Request for assistance

[Graeme Dice]

Renegade 13 said:
Both times I've ended up with roughly 20 provinces, a few moderately sized armies, and all provinces explored for magical sites using the Acashic Record spell.

Acashic record is usually not worth the gem cost. If you find one gem producing site, it will only pay off 25 turns later for an astral site, and 50 turns later for any other site. Use the individual school searching spells or level 1 mages for those schools that you can't cast the searching spells in.

So, essentially, my question is how to avoid this, how to avoid the pitfall at this point in the game.

Recruit a mage at every castle every single turn. Use the spells that target large numbers of troops such as blade wind to destroy unarmoured AI troops.

[Arker]

I used to use akashic record a lot myself. I discovered Auspex/Haruspex/Dark Knowledge etc. through posts here and have been using them. It does cut some gem costs down, but on the other hand it means a lot of mages not researching for a round instead of just one. But I think I can get more efficient with it. For instance, I seem to remember someone posting earlier that there are certain types of sites that never show up underwater? But I searched and couldn't find the post.

[Graeme Dice]

There are no blood sites underwater.

[Manuk]

Arker means spells that can`t be cast on an underwater province, Auspex, the air searcher can´t search underwater. But Aruspex, is that it´s name?, the nature searcher can search underwater.

[Endoperez]

Manuk said:
Arker means spells that can`t be cast on an underwater province, Auspex, the air searcher can´t search underwater. But Aruspex, is that it´s name?, the nature searcher can search underwater.

Haruspex, IIRC.

[Graeme Dice]

Manuk said:
Arker means spells that can`t be cast on an underwater province, Auspex, the air searcher can´t search underwater. But Aruspex, is that it´s name?, the nature searcher can search underwater.

No, I think he means exactly what he wrote, which was a question about what kinds of sites can't show up underwater. He said absolutely nothing about what site searching spells don't work on underwater provinces, or can't be cast from underwater provinces.

[Arker]

Yeah, Graeme understood me properly.

I know Auspex, also Augury, you have to have a land lab to cast from. And Voice of Tiamat, you have to have a water one. But I was thinking I'd heard that Death AND Blood sites were land only. If it's just blood then my memory was wrong, so good that I asked.

Still and all, you lose so many months of researcher spells searching with the smaller spells, I think Acashic Record might well be worth it if you have a good astral income to do it with.

[NTJedi]

Arker said:
Yeah, Graeme understood me properly.

I know Auspex, also Augury, you have to have a land lab to cast from. And Voice of Tiamat, you have to have a water one. But I was thinking I'd heard that Death AND Blood sites were land only. If it's just blood then my memory was wrong, so good that I asked.

You can find death sites underwater.

Arker said:
Still and all, you lose so many months of researcher spells searching with the smaller spells, I think Acashic Record might well be worth it if you have a good astral income to do it with.

Depends... lots of variables to consider on whether or not casting the spell is useful. Variables such as current nearby opponent threats, should/can the gems be used to summon Juggernauts instead, how many magic sites are currently known for the province, should the astral gems be saved to dispell a possible future/existing bad global spell, the list goes on and on.