Advice for MA Man

[Jazzepi]

ano said:
Yes, it is hard to get. That's why I said about being lucky. I don't rely on this, certainly. However, I think that air booster can be got when you really need it. Either from trade (Vanheim, Eriu and Caelum have A4 quite often) or from that rare crone, or at least you may empower for 60 gems. I consider this being quite real in the long run. Anyway, I think that having fast expansion, good combat pretender and very useful bless is more important than being sure you have A4 for air boosters, staff of storms and whatever else you need.

My point was that MA Man has no way to increase their magic diversity. Early expansion doesn't help you at all in the late game when you get crushed by nations using a full range of magic items/spells/summons. Because you need both A4, and a way to diversify your magic, naturally leads to the choice of a prismatic pretender. Having a rainbow mage as a pretender is not just for the A4, in fact if you had a reliable way to produce A4, I would say you should drop it off the pretender.

Good players simply won't trade you air boosters if they're going up against you. This happened to me when I was playing in Aramadillo.

Here's a new build taking into account the fact that you can spam Auspex and Haruspex with other people. Then you can build a crystal coin, and starshine skullcap on an S4 pretender to get to rings of wizardy, which can then be given to an A3 crone, which you'll have quite a few of, to get them to A4 to boost with.

Great Enchantress
Dormant
DOM 5
O 3
P 0
H 0
G 1
Misfortune 2
Magic 1

MAGIC PICKS
F1
W3
E4
S4
D4
N1

This build is probably a bit better than my earlier one. Combined with your pretender, haurspex and auspex you will search your provinces for every E/D/S/N/A and 95% of the W sites while still picking up a *little* fire. Just enough income to let you forge key items. Possibly, if you get lucky enough, you could build the D/F skull for +1 fire, use ring of wizardy, and maybe a staff of the elements to summon either the king of banefires or king of elemental fire, though this is sort of an off chance.

Jazzepi

[Shovah32]

I'm going to have to go with Meglobob here. You miss out on some magic diversity compared to the rainbows, particularly the powerful death and astral magic, but I love earth magic and the cyclops. Your pretenders also pretty much a more powerful(magically much more so), non-undead version of the Tartarian E3A2 Cyclops who is very powerful.

[Jazzepi]

Shovah32 said:
I'm going to have to go with Meglobob here. You miss out on some magic diversity compared to the rainbows, particularly the powerful death and astral magic, but I love earth magic and the cyclops. Your pretenders also pretty much a more powerful(magically much more so), non-undead version of the Tartarian E3A2 Cyclops who is very powerful.

I'm bad with midrange pretenders like Meglobob was suggesting, but I'm sure it's good.

I still don't like the extreme lack of access to astral and death, but what can you do ;P

Jazzepi

[Shovah32]

You do miss it, but not as much as you would think. And the E9A4 Cyclops is a great combatant and an insane battle mage. Like Bob said - cloud trapeze into battle and cast a few rain of stones/earthquakes to wipe out armies. Preferably rain of stones first to kill those mages.

[ano]

I like the idea of taking a cyclops, however you will be able to take neither growth or prod, nor magic. Your mages will get diseased too often, you won't be able to expand really fast due to lack of units and you will never win the research race. Yes, each of these can be thought of as "minor disadvantage", but put together they form a major one, I think. What do you get in return? A very good combat pretender, maybe an SC and access to air boosters. Not a good trade, as for me.
However, teleportable combat mage casting Rain of Stones can be really fine if not aiming for E9 bless for sacreds (which could be very good sacreds if they had faster feet. Actually it seems strange to me that they are so slow).
Titan E4A4 seems a better choice to me.

Titan (Body 602, 90 hits)
Magic: Air 4 Earth 4
Dominion 6
Scales: Order 3 Productivity 2 Growth 2 Misfortune 2 Magic 1
Dormant

[Zeldor]

With Growth 2-3 even N4 mages get old and diseased really really fast. It looks like they would get the old age at 30-50. I have no idea why crones can't get it at 100-150. That would make that weak nation just a bit better.

[Agema]

If you've got N4 mages, you can surely cast Gift of Health, which removes afflictions and so should save a lot of your crones, shouldn't it? Or does it not stop age afflictions?