Tip: Site Searching Strategy

[Ygorl]

Some disorganized thoughts...
If you've got no mages to use the gems produced by sites uncovered by Acashic Record, you can alchemize them to get more Astral (or, even less efficiently but still occasionally useful, empower somebody so that you do have mages to use the remaining gems). However, anybody who takes the province from you gets the benefit of those sites too, so there's a small potential cost to exposing them. It's also just about the only way to search for sites that you don't have mages for, which makes it potentially valuable. How expensive is it, if you do have mages otherwise capable of casting the little radar spells? You'll probably stop casting them on a province after about 5, on average, or about ten gems and five mage-turns per province. Compare that to 25 gems and one mage-turn. Acashic record will net you slightly more than the individual radar technique, but not much. So it's only a good deal if you really want to make sure you can find every damn site, if you want lots of gems that you can't actually use very efficiently, or if you value your mage time at 3+ gems per turn. It sure is fun and easy, though... Oh, and if you only have 2-3 paths for which you can use radar spells, and Acashic Record is an option, you can expect (at normal site frequencies) to make back your gem investment vs. radar spells (by alchemizing those useless gems that start rolling in) in about 20 turns. So if you're playing a nation with strong Astral but not much else and no options to change that (is there such a nation? If so, it better have a lot otherwise going for it) it wouldn't be a hideously bad bargain.

[Edi]

Hellboy, take a look at the site DB for Dom3 (link in sig), that should give you an idea of what sites to find in which terrain. A lot of sites are "Any land", but in general the tendency is:

• Fire: waste, mountains
• Air: mountains, plains
• Water: swamp, other non-waste
• Earth: mountains
• Astral: any, slight emphasis on plains
• Death: any, slight emphasis on mountains
• Nature: forest, sea
• Blood: any

I'll be updating the site DB in a few days because I now have all of the info I could possibly need, thanks to DrPraetorius. His efforts have given me accurate terrain masks, site frequencies and quite a few other bits of info that helped me track down some errors and add missing things to the DB. I'm also going to shamelessly steal his formulas for displaying the specific terrains and uniqueness of sites (using the terrain masks as basis) to make the DB more readable. That way the DB will be easily accessible and only the hardcore enthusiasts will need to try and decipher his data dumps.

[Blofeld]

Do border mountains count as mountains for the purpose of magic sites?
I haven't seen a single occurance of regular mountains in a map generated by Dom3 random generator, so that may skew the distribution and availability of magic sites quite significantly.

[Ballbarian]

Border mountain provinces count as mountains.
To get regular mountains in a random map, uncheck the border mountains box prior to map generation.

[Baalz]

Well, these types of questions are very situational. I agree that path specific radar spells are the better choice in most situations, but certainly not all. Basically, you've got 3 choices 1) Manual search 2) Search each path remotely 3) Acashic record. Here are some factors which have a significant impact on what you do.

1) Do you have strong astral with not much diversity, while also having conjuration as one of your first research goals? Bandar Log comes to mind, using acashic record sparingly when you first get it will give you a good multi-path gem income that your nice summons can use. Not a bad idea to go for arcane probing, then straight into conjuration.

2) Is the research required for radar spells at cross purpose to other research you need done early on? Mictlan comes to mind. With astral, fire, nature, & water mages all of path two, I often end up manually searching because I'm focused on researching construction and blood.

3) Do you really want gem incomes for paths you've only got first level mages in, or no mages yet (perhaps you're expecting to summon something to take advantage of them)? Expecting to need to bring a fight underwater and need water gems? etc.

4) Site frequency (including era, LA has less sites I think) absolutely effects the choice because the payout is higher so the more important factor is mage-turns. Conversely if you've got low sites, and consequently a low gem income then even the path specific radar spells may have a low ROI and it makes more sense to manually search.

5) Are there some higher level sites that would have a huge impact? For example there is a level 3 blood site which gives you a 60% blood magic discount, if you're playing a blood strategy its worthwhile to make sure you search for level 3 sites which often means remote searching.

6) Do you have a lot of swaps/wastelands in your kingdom? It really doesn't make much sense to cast acashic on farmlands, I usually only cast it on swamps/waste/forest/mountains with no sites showing yet.

7) How valuable are off-path gems to you? If you've got no use for a path unless you empower somebody twice gems of that flavor aren't terribly tasty.

[Teraswaerto]

Using Acashic Records usually gets you lots of gems for paths you can't use and wouldn't find otherwise, which you can then alchemise into pearls, and then cast Acashic more with those pearls. 2->1 ratio isn't that bad.

Over time you'll get more pearls than you'd save by not using it, and it saves mage time and reduces micro. I like to use it when I can.

[Hellboy]

Ballbarian said:
To get regular mountains in a random map, uncheck the border mountains box prior to map generation.

That's good to know - forgot about that!

Edit: Ooops, that was a dumb question, never mind.

[Dedas]

Not having regular mountains is pretty bad for nations like Agartha who then cannot build cave fortresses.

[johnarryn]

I almost never use Acashic record, even when I have access to it... too expensive, I find, and not worth the payoff.

I tend to begin manual site searching (move, search, move search) very early with several mages to get my gem economic going, particularly if I have access to diverse paths and will need many types of gems. Once its later in the game and I have more mages and more gems, I can stop some mages from researching and have them cast spells to search instead... I find this method gets me a very large income of gems starting early in the game.

[Gandalf Parker]

Again (why do I keep doing this) you might notice that the game style affects the answers. Everyone is correct, for their game.

The advantages of using Acashic Record makes it balance out in long games on larger maps.

The advantages of walking around would tend to be obvious for smaller maps like most of the blitz games play on.