searching spells a lot and usually always research thaumaturgy 2 and evocation 2 quickly. You should use mages to search for sites early on. Later you can use the searching spells, especially if you have low gem income for those types.

If you're playing with a low site frequency, the spells are less useful because it takes longer to get back the gems you burned searching. If you have mages who have several paths. those are always good to use, because they search many paths at the same time.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

EA Abysia is, IMO, one of the weakest nations for searching. Generally speaking, you want to site search with mages with lots of paths, which the Abysians don't have. Blood magic sites are pretty rare, and in my experience, fire sites aren't easy to find either.

Your Warlocks can cast arcane probing... but you'll need to find astral gems first. You could transmute fire gems, but it's a very wasteful process.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

Another way of getting alot of gems is the luck-3/turmoil-3 combo, this gives you lots of gem random events.

You could always save up your fire gems as Abysia and reserch upto and cast eternal pyre.

Other than that search like mad and cast as many remote site searching spells as possible. Keep a eye out for any indie mages who have magic unavailable to you as well. It can be worthwhile sometimes to for example recruit indie druids and empower to lvl 2 so you can cast Haruspex.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

Two words Acashic Record, this is a 5th level conjuration spell, you need 3 astral magic to cast it and it cast 25 astral gems, this spell reveals all magical sites in a province, holy, blood, everything, it cost alot of gems but once you get a few provinces done, your getting alot of different gems that you can convert to astral gems, however early age abysia might not be the best nation for this strategy.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

The core of almost any search strategy is the 2-3 gem search spells. Manual searching and acashic record can supplement this, especially to get the initial gems flowing, but single search spells should always be the first choice if avialable.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

This is 100% correct but if you have a powerful recruitable mage with 2 or more lvl 4 paths (with path boosting items) then it can be worth having him wonder around site searching.

Nations like EA Atlantis, Marverni etc...can do this. You effectively save 4/gems+ per province then, as opposed to site search spells. More if a path is death.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

Some mages certianly do make great manual searchers, but I don't think I'd ever use boosters for the purpose of manual searching. It completely eats up any profit margin by not doing remote spells. I mean, you do get the booster back when you are done, but if it was a booster you needed you probably had to forge an extra one, and if it wasn't one you otherwise needed it was an extra expense as well.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

EA Ulm's Antlered Shaman are excellent for site searching nearby provinces to your starting castle. They are both stealthy, have wilderness and mountain survival, N2, E2 - and sometimes even more.

Re: Best method of hunting magical sites?
 

The big question is - where to hunt (first)?

This is from Dom2, but still holds true in Dom3: