Random New Questions
 

Hey folks; a few quick questions about things I've run across in my recent EA Sauro game.

Arcane Nexus: it says half of the gems spent (rituals + forging) are converted into astral pearls. How exactly does that work? I forge a Horror Helm (10D). Is that 5 astral pearls, or 2.5 (half = 5, halved again for alchemizing in the nexus). How does it interact with hammers/forge of the ancients? Is it specifically spent gems, or the base cost of the item? If I were forging The Summit with a hammer, that's 40E * 3/4 = 30E. Would I get 15 or 20 pearls via the nexus? (I assume the nexus captures pearls for gems I spend, too)

Forge of the Ancients: that's a 25% forging bonus? (not sure if it's 25% or 50%). If it's 25%, can a CBM Forge Lord make items for free? Hammer (25%) + built-in bonus (50%) +FotA (25%) = 100% cost reduction? Or am I screwing up the order of forge bonuses. Similarly, would a forge lord with the hammer of the forge lord get free items (50% + 50%), or 1/4 (50%*50%)?

Water entry: I'm finding EA Oceania a huge pain the rear. I'm playing the Uropia map, and started over in what I think is Persia-ish, and Oceania has just about the whole mediterranean (we've been at war the whole game, but I've held onto all my land provs.). I reached conj 8 before EA Oceania, and would like to get the queens of elemental water before they can, as some SCs like that would make dealing with their 200+ unit armies much easier. Is wraith lord -> build laboratory -> Naiad/Sea King summoning really how I have to do it? I suppose it would be a little overpowered to be able to summon them above-ground.

Blood Hunting: I've read Baalz' guide to EA Mictlan and blood hunting, but I'm not 100% clear on everything. When I hunt, I need a total of 5 levels in blood to have a 100% chance of capturing slaves? I've been using 2 blood random warrior sorceresses with SDRs per province with a high success rate, but am finding the unrest is climbing awfully high. Giving provinces a few turn rest is a little annoying, as is ferrying around armies to patrol. Should I just ignore the unrest?

Blood Magic: Seems like it should be powerful, but I'm not sure the best way to leverage it. At the moment I've mostly been forging blood boosters for my witch kings, which is getting me more blood boosters - seems a bit of a cycle of boosters isn't going anywhere in the long run. I've got my eye on the blood royalty in the long run (though lacking B/F the arch devils are out of reach), but how do you effectively use it earlier? Spine devils seem costly at 7 slaves/3, though I've had good use of bone fiends as chaff blocking for androphag archers (3 slaves/9 is awesome). All the other blood summons seem really expensive in mage-time. Are they good enough to justify it? Do I just need to do it on a large scale? (e.g. 4 witch kings x 5 turns = 20 devils as a small, elite army?) Perhaps my problem is that I'm playing against the AI, which plays conservatively with huge horde-based armies.

Death Magic: What's the best use of my death gems? I hear that they're really effective. I tried a few Enaries casting shadow blast in combat and that was super-powerful (got to pick up some eyes of aiming though; low precision was rough even with a big blast radius), but I think I need to work on my gem-ferrying supply lines. Ritual casting, though, seems harder to get my hands on. Mostly the only obvious path is summoning/boosters for Tartarians, and Bane/Wraith Lords. Earlier on, should I be summoning chaff via Reanimation? I feel like I ought to go for a few Ermor games to really try an undead chaff based army. Still, Raise Skeletonx5 from 2-5 mages in front of 40 Androphags has done a number on most AI armies. That doesn't take death gems, either, which is cool for learning death magic but doesn't help me with the death gems use.

Souless vs. Skeletons: Just a quick check, as I am still learning here. Raise Dead gets me souless/longdead, while Raise Skeletons gets me skeletons? Soulless seem really crappy. I used Carrion Reanimation, and got a province but they were slaughtered by ~ 5 hirdmen who attacked the following turn. Sure, hirdmen are great, but 70 soulless v. 5 hirdmen seemed sad. Skeletons seem to have better staying power. Is it that soulless-generating spells tend to give more soulless/provide soulless as a benefit in battle-torn provinces more than being dedicated to them?

Golem Thugs & Trampling: I summoned my first golem a little while ago, and now need to figure out how to use him. Obvious basics: starshine skullcap/teleport. Now I have a thug who can go anywhere in the world! Woo! Except his def is crappy, protection decent but not stellar. Right now he has fenris' pelt and a shield of gleaming gold. Prot 18/def 16 seem low for a good thug. I could give him black plate instead of fenris' pelt next time, but...*shrug* Bane lords seem more effective, and close to as mobile with boots of flight. The golem has 7 precision, so the astral damage spells (Astral Geyser) don't seem that useful. Is Stellar Cascades better? (Cascades x4, wait, attack seems like it could be reasonable if I threw on some reinvig, as the golem only has 4 spellcasting encumbrance.)

How does trampling work, again? Is it in the manual? I assume I get to make free 0/0/0/0 attacks until I run out of move. It also seems to cause fatigue - the Golem is 0 enc, but with trample was generating 2-ish fatigue a turn. Not bad, but vs. glamour (Vanheim...) I need lots of attacks with his 9 attack skill to hit anything.

Thanks everyone! I really appreciated the answers from my last few threads.

Re: Random New Questions
 

Oops, almost forgot: How do terror/frighten work? Do theyf orce the targeted enemy units to take morale checks ala fear, or do they lower he enemy morale, or both?

Re: Random New Questions
 

You get the gems that were used in forging/rituals, just that they're automatically being alchemized to astral pearls.

There apparently is a way to get items for free, but it isn't easy, or economical, in any case. There's some thread about it. The boni don't stack like you wrote, but are applied one after another at times, so usually the best you can do is to minimize forging costs to 1 gem per path.

Ghost Riders and Tartarians.

Yes. And Raise Skeletons gives you a fixed number of them while Raise Dead gives a number of Soulless which depend on the amount of corpses in the province where it is being cast (including the current battle, I guess). So unless you're aware that there's a lot of corpses in the province you're fighting, Raise Skeletons should always be the better choice.

AFAIK it is in the manual. Trampling doesn't make use of the attack skill, and even if a unit defends against the trample attack it should get 1 damage which would take down the Mirror Image effect from Glamour.

Re: Random New Questions
 

Concerning Arcane Nexus - you get 2.5 pearls for each 10 gems actually spent.
Once you have 100 pearls wish for gems, you get 150 gems and 25 pearls.
Feed the gems back to the Nexus for recycling your gems out of control.

Re: Random New Questions
 

If you want the water queens you probably need something like that, but there are plenty of other chassis capable of SCing just as well.
Don't ignore the unrest, it makes hunting much harder. You will either want to patrol or set taxes to 0 (or both, all depends on how many hunters).

Yes, in general low level blood summons are hard to use early. Small elite armies of devils etc can work, but it's quite a time investment. And yeah, small raiding armies work much better vs human players.
As stated, tartarians and ghost riders are great uses. Others include manifestation, black death, carrion reanimation, lichcraft, black servants with bane venom charms, well of misery (more gems).

Yes soulless are mostly quite a bit worse. They do have their uses though, either because you get more of them or the high HP.
You definitely do not want your golem (or almost any SC) to cast attack type spells. High fatigue makes them far, far easier to damage. So you want just a few buffs (like luck or ethereal), then attack in melee.

One advantages of the golem (vs human players) is you can instantly pull him out of tough situations with returning. And of course for counter raiding- they land right on top the raiders rather than needing to guess.

Re: Random New Questions
 

I don't think anyone's addressed this question. I don't know what you mean by "free 0/0/0/0 attacks." The manual details the amount of damage caused by trampling (I think it's (10 + TramplerSize * 2) AP, e.g. 22 AP for an elephant). The number of trampling attacks you get is tied to the size difference between your unit and the trampled units, and as far as I can tell is totally independent of Move (e.g. getting a Limp doesn't hurt your number of tramples). IIRC if you are 3 sizes bigger you get either 3 or 4 trample attacks every turn (alternating), and if you're one size bigger you get either 1 or 2 (alternating). This suggests that you probably get 0.5 + (size difference) tramples per turn, but I haven't tested that to see if it really does generalize that way.

Each trample attack costs you Enc fatigue, so unless your trampler is Enc 0 he will fatigue out really fast against a large army and die. Trampling works best either for 1.) raiding human-sized PD, or 2.) undead/elemental royalty thugs.

By the way, I love the Stymphalian Wings. Trampling, flying, and Fear +0, all in one neat little package with decent Prot. Too bad it's so expensive.

-Max

Re: Random New Questions
 

chance of finding blood slaves is 10 + 40*level. so blood 3 will guarantee finding.

However, you also have to make a population check (pop/5000 %) and if you make a unrest/4 % check you fail.

All three checks must succeed to get blood slaves. And you then generate d5 +d(slaves) unrest.

I did all that by memory.. so I may be off. Some units get a blood hunt dowsing bonus too.

Re: Random New Questions
 

you know, after my experiments with death magic, I'm under the impression that there is always a "fail" chance, however slim. So most likely you can still fail blood checks after B3

Re: Random New Questions
 

Wow! Thanks for all the help, everyone. I'll be sure to put it to good use. RE: Trampling, I'll have to look at it again, because I know my golem was slowly getting fatigued- does walking give fatigue for 0 enc creatures? He had boots of the behemoth and a frost brand, plus fenris' pelt (auto berserk) and was scripted Attack Closest (what with the berserk it wouldn't have mattered anyways). In retrospect I really ought to have given him an ammy of resilience and some other armor instead of the ring of regen and fenris' pelt (Didn't realize regen doesn't work for golems), and scripted Personal Luck, Body Ethereal, wait, wait, wait, attack closest. Something like that.

Thanks for the info on bloodhunting, Chris. I didn't realize I had an unrest/4% chance to fail. I suppose mustering up some patrollers is relatively easy.

Some other questions: How much work do you folks put into using special sites? I happened across a Construction: 20 and a Conjuration: 20 bonus site, but they're far on the corner of my empire, but they're 9-12 provinces away from my capitol on a 144 province map. Plus there's woods and mountains between me and there, so it'll take 8-ish turns to relocate my forging/ritual staff over there. I guess the question is basically about how many gems a mage turn is worth, and obviously the answer varies, but do you have rules of thumb for it?

Similarly, I have a tendency to just recruit cap-only mages for my ritual/forge use, and so have a stack of 20+ mages in my capitol, minus however many I send out with my armies (I'm trying to break the bad habit and use my Witch Kings, Niefel Jarls, etc for combat...but it's a hard one to break). Is this common, or do you send out nearly all of your mages, and just have some of them stop in a lab/fort near wherever they are when you need their randoms? That seems far better from an efficiency standpoint (good for combat, though you lose a few research turns), and is less vulnerable to ranged ritual spell violence.

Re: Random New Questions
 

Berserking adds 2 fatigue/round, so that's where your golem picked it up, attacking/moving/trampling shouldn't add fatigue to 0 enc units.

As to the rest, it all depends. Usually forting and then buying some non-cap mages on the discount sites you find will be the easiest way to get going, and then move a few of the cap guys over, since you'll only be getting a few high-powered things a turn, most items you'll be making a bunch of are the low-level stuff, so there's no reason to use a cap mage for them in most cases.