Empowerment

[sum1lost]

I believe machaka may be a good nation for this, especially if you reach con. 6

I flaearrowed them a lot on dom 2

[MaxWilson]

Common means for casting higher-level spells include:

Boosters. Skull staff (+1 D), Earth Boots (+1 E), Flaming Skull (?) (+1 F), Water Bracelet (+1 W), Robe of the Sea (+1 W).

Spell boosters. Summon Earthpower (+1 E, 4 Reinvigoration), Phoenix Power (+1 F, 50% Fire resist), Staff of Storms + Storm Power (+1 A). Underwater, Summon Water Power (+1 W).

Gems, as you mentioned.

Communions. Pythium for sure, and I've done it with EA C'tis.

C'tis doesn't actually need many boosters to cast some devastating combat spells. Cloud of Death has a huge area of effect and is armor-negating; its biggest drawbacks are the high research level and path cost and the low precision (-3). EA C'tis can get around the precision problem with the Nature spell Eagle Eyes, and 25% of Sauromancers can cast it without any boosters at all. Storm of Thorns isn't bad, although it's more a support spell for the entangling effect than an army-killer like Cloud of Death. Don't overlook the battlefield-wide spells like Rigor Mortis. C'tis doesn't have any undead national summons that I can think of, but you can still use Rigor Mortis with regular troops as long as somebody is spamming Raise Dead/Skeletons at the same time. Or you can get a bunch of Pale Riders (pretty cheap for C'tis) and a Wraith Lord. It's a great spell for making sure that a defeated enemy army gets dead instead of away.

-Max

[Ironhawk]

The more common forms of boosting your magic paths are as described above. For in-battle, you can use booster spells, gems, and communions (if you are capable). For out of battle your only recourse are booster items.

Generally speaking, due to its high cost, empowerment is only used when you have no other options. For example you might not even have a mage with the magic path you want and thus you would need to empower one so that it could in turn buff or boost itself to higher levels. Perhaps the most common empowerment is blood 0 -> blood 1 so that you can bootstrap a blood economy. Another reason to use a mage might be to get over a "booster-hump" like getting from Air-3 to Air-4.

[CUnknown]

I use empowerment as Ulm (usually in either blood or nature) to let smiths use their forge bonus on different kinds of magic items. I wouldn't ever use empowerment with the intention of casting a battlefield spell. I think just giving your mages the gems in their inventory before they go into battle is effective. For every gem they burn, they get +1 path for that casting only.

Edit: I guess if you intend to do this a lot, it may be cost-effective to empower instead of using a gem every time. But it would have to be a lot of times, right? And then you run the risk of that mage dying and wasting your investment, too.

[MaxWilson]

Empowerment can also be better than booster items in the case of immortal mages. Sometimes. If you expect your mage to die repeatedly, e.g. a Phoenix or Vampire Queen is single-handedly repelling an assault on your capital.

-Max

[krpeters]

Thanks all for the advice -- I had forgotten about the skill boosting spells, definitely a worthwhile way to gain access to higher level spells. Magic items are a bit more micromanaging involved, but I can see how they'd worth the effort to get another bonus level.

So it looks like the order is:
1) Gems
2) Spells
3) Items
in order of ease of use.

Thanks all!

[Jazzepi]

My tendency is to use spells to boost paths if the caster is going to spam something like a nuke.

For example, an earth mage casting Summon Earth Power can significantly improve the number of times they can spam a nuke spell by both reducing the casting cost of the spell, and providing reinvigoration.

If I'm going to cast a spell that is better the longer/earlier it's on (fire arrows is a good example) I try to use item boosters or gems to get that spell cast on the first turn instead of buffing to it.

Jazzepi

[Taqwus]

Quite a few nations also have decent access to summons with either stronger or different magic than the national mages -- some national summons are like this, and there are some non-restricted summons that can offer other paths.

Ex. -- Spectres take only Death, but give you 1D + 2 restricted randoms, if memory serves (WESD ?).

Lamia Queens are Nature/Death, but can also offer astral.

The absolute wackiest cases are Tartarians, of course; requires death and nature (de facto), but many will have 3/2 unrestricted random, 2/2/1 unrestricted random, or even 3/2/2 unrestricted random. Takes D7, but with a D2 mage, lots of research, and many death gems, you can build Skull Staff, Mound Fiend, Skull Helmet, Demilich, the unique +3D weapon... and end up with a demilich boosted to D8 without involving any other path.