Why are Sages fair? Opinions wanted!

[The_Tauren13]

Kristoffer O said:
Hiding it would give astral nations a great advantage though.

That's a silly thing to say. One could just as easily argue, say, fire nations have a great advantage because of, like, the High Temple of the Magii.

But even so, you could just make it less common but still level 0.

[Huzurdaddi]

The_Tauren13 said:

That's a silly thing to say. One could just as easily argue, say, fire nations have a great advantage because of, like, the High Temple of the Magii.

No he's quite correct. If it was hidden and you needed ( for example ) astral-1 to find it then sage sites would be a huge advantage to astral nations.

[Huzurdaddi]

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[Ironhawk]

Sages should be priced in the 100-120gp range. At that gold cost it will no longer be a *complete* no brainer to take them. They would be on par with the lowest level mage available to a lot of nations, which prompts the question: Do I want a pure researcher? Or should I recruit a mage who can research some, but also be deployed for combat should the need arise?

Certainly at that cost most nations will still buy many sages. And thats fine - the Library was placed in the game to be a research booster. But 100-120gp will make for some diversity of choice in play. In addition, they will have the desirable effect of making high magic nations more alluring without completely crippling the tactic of playing a magic-poor nation and gambling that you will find libraries.

The Panther said:
Question for all: At what cost would you have to think twice about building sages in the first 40 turns of a game?

Like perhaps:
80 gold - Of course, build them by the boatloads!
110 gold - Probably build several when the gold starts coming in, for the research gets so much harder to make it to the higher and higher levels.
140 gold - Build a few because all you need is the lab to boost your research, but much prefer other choices.
170 gold - Never build one.

Any opinions?

They are still useful for the one random pick regardless of the research bonus. It is especially nice to get a blood sage when you are not a blood nation.

One other thing is that the other neutral mages sure seem FAR less common than sages. I would guess libraries have a higher probability to appear than other type sites.

[Tuidjy]

I voted, of course, no. Some of my reasons:

1. Sages are only marginally better, as researchers, than many other indies.
2. Sages are rather common and available to everyone.
3. Sages are rather underwhelming in combat.
4. Sages are quite vulnerable to pretty much anything.

Sages of course have their good points - they are useful for death and astral
searches, low level item forging and blood hunting. And of course, they can
provide a nice early boost in research.

But do sages decide games? Hell no. I save all my turns. Here is what sages
did in my last three big games (more than four people)

Game number I (Pythium)
I built a total of 14 sages, between turns 15 and 22. I was rolling for blood.
Theurgs are close to sages for research, and make awesome combat mages in mid
game... as well as in late game, if you can build enough slave matrices.

Early sage provinces - turn 7 and turn 12.

Game number II (C'tis)
No sages. Shamans are better researchers, and they are more useful in combat.
They do not get sick in miasma, either, but that was not an issue, I had
Gift of Health running most of the game.

Early sage provinces - turn 8.

Game number III (Abysia)

Here is one game in which I was glad to have found sages. The game is only on
turn 56 right now, but I can say that I have about two dozens sages, and that
they do not account for even half of my research. I have not built any for
about 20 turns, because I prefer recruiting fighters as opposed to bookworms.

Would I have been dead in the water without sages? Absolutely not. On turn 8
I found a lizard province. By turn 20, I had found mages that give me 6 RPs and
cost only 60 golds to recruit. I also have a druid province. Had I needed to,
and had my neighbors left me the time, I could have also taken a blood druid
province or an amazon one.

Dominions II is full of options, but it is very shortsighted to think that any
strategy is a game winner/breaker. Yes, you will lose if you neglect casters,
castles, research, mobility, hoarding, supercombatants, diplomacy... but neither
of these will garantee you a win. And yes, you will also lose if the RNG takes
a dislike to you. If your temple and lab burn on turn 2, you prophet gets nailed
by a random event assassin, and your pretender gets decay'd by an indy, you are
toast. Not finding any independant mages is a drag, but it can happen. As for
having a pretender design that requires sages, sorry, but that's your problem.

[The Panther]

Interesting post, Truidy, and food for thought. It just so happens that I have recently played those same three races in MP and behaved nearly exactly like you did:

1. Pythium. This is one of the races that simply does not need any sages. I think I built maybe 10 sages in my game by turn 40, mainly for the random pick. Normal research meant a zero need of sages for me.
2. C'tis Miasmi. I never built a sage. They die to disease and I always would rather have another shaman instead of a dying sage. This was set on hard research, but I still didn't need any sages to be the third nation to finish all research (Pythium was first, Caelum second to complete).
3. Abysia - I built sages by the boatloads from two libraries. I must have built 80 of them, probably more. I quit building them for a while, lost some to fires from afar, and then started building some more. But this game was very hard research and I really, really wanted to get to ghost riders after getting the blood 9 research done plus my needed construction and evocation research. The cheapest Abysian capitol-only national mage was much too busy with blood hunting to waste time on mundane tasks like studying.

Also, there is 4: Atlantis. I have built maybe 20 sages (turn 68) and only because of the very hard research setting. Otherwise, my 60 gold amphibous acolytes work just fine, thank you very much. Capitol only is a drag for the acolytes, though.

One thing is for sure, the need for sages is strongly dependent on your race and theme selection as well as the hardness of the research setting. The real problem with sages is that it evens out the research ability of the various nations and they take away the sting of hard or very hard research.

The drawback to nerfing sages is that it would just make the strongest race even stronger. Pythium is already too powerful as is and does not need any help by hurting the other races through limited sages.