Site Searching: What do you use?

[Scott Hebert]

I use the site-searchers for much the same reasons Agrajag gave.

Regarding blood sites... heh. It's really nice to see a 40% or 60% province... Devil's Den!

[Edi]

Or The Demon Gate.

I tend to rely greatly on the various radar spells, usually to the exclusion of all else if it is an option. However, after I made the magic site DB (available at Arryn's site), I've drastically changed strategy. 70% of sites or thereabouts are lv 1, and a surprising number of the very good ones fall also into this category (they just tend to be rare). Lv 2 mages can find around 85 to 90% of any existing sites, so using mages with greater path levels is a complete and utter waste of a resource that could be spending its time in far better pursuits.

Furthermore, of the lv 3 sites, only Cave of Clouds, Crystal Garden, Grove of Evergreens, Iron Cliff, Weeping Stone and Well of Pestilence are common, and even of those Cave of Clouds has terrain restrictions.

ALL other non-rare lv 3 sites except the Hidden Monastry are unique, regardless of rarity. Well, except for a couple of underwater sites, but there are so few of those anyway that it is not a big deal and basically only affects Atlantis and R'lyeh anyway. Of the rare ones, there are about ten non-unique sites, but the odds of finding any rare site are pretty low compared to the common and uncommon ones, so it is foolish to count on them, and there are more rare lv 1 and lv 2 sites anyway.

Searching for Lv 4 with expectation to find is stupid. All of those sites are rare, all except the Temple of Time are unique and half of them are restricted to a single terrain type.

By far the best type of site searchers are rainbow mages like the Tien Chi Celestial Master, the independent Enchantresses and others that have multiple randoms. Using anything above lv 2 (except for the holy path) is outright stupid unless you know for a fact that there is a specific site in a province (the only lv 3 or above that can be detected by unrest is The Demon Gate, and there are several that modify scales, but they are harder to see, especially if you have points in that scale to the same direction).

There is a very, very good reason why all the radar spells (except death and astral, which require just one path level) are lv 2 spells. Use them, people, or you will be wasting your more significant mages (path lv 3 or above) idling half the time (moving from one place to another) and not doing much useful with them the other half.

Edi

[Evil Dave]

After doing my own site analysis, I came to the same conclusion as Edi. Now I do most of my searching with mages with several level-1 paths.

Given how rare the level three and four sites are, and how little good stuff they contain, I wonder why the developers threw them in... Comments, Devs?

[The_Tauren13]

And why, for gods sake, does the searching display go all the way up to 9??? That really threw me for a loop as a newbie

[Edi]

Huzurdadi, Mount Chaining is both rare and unique, though it is lv 1. So it's chance of appearing is not all that great. Summoning Circle is non-unique, so there is more of a risk of it appearing. One of the most frightening things I've ever seen is Mictlan starting a game with Mount Chaining in the province right next to their capital. It was a co-op game I played with a friend and where everyone but Arco and Pythium (us)were AI, but if it had been a regular MP game, it'd have been game over for everyone by turn 30.

Edi

[Saber Cherry]

The_Tauren13 said:
And why, for gods sake, does the searching display go all the way up to 9??? That really threw me for a loop as a newbie

Hey, that's what the "Newby Guide" is for But it would be really sweet if some sites above level 4 got snuck in before (or in) Dominions 3... and multipath sites, where searching at either (say) Water-2 or Fire-2 discovers the "Luxurious Hotspring of the Opulent Steam Dragons," (enter to cure arthritis) and searching with either Nature-5 or Blood-5 discovers the "Deep Forest Museum of Mass Murder Memorabilia" (enter to summon psychotic curator).

[Chazar]

Evil Dave said:Given how rare the level three and four sites are, and how little good stuff they contain, I wonder why the developers threw them in... Comments, Devs?

First of all, these sites might be of use for scenario maps.
More importantly, I am convinced that all those pretty rich details present within Dom2, like these rare high-level sites, ensure that there will be always something left to discover, which is an important part of the real-world-'magic' of Dom2!

While I do make use of all these databases, and while it is good that they are made (since they help to even out chances in MP games, thanks), it is also bad that those databases exist, since they destroy that real-world-'magic' of dom2. Have you ever experimented with wish? It's certainly a pain for MP-games, but I imagine that it would have been fun to disover all its abilities on my own - if I only hadnt read all about that spell on the web already...

Yet, desipite all that, there are still neat things in the game waiting to be discovered (altough I seem to read only about it here, like last weeks post about....).

[Turin]

I always try to get a province site searched by at least lvl 2 mages using indi and national mages.
After that I use the searching spells on those provinces who still have a good chance of having sites.(for example mountains/swamps where my mages found only 0-1 sites.)

An exception are underwater provinces, those always get the voice of tiamat + haruspex treatment, without having mages search first. And provinces with odd scales and/or unrest get searched remotely too.

[Oversway]

By far the best type of site searchers are rainbow mages like the Tien Chi Celestial Master, the independent Enchantresses and others that have multiple randoms

I agree. It all depends on my nation/setup/independants I find what to use for searching.

[Huzurdaddi]

WRT blood sites:

Yes there are very few blood sites that are worth anything. However the two that are worth some are so insanely powerful that you really have to search for them ( Mount Chaining and Summoning Circle ). Both of these sites can easily change a game even in the last stages.