[Arcturas]

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.