Indep. Mages

[Methel]

Sofar It seems to me the indeps are pretty much a waste of money unless you need them to branch into a new path. There are a few exceptions, but the most common seems to be the shamans of the animal spirits. Do you guys use these for researchers early on?

[Wish]

nope. you wanna use sages if you can get one of the two sites that lets you build them. Some of the academies are good too.... but mostly indy mages are for branching into neglected paths.

[Micah]

Abysia's research capacity is actually so incredibly bad that the X tribe shaman are cost-effective researchers. They're not at all useful in battle, but they won't die off from old age, and the gold to research point ratio is about the same as the anathemants. Plus you don't have to build a fort to make them.

For most nations though they're only worthwhile if you need nature magic (or astral, in the case of the lizard shammies. The lizards are even worse researchers than the tribals though, for the cost, assuming some magic scale)

[MaxWilson]

It depends partly on your magic dominion, and on whether you have access to air/fire/death magic on your national mages. For a nation like Marverni, with no A/F/D and thus no research-boosters possible, I can see indie mages as being cost-effective, especially with Magic-1 or better. As Helheim I'll make a few Academy wizards, but not a ton, because while they're most cost-effective at researching they're not usually as good at being battle-mages as my Svartalfs. I'm still branching out into other nations, but as Agartha I doubt I'd use regular indie mages for researching because earth readers are so cheap, but I'd jump all over Academy mages if I found them.

-Max

[Sombre]

I play with indies off, so unless you find a site which enables the more interesting ones, you don't get any at all. It helps increase national differences, which I appreciate.

[MaxWilson]

Is that the same as just setting indie strength to zero? Or is there a mod that prevents you from building indies once you conquer their provinces? I should try that...

-Max

[Edi]

Max, there is no mod that prevents building indies. The way you do it is add the following into the map file for each province

#setland <province nbr>
#poptype 100 (any value greater than 87 will do)

That will remove the independent poptype, but it will still get defenders, because poptype removal only happens after the defenders have been assigned. You have to do a separate no-indies version of each map you want to play that way.

Independent strength means just how powerful the defenders are (i.e. higher value = more of them).

As far as what indie mages are useful, the Enchantresses, Enchanters, Sorceresses and Metal Order mages (Iron, Silver, Golden) are great, as are wizards. Depends somewhat on what paths you have and how high you can get them with nationals. Moon Mages and Elludian Moon Mages are downright brutal with Evocation 7, just put a horde of them in the back, script Nether Darts and watch the nemy army vanish under a rain of dark power.

Sages can be recruited from 3 sites: Library, Citadel of the Loremasters (unique, rare) and The Council of Sages (unique, rare). I think there might be a fourth one, but I can't remember for certain.

Of the indie poptype mages, only the Amazons are really worth anything bar special circumstances, or the lizard shaman if you lack astral magic (such as EA Ulm).

[Sombre]

4 maps have already have NI (No indies) versions ready made in the mod forum.

NI Silent Seas
NI Aran
NI Parganos (Edi's fix)
aaaand,... the other one Edi fixed that I don't remember the name of. The thread where you can find them was made by me and should be called 'no indy maps' or something.

Edit: Forgot to mention that if you play primarily single player the AI actually does better with no indies. No more armies made of 15 or so random national troops and a million crappy light infantry and militia. Makes a nice change. I personally very rarely play on anything but the NI maps.

[jutetrea]

Hmm, I saw this pop up then forgot about it, will definitely try out the NI maps. Randomized of course

Enchantresses have been my saving find more-so than any other. I've had bad luck with sorceresses getting old, even more than sages. I did use the onyx (amazon?) sorceress in the last game to kickstart a weak blood economy with a rainbow pretender. Before that, never used em.

Enchantresses are pretty expensive, but worth it for the automated site searching and the 2E + boots blade winds.

[Gandalf Parker]

I would think that it would be more balancing to have some mod that removes the site-based indept mages rather than the poptype recruitable indept mages. The site-based ones tend to be the "worthy" ones. Those would be the random-luck effect on the game that true strategists dislike.

Of course, in my games I tend to increase such things.