How do you use astral gems?

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Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
I will probably regret asking but.. they dont work to boost research anymore like in Dom1?

Nope, feature was pulled out of Dom2 ... maybe because astral nations were already the strongest and didn't need an extra boost !
A propos de Acashic Records, it isn't that much costly than the basic one-path spells : each of these costs 2, so searching all paths cost 18 (counting slaves), whereas AR is 25, that's only 25% more but is 1 action instead of 9 and can be done with only 1 path instead of 9 !
Finally note that with 40% site freq and avg 1.5 gems/site (that's a guess more than a calculation, given that many sites don't give any gems) you'll get on average 0.4*4*1.5 = 2.4 gems/turn production. So ROE is 10 turns ...