New empowerment strategy?

[Taqwus]

Acashic Record does require Conjuration 5 (!), an Astral-3 mage (or an Astral-2 with a Starshine Skullcap / Crystal Coin; more widely available), and a whopping 25 Astral pearls per casting. Most of the single-field divination spells are easier to research (although they're in multiple fields) and often easier to cast (heck, Dark Knowledge is a Death-1). They're also far cheaper.
If you've bootstrapped your gem income to the point where 25 Astral isn't much (note: that's enough for a Juggernaut, or an Imprint Souls, or half an Angelic Host, or a quarter of a Wish..., or 187.5 gold after conVersion to fire gems, etc), and the magical site frequency is rather high, it might be useful to you. Or if you're playing single-player or against human players that are also playing less than brutally optimized, I suppose.
Hm. In Dom I, you sometimes used to be able to *know* that there were at least X magical sites in a province because there were four slots, and when one was found it revealed the site in the slot corresponding to an arbitrary order. If you lit up a site in Slot #4, you knew there were three other magical sites present, and thus it might be a good Acashic Record candidate especially if you lacked the mages to cast the single-site divination spells or you also wanted the holy/unholy sites. The new interface fixes that.

[HJ]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Acashic Record does require Conjuration 5 (!), an Astral-3 mage (or an Astral-2 with a Starshine Skullcap / Crystal Coin; more widely available), and a whopping 25 Astral pearls per casting. Most of the single-field divination spells are easier to research (although they're in multiple fields) and often easier to cast (heck, Dark Knowledge is a Death-1). They're also far cheaper.

I didn't say that it's the most cost-effective way, just that it's the best way to find them. The way the initial poster presented his case, it seems that he wanted to know what sites are there in the first place, and how to find them (I myself am still much in that phase). Of course there are optimal ways to find sites, but Acashic record is great for exploring the game's variety and all that, and also to get access to gem variety that you are not normally able to. And yes, I'm talking about leisurely paced SP games I play, where I want to see everything that game has to offer.

[ November 20, 2003, 21:38: Message edited by: HJ ]

[HJ]

Originally posted by SurvivalistMerc:
If 4 is required for a lot of sites though...maybe my rainbow should include a lot more 4's considering the positive bless effects.

It's not, only for the most powerful ones. Lots of sites are level 1-2. Magic level 2 will enable you to cast site-searching spells (auspex, haruspex, voice of apsu, augury, bowl of blood) or even level 1 is enough (dark knowledge and arcane probing), so once you find first couple of sites to get some gem income rolling, you can start casting them to increase it further in a faster and easier way than hopping from province to province. Arcane probing is especially nice, since it gives you access to astral pearls, which you can more easily convert to other gem types in order to cast that school site-searching as well. However, you can find holy/unholy sites only through Acashic record, unless you search with priests. So if you want to see those, this is the way to go.

[ November 20, 2003, 21:41: Message edited by: HJ ]

[PvK]

On the other hand, casting a single-discipline spell isn't always faster than searching with a mage who has more than one discipline, since searching in-person searches with all of the mage's disciplines at once.

PvK

[HJ]

Originally posted by PvK:
On the other hand, casting a single-discipline spell isn't always faster than searching with a mage who has more than one discipline, since searching in-person searches with all of the mage's disciplines at once.

PvK

That's also true. And that's why Acashic record is the fastest way to find all the sites if you have enough gems to do it every turn.

Also, if you're interested in only single variety of gems, then divination spells are probably faster way to achieve that.

[ November 21, 2003, 02:56: Message edited by: HJ ]