Tip: Site Searching Strategy

[JayThomas]

This explains what was happening to me in an SP game of mine. I had the PoD who was generating these dead guys and I kept getting messages saying something about holy fire or something was knocking some off every turn.

Guess I'll do more priestly searching.

[Hellboy]

Thanks for the answers, this does help!

I seem to recall from Dom2 days that there was an unholy type, and that that was different than holy. However, in the site DB, I don't see anything labeled as "unholy" - does this exist any more?

Also pulling from quantum mechanic's original post, we have the following list of tendencies in type of sites vs. terrain types:

nature in forests,
earth in mountains,
water in mountains and forests,
astral in plains,
fire in wastes,
air in mountains and wastes.

Is this list complete? I would certainly have guessed that water sites were more common in sea provinces (for example).

Also, death isn't on this list and neither is the terrain type 'swamp', is there no terrain type particularly good for death sites and no site type more likely to be found in swamp?

[Ballbarian]

"Unholy" sites don't exist anymore afaik. (...and I miss them!)

Not sure about the completeness of the sites vs terrain list.

(btw, I use acashic record with a vengeance when I have access to astral.)

[Ygorl]

Some disorganized thoughts...
If you've got no mages to use the gems produced by sites uncovered by Acashic Record, you can alchemize them to get more Astral (or, even less efficiently but still occasionally useful, empower somebody so that you do have mages to use the remaining gems). However, anybody who takes the province from you gets the benefit of those sites too, so there's a small potential cost to exposing them. It's also just about the only way to search for sites that you don't have mages for, which makes it potentially valuable. How expensive is it, if you do have mages otherwise capable of casting the little radar spells? You'll probably stop casting them on a province after about 5, on average, or about ten gems and five mage-turns per province. Compare that to 25 gems and one mage-turn. Acashic record will net you slightly more than the individual radar technique, but not much. So it's only a good deal if you really want to make sure you can find every damn site, if you want lots of gems that you can't actually use very efficiently, or if you value your mage time at 3+ gems per turn. It sure is fun and easy, though... Oh, and if you only have 2-3 paths for which you can use radar spells, and Acashic Record is an option, you can expect (at normal site frequencies) to make back your gem investment vs. radar spells (by alchemizing those useless gems that start rolling in) in about 20 turns. So if you're playing a nation with strong Astral but not much else and no options to change that (is there such a nation? If so, it better have a lot otherwise going for it) it wouldn't be a hideously bad bargain.

[Edi]

Hellboy, take a look at the site DB for Dom3 (link in sig), that should give you an idea of what sites to find in which terrain. A lot of sites are "Any land", but in general the tendency is:

• Fire: waste, mountains
• Air: mountains, plains
• Water: swamp, other non-waste
• Earth: mountains
• Astral: any, slight emphasis on plains
• Death: any, slight emphasis on mountains
• Nature: forest, sea
• Blood: any

I'll be updating the site DB in a few days because I now have all of the info I could possibly need, thanks to DrPraetorius. His efforts have given me accurate terrain masks, site frequencies and quite a few other bits of info that helped me track down some errors and add missing things to the DB. I'm also going to shamelessly steal his formulas for displaying the specific terrains and uniqueness of sites (using the terrain masks as basis) to make the DB more readable. That way the DB will be easily accessible and only the hardcore enthusiasts will need to try and decipher his data dumps.

[Blofeld]

Do border mountains count as mountains for the purpose of magic sites?
I haven't seen a single occurance of regular mountains in a map generated by Dom3 random generator, so that may skew the distribution and availability of magic sites quite significantly.

[Ballbarian]

Border mountain provinces count as mountains.
To get regular mountains in a random map, uncheck the border mountains box prior to map generation.