[Micah]

Well, put some on your pretender, empower, or search for indies with astral. Also, remember you can trade in MP games. A lot of nations would probably be fairly interested in taking F/A boosters in return for a RoW, and you're likely to have one of those paths if you're not strong in S. Oh, and grab Dagan and have him probe his little sagely heart out if you can.

By the time you hit turn 30ish you should have enough gems stockpiled to take the hit and burn some empowering someone if you haven't found any indy mages, and if you don't have S you'll probably at least have E, so you can make a crystal coin instead of having to empower all the way up to S4.

Basically you'll have to get S access in a MP game somehow. If you don't have at least minimal astral access by the time you get into the end-game you're really going to be hurting, since you're going to have serious issues with mobility (teleport, astral travel, gateway) and power projection (MIND HUNT, both casting and being beaten down by it, along with the previously mentioned mobility spells) and obviously path diversification via boosters.

And for Endo: I assume your reference to the path reqs of the Army spells is intended to show that my earlier statement of only needing a base E3 to cast them was in error. It is not.

I'll spell it out though, E3 + summon earth power = E4. E4 plus a gem boost = E5 for army of lead.

You cannot cast Army of Gold the same way from E2, however, since it requires 3 gems to cast, meaning at E3 you cannot burn an extra gem to boost your path. Thus, both spells require E3 base, with AoLead requiring an extra gem and resulting in more fatigue.