Questions about a game in progress

[Endoperez]

Ah, that reminds me of something else. If you forge a Dwarven Hammer (E3), anyone having it while forging will have a forge bonus 25, the same as your Master Smiths, and it stacks with your Smiths' ability. Can you say no to 50% off of all items?


Black Servants aren't mages. They are ethereal, however, and as most undead they have encumberance 0. That means that they are hard to kill, and won't suffer from high-encumberance armors (their encumberance will STAY at 0, no matter what armor they wear). Black Servants equipped with Black Steel Full Plates and Black Steel Helmets are VERY hard to kill. Another very useful item is Pendant of Luck (S1), having 50% chance of negating anything that might further damage them, and of course Amulet of Antimagic (S1) to protect them against enemy priests. They could also benefit greatly from Lead Shield (E1 or E2), which also increases magic resistance, especially as they can ignore its encumberance.

[Shovah32]

Who said they were?

[lillumultipass]

Ok, my game is going well for the moment, even though I guess it is going to be harder now that I am at war with Tien Chi, Caelum and Agartha at the same time.

I had forgotten how much micromanagement was involved in the middle to late game: it is a pity mages can't autoforge the same item every turn...And assigning the ten lightless lanterns you forge each turn to 10 mages is not funny either. But I guess that's the downside of having so many possibilities.

one thing however: I was casting something like 2 Haruspex, 3 augury, 3 gnome Lore, 3 arcane Probing and 2 Dark knowledge a turn, and I found that my success rate was low. Then I took a closer look, and it turned out that the mages were all searching the same province on a given turn, even those that were casting the same ritual! I guess this is a bug, or I am just unlucky. Hence, I have stopped casting each spell more than once per turn. But it's a pity.

[Endoperez]

It's a bug. It seems none of us remembered to mention the bug...

[lillumultipass]

ok. So, basically, it's pointless to autocast the same spell multiple times.
It is kind of annoying...

[PhilD]

lillumultipass said:
ok. So, basically, it's pointless to autocast the same spell multiple times.
It is kind of annoying...

Yeah, it is. I mean, it might be bad strategy to autosearch as much as you can, but I'd like to be able to decide on my own bad strategy (esp. in SP) without the game making the micromanagement help only available if I limit my searching...
(and as a result, I end up only casting each spell once per month, because the monthly casting is so much more convenient)

[reverend]

You could still have one type of search going on monthly. But when you have enough free mages and gems, those can be used to manually search other provinces. The monthly spell still tells you its target so you can adjust your other searches.

It's kind of like an indexing service on a computer. Usually run in the background, slow but steady with little use of resources, but when needed, just activate it and put some more CPU time to it. It just depends. If you want results quickly, you have to micromanage. If just want results, let the mages do it themselves.

[thejeff]

It's very annoying. But it's nice to be able to autocast it at all. I usually have one autocasting each search spell and do the rest by hand, making sure to leave the next province for the auto searcher.

The auto search spells pick from the top down, so I just start the manual searching from the bottom up.

There are some other weirdnesses with autosearch, but I haven't pinned them down yet. It will ignore provinces occasionally, for reasons that I don't yet see.

[lillumultipass]

what do u mean by "the auto spell pick from the top down"?
alphabetically?