Guide: LA Man - Castle Warfare

[SlipperyJim]

Playing MA Ulm in SP right now, and I've found a ton of recruitable mages. Onyx & Garnet Amazons, Sorceresses, and those hidden Astral mages (stealthy, ethereal, 3S) are all joining my armies. Oh, and some Gnomes.

Forge $%&@, huh? I'll give you a forge $%&@!

Anyway ... I think it's all a matter of luck. The current game is quite unusual for me. In my last game, the best I could find were some Enchantresses and Adepts of the Golden Order, and I controlled about 10x the provinces by the endgame.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I don't know, maybe because I play a lot of LA, but I reliably get to build special indy mages in about 50% of the games I play.

The other 50% it's unreliable?

I find that depending on path availability, if Magic Sites are at least 40, most of the time I find a -good- indie mage site of some kind if I search 20 provinces or so. Now, that's not discounting the ones that don't implicitly add magic diversity and such, as long as they are good mages, worth buying. Adepts of the Silver Order et al will still get 9-10 RP in Drain2, though even at Drain 3 that quality of mage is comparable to many nations' top recruitable anywhere mage. Add in the fact that LA Man should have money coming out of their ears, and I'd think the primary consideration on the Drain choice, is avoiding losing all of your stockpiled gems.

To put this in perspective, I lost well over 100 gems over 2 turns of consecutive Magic Fading events once, it wiped out all of my non-national gems that I was saving up for Empowering searchers/forgers, and thus, it made me cry cry cry. I honestly think I'd rather take Death3, or Misf3 before I'd ever take Drain3 again.

(Maybe, just MAYBE Drain3 on Man if my build used Luck3, but.....)

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by SlipperyJim

Anyway ... I think it's all a matter of luck. The current game is quite unusual for me. In my last game, the best I could find were some Enchantresses and Adepts of the Golden Order, and I controlled about 10x the provinces by the endgame.

I dunno, I think those are both awesome finds (If it's the 1N + 2.5pick Enchantresses, not the 2N + 1.5pick, those suck).

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

The other 50% it's unreliable?

I find that depending on path availability, if Magic Sites are at least 40, most of the time I find a -good- indie mage site of some kind if I search 20 provinces or so. Now, that's not discounting the ones that don't implicitly add magic diversity and such, as long as they are good mages, worth buying. Adepts of the Silver Order et al will still get 9-10 RP in Drain2, though even at Drain 3 that quality of mage is comparable to many nations' top recruitable anywhere mage. Add in the fact that LA Man should have money coming out of their ears, and I'd think the primary consideration on the Drain choice, is avoiding losing all of your stockpiled gems.

To put this in perspective, I lost well over 100 gems over 2 turns of consecutive Magic Fading events once, it wiped out all of my non-national gems that I was saving up for Empowering searchers/forgers, and thus, it made me cry cry cry. I honestly think I'd rather take Death3, or Misf3 before I'd ever take Drain3 again.

(Maybe, just MAYBE Drain3 on Man if my build used Luck3, but.....)

You actually leave gems in your treasury with drain?
Thats just silly Jim. You're building a mage a turn... and one scout per turn in your neighboring provinces... That really handles the problem until you get up to 150 gems per turn income or so.

By the way.. do the same thing with your blood slaves... if you're at risk of getting that gaderite rebel.

[thejeff]

True, you can get around it through micromanagement. It's a lot of micro, though.

And you leave yourself open to losing gems through assassination and remote spells.

[SlipperyJim]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

I dunno, I think those are both awesome finds (If it's the 1N + 2.5pick Enchantresses, not the 2N + 1.5pick, those suck).

Yeah, those are both good finds. I totally agree with you!

(Of course, the usefulness of the Golden Order was really limited by the fact that I was nearly finished with research by the time I found them.)

My point is that Enchantresses and Golden Order guys were all I found when I controlled over 200 provinces. By contrast, in my current MA Ulm game, I only have 20 (or so) provinces, and I'm finding tons of cool mage sites. So it's highly variable.

That said, I should not have bragged. I just found a province with both Garnet Amazons and a disease-causing site. Yuck. Time to beeline Enchantment-5 for GoH....

[Sombre]

What's the percentage of disease chance on the site?

I wouldn't think it would be anything to stop you recruiting the amazons.

[vfb]

Just don't drop the gems on a mercenary by accident and submit the turn.

:whistles innocently:

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

You actually leave gems in your treasury with drain?
Thats just silly Jim. You're building a mage a turn... and one scout per turn in your neighboring provinces... That really handles the problem until you get up to 150 gems per turn income or so.

By the way.. do the same thing with your blood slaves... if you're at risk of getting that gaderite rebel.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

You actually leave gems in your treasury with drain?
Thats just silly Jim. You're building a mage a turn... and one scout per turn in your neighboring provinces... That really handles the problem until you get up to 150 gems per turn income or so.

By the way.. do the same thing with your blood slaves... if you're at risk of getting that gaderite rebel.

I honestly didn't think about it. I've never been willing to do such a build on my own, it happened to be a position that I perm subbed, that had 3Misf + 3 Drain.