You haven't addressed my points...and you're assuming that XP is a major game element.
Xp is a major game element, it gives +1 to that magic. And I did address your points.
1. Oh, sure, evangelism may be assumed to be worthless.
2. If you don't spend money, what good is it?
1. The civilians may have not been compelled by the evangelism. For all we know, they may have assumed we were evil, although it's not likely. We just don't know yet, and so you cannot say that evangelism is worthwhile.
2. If we don't spend mana, we can send it later. Wouldn't it be nice to have more than 0 mana in a battle for once?
Well, you actually did. Also, since we, quote, "just increased the need substantially," it is quite possible that our consumption rates outstrip the regrowth rates.
Never said anything like that. If I did, show me. And if indeed we are now consuming faster than it is being replenished, we are still getting more bushes since we are not eating the seeds, so that won't be a problem for long.
Au contrare. There's real-world evidence on the first, putting aside how unlikely it is that Corruptor would have let us send some people off on an unexpectedly Wild Goose type of chase. As for the second, that's mathematics.
1. real world evidence has nothing to do with this since it is fictional. 2. We just don't know. If it is effective, it could be not worthwhile. Attracting 1 person is not much for our work.
[quoteYou misunderstood what I said, and we "don't need" Life Booners because we're not using them. A surplus of food always helps, to say nothing of what happens when we make new plants...][/quote]
If we don't need Life Booners, we shouldn't make them. And a surplus of food does not always help. If you have more food then you can use, then that money for the surplus could have been spent on things that are immediately useful, like expanding the afterlife. And when we make more plants to make Life Booners more useful, we can make more life booners. Also,
2. The people that will hopefully be flocking to us, or who we build homes for to evangelize?
is where you said it.
If we grow food hundreds or thousands of times as fast...that removes pretty much the only cost. With a few Life Booners focused on growing meatmelons* and wheat, we can sell food to other villagers for just about as little as we like and still turn a profit. Capitalism, ho!
*Which could sell for more. Meat is considered a luxury food in real-world medieval times, so a substitute would be roughly analogous to imitation lobster or something, which sells for more (pound-for-pound) than bread.
We do not know how much these will sell for. And growing things with magic to sell for silver is converting mana into silver. We have better ways of doing that, so we don't need to be using less efficient methods.
Oh, sure. Let's ignore common sense and assume evangelism does nothing. [/sarcasm]
We just don't know. I refer you to my above response. Stop assuming completely unproven things and just wait a day or two, so we can guage if it is a good enough use of mana and manpower. And common sense is nothing more than guesswork.
What makes you think Maher made vampires?
For one, he's a death god. For another, vampires aren't living, and therefore have no soul, so they could not have been a preexisting race. Third, how would such a race come to be otherwise?
Life boons are a lot more versatile than fire boons. Look at Eldrick; he's done everything from making bushes spring up in combat to making mushrooms into buildings with that little power of his. Fire? It burns. That's about it.
Let's represent this one mathematically. Yes, L > F. However, L+F> L, because we know fire is useful in some things.
...How is that relevant to saying she's the "least tested"?
I said she's the most tested, not the least, and thus is most likely to be able to control a chaos boon.