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[lijacote]

I'm not certain, since it's been a while since I last took an interest in them, but I think they are either event-spawned or undiscoverable.

[Kagus]

The inspector is perfectly good for checking sites out. Also for items, units, spells...

Damnit, this is *precisely* what I've been looking for, but none of my searches have turned up so much as a whiff of this.  Thanks, I'm gonna go get lost in the data mining for a while now...

[Delta Foxtrot]

It's really good. It can be tricky to figure out what some tags are, but once you know those you can search stuff fairly well. It's not perfect though. I'm not aware of getting it to show mages with a specific path/path depth. You can list them by path&depth by clicking on the magic tab, but it's inadequate if you want to include randoms.

[Kagus]

It does let me sort boosters, spells available to nations and whatnot...  Not having the ability to sort by random depth potential is minor quibble at best.

Seriously, this thing even lets me pin various items to a clipboard for easy reference.  I'm in love.

EDIT:  ...it never occurred to me before that someone could decide to interpret the spell "Black Servant" as racially insensitive.

[Frumple]

If such a thing as "too many pearls" existed then I guess, but I've never hit that ceiling.

I definitely have in SP. Given the right variables, it's possible to get your pearl income to rise faster than you can spend it. Definitely late game and clam/wish spam and whatnot, but it's possible. This is especially true if you're a nation with somewhat limited astral access -- if you've got a slow trickle of able astral mages and don't want to go empowerment crazy, it's pretty easy to slip 25S in the casting queue and still be building a surplus or have all your other casters going full blast without running out of resources.

It's also fairly fine to use it if you've got a significant advantage and want some win more. Particularly if you're mainlining other paths. If you're not doing anything with the astral, might as well sitesearch with it >_>

It's definitely a bit of a "stars align" thing, though.

Though yeah, you silly people haven't really mentioned the actual major advantage to site search spells: Significantly less micromanagement. M is considerably less moving parts than ferrying around some crud load of mages and hoping nothing kills them while they're twiddling their thumbs waiting to get places. Frumple is perfectly willing to trade some efficiency for having less things to pay attention to. Especially later in the game where a single moment of inattention can cause entire fronts to collapse... spending a little gem on some sanity management is a pretty damned good investment, imo.

[Kagus]

That's mostly what I use it for too.  That, and continually forgetting to script my site-search mages to the back of the battlefield with "retreat" orders, so they don't try and singlehandedly defeat that barbarian invasion with only sleep touch and a perky 'can-do' attitude...

EDIT:  Writing that made me realize that I also haven't done that in any of the new test run games I popped up just now.  Dammit.

[E. Albright]

Dominions provinces are not exactly a rat maze.  Plotting a course without overlap is trivial.

It's really not. Once you run out of provinces to search, or have to run for a fort ahead of an invasion, your path is suddenly nothing but overlapping provinces. An inconvenient truth, I know, but a vexing one when your argument ran along the lines of "every mageturn is sacred and X1Y1Z1 searches THREE TIMES per TWO TURNS lol".

Manual searching is generally more efficient than remote, but the comparison is not a "zomg best thing EVAR" vs. "a wet fart" as you would have us believe.

Though yeah, you silly people haven't really mentioned the actual major advantage to site search spells: Significantly less micromanagement. M is considerably less moving parts than ferrying around some crud load of mages and hoping nothing kills them while they're twiddling their thumbs waiting to get places. Frumple is perfectly willing to trade some efficiency for having less things to pay attention to. Especially later in the game where a single moment of inattention can cause entire fronts to collapse... spending a little gem on some sanity management is a pretty damned good investment, imo.

Ya know what? Yeah, THIS. Because less micro was the precise reason I suggested using the spells (especially in Dom3) to BFEL. So hurumph. Yes, manual sitesearching is generally better for the player in terms of competative efficiency, with caveats discussed above, but it's much worse in terms of quality-of-life and automation. And if you have someone who just doesn't/forgets to sitesearch, you're not getting enough increased efficiency to help when their manual searchers take 3-6 turns to search 2 provinces for 3 paths at level 1 because they don't remember to move/search. So again, hurumph.

For maximal gemcost/magetime efficiency to find a moderate amount of sites, manually search with some spells on the side. For maximal consistency/playertime efficiency to lol find evarthin, Shift-M and forget it.

[E. Albright]

Oh, and this thread has a nice little by-terrain/by-anomalous-scale path sitesearch guide.

[Kagus]

So, running some tests with MA Man, trying to figure out some of the changes (like how the monk research actually works).  Very early game, just picking up the provinces around the capital...

I notice one of my longbowmen lost an arm to a stray vine arrow.  He's still shooting.  Apparently, you don't need two hands to operate a bow.  I...  Guess he's just nocking it with his teeth or something.

I also learned that just because the Horned One has beastmaster +3 doesn't mean it actually applies to the free chaffimals he gets at the start of battle.  Apparently, he's not actually the one leading them...  Just like how Bogarus PD aren't actually led by that fancypants Knyaz who shows up at 20 defence, and thus have to stick with their usual piss-poor morale.


...I should probably stop trying to find expansion SC's in pretenders that aren't.  But dragons are just so damned dull, man...


EDIT: Okay, I'm almost 99% certain that this is unintended behavior...  LA Xibalba, the Way commander gets a shapechange ability, apparently supposed to be a result of their training with the Nahualli or whatever...  And the fluff text says they're supposed to be able to turn into mighty jaguars or somesuch.

Thing is, they don't.  They can shapechange into Ah Itzob, another one of Xibalba's indistinguishable batmages.  They keep all their paths, lost the -4 inept researcher penalty, get paid less upkeep...  And can't change back.  Stats-wise, they're exactly the same except for 1 less MR.

Ahh, gotta love hamfisted mod-nations...  Even when they're made official.

[Delta Foxtrot]

I recall reading some posts about bugged Xibalba shapechangers. There's a few fixes and rebalances for new nations coming along with the next patch, though I imagine that'll be some time in the making still. There's a few instances of "Xibalba fixes" in the list of fixes and I guess that shapechange stuff is included.

In fact why won't I link to the patchlog here:
http://jaffa.illwinter.com/dom4/dom4log.html

A few personal picks I feel like highlighting:
-Dominion spread chance changed to 50% + dom str*5% (as opposed to the current formula of dom str*10%)
-Pretender cost finetuning
-Pretender stat changes
-New Monster Pretenders
-Monster pretender fixes

While it remains to be seen just what kind of pretender cost & stat changes end up taking place, I'm cautiously optimistic. Maybe I'll actually want to make non-dragon, non-titan, non-immobile pretenders after the next patch.

[Kagus]

I've named a couple test pretenders "YABF", for 'Yet Another Blood Fountain'.  Here's hoping some variety can be attained.


That said, there are some special pretenders that bear mentioning...  Sorta.  The Machakan giant fetish is a pretty funny one, especially since it's Dom4 and 50 points, while having the health and protection of a monolith or the like.

...he will literally swing and miss an elephant in combat though.

[chaoticag]

Oh huh, lowering domstrength? Might make rainbow pretenders worthwhile again. I found those fun in dom3

[E. Albright]

That said, there are some special pretenders that bear mentioning...  Sorta.  The Machakan giant fetish is a pretty funny one, especially since it's Dom4 and 50 points, while having the health and protection of a monolith or the like.

It's also mindless, which means a whole bunch of traditional SC counters do nothing to it.

[Delta Foxtrot]

One thing to keep in mind about dom strength is that it dictates how many candles you can (at least from just temple checks) have in a province. So while dom2 will spread as fast as the current dom6 (or so I believe), dom2 god will only have 2 candles per province bar some lucky events. So if someone starts dompushing you (a neighbour with awake dom9, blood sacrifice) you'll be in big trouble a lot sooner.

Granted dom2 would be fairly extreme, I'd probably consider dom4 the minimum to take, possibly even more than that if/when the meta proves it inadequate. Certainly something to keep in mind if you end up in a game with many blood saccers.

[Kagus]

That said, there are some special pretenders that bear mentioning...  Sorta.  The Machakan giant fetish is a pretty funny one, especially since it's Dom4 and 50 points, while having the health and protection of a monolith or the like.

It's also mindless, which means a whole bunch of traditional SC counters do nothing to it.

Plus the whole 0 encumbrance thing for when it actually goes out a-stompin'.  That, and I think it's just kinda entertaining having a mindless pretender...

EDIT:  Only just found out now that horror marks don't affect mindless units, that's a pretty significant change right there...  Think I'm starting to get what you're talking about.

Also, you know what gets my goat?  Important commanders, particularly in the early game, who decide to pick up items after a battle that are perhaps not quite as beneficial as they think.  Like, say, the Son of the Dragon King hero randomly nabbing a leper rod after an indy fight, and then proceeding to uselessly waste away afterwards.

Also just had an oracle of the ancients grab a knife of the damned, because he needs that apparently...