Communion Fatigue question--- strange obeservation

[konming]

These are good points.

Altough concerning using your best mages as slaves is kind of impractical in many cases. First these better mages are often much less in number. Rarely can you afford to use 8 arch theugy in battle as slaves, when they could have cast thunderstrike, astral fire and alike. Second if you lose 8 acolyte theugy you will sigh and move on, but if you lose 8 arch theugy it might as well be game over. Third often only the best mages have the random path you need, and mixing good and bad slaves will just get the bad slaves killed.

Still appreicate your good thoughts in using the communion.

[Baalz]

See, that's exactly the problem most people have with communions it seems, they want (for instance) the guy who got the air random to cast thunderstrike, while the other big mages are casting all kinds of stuff the slaves don't have the paths for. That's the kamikaze way to use a communion, and while effective *will* result in communion slave deaths because the slaves are soaking up fatigue for spells they can't themselves cast (alternatively you can use 16+ slaves so they can actually soak that stuff up). That is, of course, a viable strategy but you should be aware of the cost and not bemoan it. The other way to use a communion is as I describe above, which is much safer and still hideously effective most of the time.

If your question is how to prevent master from overdraining slaves to death, the answer is don't make the master more powerful than the slave. If you objection is then that you don't get to supercharge your mage to cast spells not otherwise possible, I say just use more slaves (use 16 slaves and one master...you can cast thunderstrike all day long). If you think that's too expensive, then just go in knowing your slaves are expendable kamakazees and plan accordingly.

[Folket]

But nothing explains the result in case 3. Twice the amount of slaves give each slave just a fourth of the fatigue. And these were the slaves without paths. I can only explain that with that the slaves gets bonus to paths they do not have.

[llamabeast]

They do get bonuses to paths they don't have, I think. I think with a communion of 2 slaves the slaves go to level 1 in every path they didn't previously have access to - i.e. the bonus levels are given in paths they don't have as well as paths they do have.

Of course this doesn't apply to the masters.

[Folket]

I that is so. It is more gold efficient to use twice the amount of communicants then Theurgs.

[Baalz]

Yeah, communicants are very gold efficient, the limiting factor is castle-turns. On a gold basis it'd be great to have groups of 16 communicants marching around with any decent sized army but in practice it's pretty hard to mass them.

Not that Pythium needs a boost, but I was thinking it'd be pretty cool if communicants were troops rather than commanders. Maybe bump their cost up a bit...

[thejeff]

Yeah. I almost always want to build at least the cheapest researchers, rather than communicants. At least they can do something when there aren't big battles going on.

Maybe I just need to build more castles. Communicants can be built without a lab right?