[DonCorazon]

Cool post. I always site search manually right away, everywhere, with the philosophy that giving up the mage time to get a site on turn 3 could easily provide an extra 100+ gems in a 50+ turn game (assuming +2 gem site is found). Doing the same search on turn 25 however sacrifices the same mage time for a net return of 50+ gems. Seems obvious but I find I often have one of the higher gem income scores...

It coincides with getting mages out of the lab early on and onto the battlefield (as opposed to when I first started playing and found all I ever did was accumulate mages that seemed to research for the sake of researching). Even a little minor spell action can help out in those early province expansions and if you expand radially around your capital you can keep sending a mage out while the prior one searches.

This strategy results in lower research at first, which can cause some nervousness, but with some luck you'll find some indy mage sites that can provide a huge leg up when you're recruiting 2-3 mages vs. everyone else's 1.

I then go back and use remote rituals later - but still question how useful that is since it has been my experience that I rarely find anything new, and am now spending gems (in addition to mage time) and the holding period for any sites found is much shorter, meaning lower total gems will be extracted.