Bug: Strands of Astral Power

[BlanketThief]

SoaP does not dispel when the caster is feeble-minded (Allowing the caster to be healed of the affliction and not pay for recasting, or just to hold onto the global slot)
If the caster is feeble-minded, each turn the casting-player (PlayerA) will get the message:
"Foo didn't find any new mages/sites...
One of our highly trained astral mages managed to retaliate at the hostile presence and ruin his mind. Hopefully this threat is over now"
The last portion of that should only be received by PlayerB, as opposed to both PlayerA and B the way it currently is. PlayerA recieves the full "Did not find... our astral mages managed to retaliate.." message each turn which the casting-unit is feeble-minded
Can provide more details as needed.

[Edi]

Send the game files to Illwinter per the shortlist thread instructions. This is again something that Johan needs to take a look at.

[NooBliss]

Does it make SoAP any good? I tried using it in SP, and I dont think I ever noticed any effect at all.

[Ferrosol]

Originally Posted by NooBliss

Does it make SoAP any good? I tried using it in SP, and I dont think I ever noticed any effect at all.

It works well if you have a pretender who is

A.) A strong S mage
B.) Has a decent scattering of magic paths

I see the main benefit as whacking enemy mages though rather than the site searching.

[sansanjuan]

Originally Posted by Ferrosol

It works well if you have a pretender who is

A.) A strong S mage
B.) Has a decent scattering of magic paths

I see the main benefit as whacking enemy mages though rather than the site searching.

I saw ano use it to great affect by wishing for power with the casting mage (+2 each path). I don't think it will find level 4 sites but immediatly found rafts of lower level sites in newly conquered lands.
-ssj

[Ferrosol]

Originally Posted by sansanjuan

I saw ano use it to great affect by wishing for power with the casting mage (+2 each path). I don't think it will find level 4 sites but immediatly found rafts of lower level sites in newly conquered lands.
-ssj

True but if you are the point where you can wish for power you probably dont need to worry about site searching.

[Loren]

I've seen this also.

[ano]

I saw ano use it to great affect by wishing for power with the casting mage (+2 each path).

Wish for magic power gives +1 to all paths. Another +1 was from Robe of the Magi. This spell in general has situational uses. For a huge poorly-sitesearched empire (like in the case sansanjuan mentions) it may be a very good spell because for the price of the spell + wish (140 S pearls in CBM) if you have a strong dominion, you will find something like 3-8 sites per turn in average. This will pay for itself very soon, especially considering the absence of gem generators and value of each gem. Also, it severely hurts any force that is trying to invade you.

[Peter Ebbesen]

I have used SoAP to great effect in two MP games with a low amount of players - only in the CBM version, in vanilla it comes too late to be used for anything but whacking enemy mages and has to compete with other major end-game enchants.

One game was as MA R'lyeh using CBM 1.6 with a rainbow void lurker with high astral going directly for SoAP in research, the other was as a considerably more powerful CBM LA Ermor rainbow master lich strong in astral and death who had it as my third research priority after Con4 and Enc3 research.

In the first case nobody bothered to dispel it when it popped up in the early-midgame since my dominion didn't threaten anybody but it did find many sites for me, though Voice of Tiamat found many more (researched as 2nd priority after SoAP), and nobody bothered to dispel it in the late game as I had managed to put up much more juicy targets for dispelling. Note that with a much larger number of players (there were only 6 players still alive and kicking after the early game) it would probably have gone down sooner rather than later.

In the second game I poured a very considerable amount of astral gems into it when I put it up and it survived all its way into the late game, both finding me many sites much earlier than I could otherwise have done and, when my neighbours finally invaded, frying a lot of mages. There's nothing quite like being told that 21 mages have been killed by SoAP in a turn (though that was the most it ever did).


I haven't had my caster feebleminded from SoAP (and I am not entirely sure from the SoAP description that SoAP is supposed to go down if feebleminded from other sources) but I can confirm that having a caster feebleminded as a result of battle does not take down the SoAP. This happened to my master lich who was more than happy to be back frying minds after a few turns of healing his own afflictions.

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In either case, in the CBM version where it is a mere 40 astral gems at Evo6 S7 it is now one of my highest priority spells for any nation suited for a rainbow mage strong in astral or a pretender strong in 2-3 paths of which one is astral... so long as I either have a source of healing afflictions or don't care all that much about the pretender being nuked out of his own mind or think that a mere 2-3 turns of sitesearching will pay off well enough.