Newb question, but what's the usual strategy for finding sites and getting gem income up? Obviously it's nation dependent, but I always feel like I'm way behind projection when I get to the point where I can start constructing worthwhile items. I've mostly just been having one or two of my first recruited mages follow along the expansion parties and searching, maybe throwing out another couple if they roll onto a new path. Stuff like Voice of Tiamat makes sense for ocean provinces since it hits four elements, but is stuff like Voice of Apsu worth casting considering the cost in gems versus the odds of finding a water site? Hell, can sites even spawn that need a level 9, or does it just cap at 4 or 5? Other than trying to catch differences in scales (like a couple provinces with added death and making all my guys diseased), I'm not sure if there's other things that point to specific magic sites.
Newb question, but what's the usual strategy for finding sites and getting gem income up? Obviously it's nation dependent, but I always feel like I'm way behind projection when I get to the point where I can start constructing worthwhile items. I've mostly just been having one or two of my first recruited mages follow along the expansion parties and searching, maybe throwing out another couple if they roll onto a new path. Stuff like Voice of Tiamat makes sense for ocean provinces since it hits four elements, but is stuff like Voice of Apsu worth casting considering the cost in gems versus the odds of finding a water site? Hell, can sites even spawn that need a level 9, or does it just cap at 4 or 5? Other than trying to catch differences in scales (like a couple provinces with added death and making all my guys diseased), I'm not sure if there's other things that point to specific magic sites.
Ok so this is something that's been scienced out pretty recently afaik
If you want higher early income, and you have competent site searchers (3+ in the path in question), you're right on the money with just sending out a couple to search. Even if you have 2+ on the path you're getting 66% of all possible sites. The rare sites require 3+ iirc. There might be some particular Uber rare sites that need more than 3,but I can't confirm off the top of my head. I personally wouldn't search with 1 on a path, especially since level 1 usually lets you use the search ritual.
However, if you happen to have native income of the gem in question, or some way to get the gems for the rituals, the optimum output in total usually comes from the searching rituals. Not only do they thoroughly search the site, and eliminate the doubt that you need a higher level, you don't have to move in between searches, which makes it more mage-turn efficient.
That being said, you're probably gonna spend a lot of gems on the search, so it comes down to WHEN you want your income to be higher. If it's a quick game, you probably can't afford to spend the gems on searching.
Should also note that it's AGE dependent as well. (Early Age = More sites, Late Age = fewer sites)
EDIT: also, sites with "negative" effects are always active, whether or not they're searched. This includes things like disease spread, and holy damage to undead/demons. Also (original) terrain affects sites. More nature in forest, more death/fire in wasteland, more water underwater, etc.
One thing to note that thrones provinces tend to spawn with the maximum amount of magic sites, regardless of age. It's always worth searching a throne fully.
I tend to go with searching with 2+ mages, don't bother otherwise, remote search with cheap mages if you got enough gems to spare.
So I mentioned I was going to test something, to which I did, but forgot to post about it.
Testing "Tapestry of Dreams", if you don't know what it is it's the scouting spell for glam mages (glamour 2).
If you read the bottom tooltip, it states "This scrying ritual will also detect invisible and glamoured units as long as they are not currently sneaking". At the time, I was sieging a castle from Na'Ba who had 3 assassins on my army. I saw this tooltip and wondered if this would work on stealthy units who are assassinating, since they're technically not sneaking (as in, moving), and would be a good way to counter assassins. The answer is no, it does not work in that regard. Assassinations is still considered sneaking, which makes sense, but I wondered if this was the case mechanically. Still this scout spell is very good since many don't reveal stealthy units/glamoured units besides Astral Projection.
Here is another fun fact:
Spine Frogs are a new nature 1 generic summon. On paper they are not that great. They have weak stats all around with the exception of their strength at a whooping 17 and 41 HP, which is pretty good. They also have two(?) attacks, which is not bad.
What really makes them stand out is that they have the special ability to destroy armor and magic items on attack. So in theory, they should be good paired with anti-thugs. They're INCREDIBLY cheap to, only costing ONE nature gem. However it's. limited to 1 per summon, so even if you have +4 Nature and +3 Water you're going to get 1 no matter what, so they're a bit slow to mass. With below average precision they will probably miss more than hit, and they only have 5 rounds of spit. They also have poison skin, so that combined with high HP/STR , they seem like they would be a problem for most melee units without resistances. Having regeneration on them would probably make them solid frontline support.
Ah yeah you're right. I forget that due to their high health that the AI will prioritize them unless you have something with more within range. Very niche summon for sure but they're a cool addition. Would rather summon Killer Mantis over this 95% of the time if I had to choose.
This is an Asphodel focused update, they got new type of manikins and gods. They also got spells and abilities to spread carrion seeds with which to infect their enemies and turn them into undead manikins. There is also a large amount of bug fixes, performance improvements, new mod commands as well as some balance changes.
Asphodel
New sprites for manikins and carrion beasts
New Asphodel pretenders: Mother Mandragora, Titan Mandragora, Worm Soul
Carrion dragon now has a carrion vine attack that can infect targets with darkseeds
Asphodel's ritual Grow Fortress has now become Carrion Fortress instead
One third of sacred manikins will now be Carrion Furies
New types of manikin chassis
New magic items: Carrion Seed, Carrion Bow
Some magic items are cheaper for Asphodel
New spells: Sleep Vines, Vengeful Vines, Tangle Thicket
New sacred: Black Minotaur
Black Centaur get +1 berserk
Sagittarian replaces vine bow with carrion bow that can infect target with darkseed
Manikins start age fix
General
Increased 3D performance (+25% FPS) for Windows-AMD (new AMD driver) and Mac
Ind got cheaper temples as 'every mansion is a palace and every building is a temple'
Heroism bless +50% -> +35% xp
Awaken Forest now more expensive and only targets 50% of battlefield
Spiritform beings are now immune to petrification
Mossbody can no longer target spiritform beings
Magic scale 4+ didn't give horror marks correctly
Terrain changes now affects resources and can make people migrate
Performance improvements for main map and research screens
Performance improvements for large battles and turn generation
Spell AI no longer casts sermon of courage on mindless targets
No longer show regen icons that are incompatible with the monster type
More possible errors printed to admin log for lobby games
Keyboard shortcuts in scoregraphs (F2) were wrong
Skeletal Legion affected caster too, fixed
Liches now keep their age
Master password wasn't always properly remembered during game setup
Switching between lobby and local network could crash the game, fixed
Independent priests could cast all type of banishments, fixed
Icon for negative inspiration bonus
Migrations now less likely to lead into wastes or swamps
Weightlessness bless didn't affect combat speed
Supply usage was sometimes wrong on 'y' screen
More national summon rebalancing
Awe from throne did not show up in bless info
Keyboard shortcuts in alchemy didn't work properly
Twiceborn no longer has any effect on most monster shapes
Fix for twiceborn getting around uniqueness of some monsters
Stat penalty from blindness wasn't shown correctly
Blank config path could prevent game from starting, fixed
Humanoid apes and dogs now leave corpses when they die
Fix for simulacrum losing global enchantments when killed
Fix for simulacrum creator getting unexpected afflictions
Magic empowerment can now raise to max level 13
Chain mail of displacement now gives actual displacement
Income box was not shown when dominion was 0, fixed
Dreams of R'lyeh did not give Dimensional Overload in battle
Fixed possible memory corruption when two immortals returned on the same turn
Memory leak during host fixed
Rider's magic items never affected mounts that were commanders
Last messages didn't work in very large games
All Elemental Opposition rituals dispelled air, fixed
Most immortality effects now take priority over Life after Dead
Shinuyama had access to Caelum's national spell 'Call of the Drugvant', fixed
Pretenders no longer lose passive bless when outside dominion
Fix for incorrect retreat message mentioning fort
Fixed incorrect 'cannot lead magic beings' error message
Returning from the void can no longer put you inside a cave wall
Returning from Inferno/Kokytos will now usually leads to a cave
Fear and Dread no longer stacks with each other
Mirror walk no longer castable by stationary commanders
Fix for out of range dominion values in games with Dreamlands R'lyeh
Throne settings were not loaded/saved with ctrl-l/ctrl-s
Indep flags weren't flashing when choosing spell target province
Larger background texture in network lobby
Auto site searching now stops if inside a besieged fort
Elemental royalties permanent elemental summons can now be boosted
Fix for temporary spirit sight not working
Stygian Paths didn't work for units following along
Box selecting commanders/squads didn't always work properly
Network lobby games now keeps time better
F1 now shows sneaking commanders at the end
Fix for divine emperor not being able to storm castle
Farstrike ritual performance fix
Farstrike rituals were not always fully anonymous
The Missing Tune didn't work properly
Earthquake's special effect in caves didn't work
Random maps with edge start positions are now square shaped
Stat & typo fixes
Modding
Potential crash bug fix for mods using new sounds
Fix for "too many sprites" error when using mods in textonly mode
Button to disable all mods in mods menu
Enabling mods from command line now requires both folder and modfile
New monster/item commands: #clumsy, #powerofdeath, #fearofflood
New monster/item commands: #falsesupply, #glamourmanip
New monster commands: #godsite
New event commands: #addgeo, #remgeo
New item modding commands to create dancing weapons
New weapon commands: #spiritformimmune, #illusionimmune, #false
New weapon commands: #holyifhit, #killmagicifhit, #killdemonifhit
New weapon commands: #fireifhit, #coldifhit, #shockifhit, #petrifyifhit
New weapon commands: #aftercloud, #aftercloudarea, #poisonifdmg
As you can see Asphodel got ALOT of love this update. Here are the new sprites:
Bramble Forts have twice the wall integrity now at 300 which is nice. More supplies to but that honestly doesn't impact Asphodel much.
The new sacreds:
The Carrion Fury is a FREESPAWN btw, but only when your pretender is alive. I think it's cap only?
Carrion Dragon got a chunky buff for his attacks:
This is basically the equivalent of two vine shields that poison/damage instead of giving defence. Not only that, but when the entangled unit dies they turn into manikins.
The Carrion Bow itself is just a straight up upgrade to the Vine Bow. All my archers have it to, so any kills they get=Manikin. Carrion Seed causes disease and once your commander dies, it turns them into a normal Manikin. I've yet to test it on other creatures to see if they it has any special effects, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Oh, and that manikin that was produced from your commander inherits their items as well.
Two new spells.
Vengeful Vines you get at conjuration 4, Sleep Vines you get at conjuration 3. The latter is just a castable version of what manikins have but ranged. Tangle Thicket is just a bigger tangle vine and not exclusive to Asphodel.
And to top it all off, the new pretenders:
Both Mother Mandagora and Worm Soul are great. Mother gives me access to glam by default and has decent stats. Power over death seems underwhelming unless they have immortality and you would want to utilize it with an awaken pretender for max benefit. Won't lie, I don't exactly understand how Power Over Death works. Worm Soul seems like a suicide bomber/potential thug with access to two traits I have yet to see. Disease explosion (when slain he explodes into a cloud the diseases everyone) and swarm (when slain you basically turn into a swarm spell and one of those bugs have the soul of the pretender, and can reform to fight again if he survives long enough). I do not see a reason to take the Titan Mandragora over Carrion Dragon and he seems underwhelming. Only benefit he has over the dragon is he is cheaper to break into other spells (60 instead of 80) and has more slots, so I suppose he can be a better thug statwise mid to late game. However at that point you want to use them conservatively. Dragon can also transform into a Carrion Lord and is 90 points cheaper then the giant. So unless you're breaking into a lot of magic paths, it's not really worth it.
This was very much needed for Asphodel. Although pre-update they were far better than their Dom 5 version, they still lacked compared to other undead nations. So far I am happy with the changes, except that your commanders dying from carrion seeds don't produce special manakins, so I don't see a huge benefit to using it yet except to potentially save your items from being lost. Having more blessed units makes bless builds far more viable.
Also, how good is power over death(PoD) really? I don't see intentionally killing your pretender to give stat boost, although good, not really worth it. You could potentially lose dominion or a magic path. On top of that, you have to have your priests call them, which takes some time, and priests with magic could be researching, searching, crafting, preaching, or participating in battle instead. PoD 3 would give you a +6 to Str/Att/Def/CS & +3 MR which is great, but idk. Asphodel losing dominion once they're over 5 wouldn't be bad either, and the centaur priests aren't very useful besides reanimating/giving quick roots/transport. Bit mixed about it.
Edit: Also I accidently submitted this post too early. My bad.
I have never found a functional use for Power of Death given that anyone who might want to use it can't effectively recall a dead god on anything other than a glacial schedule. And its got the classic Illwinter "this is a cool mechanic but its gutted by overly-cautious balancing".
The 2 stats you get per death is about as useful as the now-capped Corpse Eater on the Raven pretender. If not even less useful.
Kind of confused on this one, since I'm still learning when it comes to pretender designing and blesses. Does this mean they still get the full bless setup wherever they go, or is it just that they keep it when outside any dominion and lose it in enemy dominions? Not sure on what the "passive" part specifies.
Huh, so toying with carrion seed more even if my mage dies they can still cast spells. That's actually pretty useful. Friend told me that mindless mages has been a thing since Dom4 and I completely forgot lol.
Kind of confused on this one, since I'm still learning when it comes to pretender designing and blesses. Does this mean they still get the full bless setup wherever they go, or is it just that they keep it when outside any dominion and lose it in enemy dominions? Not sure on what the "passive" part specifies.
I think it is referring to the non-blessed part of blesses; the effects that any sacred gets. Stuff like snow move or mountain survival or +% XP or... I think maybe enlarge is passive as well, right? (Enlarge bless being the best bless there is of course)
Glad to see my lame joke of a pretender finally got his moment to shine.
I think it is referring to the non-blessed part of blesses; the effects that any sacred gets. Stuff like snow move or mountain survival or +% XP or... I think maybe enlarge is passive as well, right? (Enlarge bless being the best bless there is of course)
Newb question, but what's the usual strategy for finding sites and getting gem income up? Obviously it's nation dependent, but I always feel like I'm way behind projection when I get to the point where I can start constructing worthwhile items. I've mostly just been having one or two of my first recruited mages follow along the expansion parties and searching, maybe throwing out another couple if they roll onto a new path. Stuff like Voice of Tiamat makes sense for ocean provinces since it hits four elements, but is stuff like Voice of Apsu worth casting considering the cost in gems versus the odds of finding a water site? Hell, can sites even spawn that need a level 9, or does it just cap at 4 or 5? Other than trying to catch differences in scales (like a couple provinces with added death and making all my guys diseased), I'm not sure if there's other things that point to specific magic sites.
Another thing to keep in mind is some provinces will have higher chances of particular types of sites. While these couple graphs are from Dom5, not 6 it should give you a general gist of what gems are better found where. As far as glamour magic site searching goes I personally feel I've found them primarily in forests, with some in plains and mountains. You can look up what sites there are that can appear and where via Dom6 inspector (which I will shill as a useful albeit unfinished tool) that can help you in figuring things out too. Only issue with this though is if a site could appear in a plains or a forest province they are still more likely to appear in forest for example.
Should be soon so keep a lookout. Scalaria is sitting on a bunch of thrones and I am certain only needs one more. In hindsight I should attacked them first but I saw Na'Ba as a much bigger threat to me. Seriously, Na'Ba was good in Dom5, but in Dom6 seems top tier and this players knows what he is doing. My armies only won because of numbers really, otherwise I lost or barely won the majority of big battles. Not to mention, he has managed to hold off two big nations nearly on his own. I learned ALOT though, so it wasn't a real loss to me.
Note to self: Next time team up with someone to kill Scalaria.
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