how to sitesearch effective ?

[Boron]

i know there a 3 ways of site searching :
1. search sites through units ( best with rainbow pretender )
2. spells which reveal all sites of one colour like dark knowlegde
3. accashic record

accashic record is really good but only arco , pythium and ryleh ihmo really excel at it and can rely on it .

atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages . so you need to take at least astral 3 on your pretender . but most likely you would have better things to do with your pretender than letting him cast accashic record quite often .

if you instead search with your rainbow pretender first depending how many points you spent on him you find about 50-8x% of the magic sites with him i guess depending if you have level 1 , 2 ,3 ,4 in all / most paths .
second this is time consuming : 2 turns per search . and with high indeps you don't expand at turn 1 probably so when everything goes really well you have searched 10 times at turn 25.
but it is dangerous since most good rainbows are very weak . so after turn 25 letting him search in border provinces is dangerous .
if you are very unlucky you even could loose your pretender because of a random event attack of barbarians or something similiar .


if i search with e.g. dark knowlegde .
it says it reveals all death sites .
there are many sites which produce e.g. 1 death gem and 1 gem of another kind .
so do i find all sites where 1 kind of the produced gems is a deathgem ?
sites like gold mines and so on are they found always the time the province is conquered ?

how many sites are holy / unholy ? i just want to know a rough percentage value
are there some really good holy / unholy sites which give many gems which i don't want to miss ?

[Endoperez]

Dark Knowledge etc. act just as a level 9 mage of the appopriate magic would search the target province. And in fact, just as well as level 4 mage could as there are no magic sites above that level.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Boron:
atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages .

Atlantis has the S2 Deep Seers, Jotunheim can pull S mages from the multiple sorcery randoms on the big hags in IW and Niefel, and they have S2 Nornas in Utgard.

You're right about Caelum, though. With only the possibility of an S random on a High Seraph, they're not really very innately astral.

[En Forcer]

I focus on getting one or two mages to the 3 astral required to start using akashic record. I find that spell the most time efficient although there is a thread talking about it using too many gems.

Gems- if you are number crunching than I guess Akashic record costs too much to be worth it. But I end up with gems coming out of my ears and if not astral than something else which I can convert to astral so really it's a matter of budgeting your resources and deciding what is important to you. Once I actually have someone who can cast it, the whole game changes because it opens up all these new resources.

I no longer use the search command for my commanders. I don't like how long it takes and that combat can interrupt the search.

my $0.10

[Boron]

Originally posted by Norfleet:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Boron:
atlantis , caelum and jotunheim excel at clamhording but have no astralmages .

Atlantis has the S2 Deep Seers, Jotunheim can pull S mages from the multiple sorcery randoms on the big hags in IW and Niefel, and they have S2 Nornas in Utgard.

You're right about Caelum, though. With only the possibility of an S random on a High Seraph, they're not really very innately astral.

---

you are right

but i meant that they can reach astral 3 without empowering / item forging
you can give your pretender 3 + astral no matter what race you play . but normally you have better things to do with your pretender
starshine skullcap : con 6 , 2A
crystal coin : con 4 , but 2E,2A so hard to forge
these 2 are the only easy options i see so far (perhaps i overlooked one ) to increase astral skill quickly .
if you have S2 , S is either ADNB right ?
so you have with S2 only 1/16 chance of getting astral 2.

i dunno which race can easily forge the crystal coins .
for the starshine cap you need to research con 6 first which needs some time especially at difficult/very difficult research and you don't get good benefits other than the items .

while pythium on the other hand is the best accashic race of all i think . + they have even 1 water income + 2 air .

small question: where can i see if the random magic skill is a sorcery or if i get only elemental or all ?

with the arch theurgs you can accashic
if you are lucky you can even get a w2 for clam forging .

normally when you have researched accashic with pythium and saved your astral gems you can immediately cast 2-4 accashics depending on settings and then hopefully you have enough income to cast one every 2 additional turns

so in this aspect they have really an advantage over every other nation ihmo

[Boron]

Originally posted by En Forcer:
I focus on getting one or two mages to the 3 astral required to start using akashic record. I find that spell the most time efficient although there is a thread talking about it using too many gems.

Gems- if you are number crunching than I guess Akashic record costs too much to be worth it. But I end up with gems coming out of my ears and if not astral than something else which I can convert to astral so really it's a matter of budgeting your resources and deciding what is important to you. Once I actually have someone who can cast it, the whole game changes because it opens up all these new resources.

I no longer use the search command for my commanders. I don't like how long it takes and that combat can interrupt the search.

my $0.10

i love the accashic too
but at the moment i want to try ermor ae and after this either ulm or man or vanheim .

all are very bad for accashic

so at the moment my main concern is to find most quickly many sites with ermor .

another question : how do you best defend against banishment as ermor ?
i want to try them in my first mp game but at my tests at sp so far with impossible ai the ai is sometimes not so stupid at all and i ran into a province now with 3 priests 1 of them prophet + only 10-20 units against my 150 but they won through banishment grr.

so i want to find magic sites most efficient and plan to cope this a bit first with e.g. spring hawks and later better need not eat summons

so feel free to post advice

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Boron:
another question : how do you best defend against banishment as ermor ?
i want to try them in my first mp game but at my tests at sp so far with impossible ai the ai is sometimes not so stupid at all and i ran into a province now with 3 priests 1 of them prophet + only 10-20 units against my 150 but they won through banishment grr.

Well, depending on your Ermor theme, the usual way you "defend" against Banishment is that you don't. While spells like Antimagic can help, especially on top of SG Ermor's superior magic resistance, this comes as little consolation to AE, where your undead will just die messily no matter how hard you try.

So ultimately....you don't. How much did you really pay for those troops anyway? Just accept that win or lose, your forces are going to be pummelled, and there's plenty more where that came from. Just try and kill your opponents faster than they can kill you. In the end, all your freebie undead are just fodder for your more important summonables anyway, and if they're getting wasted, your good units aren't.

[Boron]

yeah i know that they are only fodder
but at the beginning i need my gems for other things and the early researches aren't that good too .

so if your enemy decides to attack you in the beginning and if you are worst case neighbored to someone with natural lvl 4 priests like marignon / atlantis .... how do you defend against him ?
if he just has 4-5 priests + some guard troops / perhaps seasonal spirits or something else which doesn't eat how can you defend against this ?
if you didn't take the PoD but a lich / ghostking even your pretender is probably not strong enough to kill them or it is at least very risky .
i mean of course in the first 15-20 turns or so .

edit :
because i like the arch bishops of AE which summon 5 or 6 undead horsemen / turn .
but they are almost worthless it seems to me now .
most likely i should try without bishops
trying to get conj 6 quickly is basically a good idea since the spectres are best ermorian researchers or ?

[ June 30, 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: Boron ]

[PvK]

As usual, hit them as soon (during a battle) as possible, and develop something that doesn't get banished, as soon as possible.

Large numbers of skeletal horse in the front and front flanks are pretty dangerous since they are so fast and have good attacks, even if they die quickly.

Use the national unholy protection spells, since they will help at least a bit - against a large number of attacks, so the total effect is worthwhile.

PvK

[Cainehill]

One thing about putting Astral-3 on a pretender : my advice is to only do it on an immortal, or possibly a human rainbow.

Astral 3 on a pretender that's going to be out there in combat makes it far too easy to kill using piddling Astral 1 or Astral 2 mages. If you're immortal in friendly domain, this doesn't matter as much, and if you're a human rainbow, mostly used for early site searching, research, forging and casting from somewhere safe inside the capitol, it also doesn't matter as much (if they're coming after you in your home fortress, you have bigger problems already).

Because of this, I recommend either going all out on a combatant Pretender ( Astral 7-9, thus making it much harder to get a cheap kill against ), or none at all. After all - your pretender probably has better things to do than cast Akashic Record anyways.

If you can just get a mage with astral 1, it can be worthwhile to empower it once (for 30 astral gems) and then create a starshine skullcap (10 more astral gems), and then you have a mage who can cast your Akashic records. Considering that Akashic Record costs ... 25 astral gems a cast, 40 gems to get the ability isn't all that extreme; less than two castings worth of gems.