Worst Tier 2 wand "needs" for a mage?

[Tarnos]

I feel like Fire is the worst of them all, because you have to micro manage them to hunt or fight in battles.
Lightning would be probably second one unless its pure researcher or you setup specific rooms of introverts.

Any other wand seems to just stabilize on its own with no input.

I don't know what Tier 3 wands adds, if there is more then I might change my opinion :D

[Prometheus0000]

Tier 3 wands as far as I understand it just makes the bar change faster, you can hover over it on the mage sheet page to see. I think it says it 'intensifies'.

Extroversion (water) seems bad, but apparently you can have it rise while they sleep if you do a 3 bed room thing. Lightning is only bad if not researching. I'm not really sure how to handle it in that case since I just started over at that point. Fire you want ranches for, possible along with a group that checks victory status and sets their hunt priority to emergency for a while, though that would mess up all my other priorities, so I just set it to high. You can also just hold shift to queue up several hunts.

Dark needs moonlight, so you should try to have them awake at night, moonlight in their bed while sleeping apparently doesn't count. The others are basically free.

[Manxome]

I think that's the common opinion (i.e. fire is annoying, introversion borderline, the rest are mostly ignorable with proper setup).

I just got my first tier 3 wand (air) and so far it looks like the tier 3 upgrade makes the need drain twice as fast, which means (a) you need to spend twice as much time per day on refilling it, and (b) if you stop refilling it, the time before it becomes a problem is cut in half.

This does suggest that certain tricks for handling wand needs at tier 2 might stop working at tier 3. For instance, a tier 2 extroversion need can be filled just by sleeping in a room with other mages, even if you spend the rest of the day alone--but if tier 3 doubles the amount of refilling that you need to do, then just sleeping with others won't be enough anymore, so if that was the ONLY time your extrovert spent with other mages then it might suddenly become a problem.

Also, the air need (kinetophilia) already had a pretty short timeline at tier 2: the full bar is only 24 hours long, and you get the first penalty after just 6 hours without refilling it. Tier 3 cuts that in half, so you can go from full to zero in only 12 hours, which is short enough that it could happen just from an extended classroom lesson, even if your daily average change is positive. This may force you to schedule breaks for them that you didn't need at tier 2.

The one I'm personally most annoyed about at the moment (preemptively; I haven't actually got this wand yet) is the moonlight need from the dark wand. At tier 2 they need 3.1 hours of moonlight, so I set up my schedule so that there are 2 shifts that each sleep for part of the night, knowing that the remaining part of the night would still be enough, and my dark mages would be fine on any shift. But if tier 3 means they need 6.2 hours, then that won't be safe anymore, so I'm going to need to change all my schedules around to compensate. And I have a LOT of schedules, because I set up automated schedules for various trials (and combinations of trials) to try to complete them with less micro.

[gussmed]

For Moonlight, just put a Mana Lantern in the rec room they visit regularly. Mana Lanterns emit moonlight, and if you're keeping up with recreation needs, that's 2.5 hours of guaranteed moonlight.

[Prometheus0000]

Publicado originalmente por gussmed:

For Moonlight, just put a Mana Lantern in the rec room they visit regularly. Mana Lanterns emit moonlight, and if you're keeping up with recreation needs, that's 2.5 hours of guaranteed moonlight.

That assumes you even bother with recreation though. I've always found it to be pointless other than for trials. It just takes way too long, and wears off way too fast.

Also, presumably it'd have to outweigh the sunlight in the room to count, and I don't exactly have unlimited mana crystals.

[ulzgoroth]

Not sure why you presume it would have to outweigh the sunlight.

My dark tier 2 mages have simply never needed any special treatment, but if they did the special treatment is pretty obvious - give them a custom schedule where they are awake all night.

[Prometheus0000]

Because when I put a mana lantern in my greenhouse to grow night plants it didn't work (growth 0%). Maybe it just has to be a certain % though, I dunno. For plants it'd presumably start reducing the amount day plants grow though.

[Manxome]

I think the wand needs for sunlight and moonlight just check if there's any of the correct light in the room, and don't care how much it is. I seem to recall seeing a nature mage getting their need refilled (at the full fill rate) during a twilight period where the natural light was in the process of switching between sun and moon, even when there was more moon than sun.

Conversely, trees in my woodcuttery DO seem to care about quantity of sunlight, and reduce their growth rate if it's less than 100% (which I fixed by adding more windows). But note that it was reduced growth speed, not a binary on/off switch. I suppose I didn't try adding other types of light, but I'd be pretty surprised if that reduced the growth rate.

Putting a mana lantern in your greenhouse was a clever idea; I haven't tried that. But if the growth rate was ZERO, rather than "small", then my guess is that they have some hard-coded rule about what time of day the night plants are allowed to grow, and it won't work regardless of how many lanterns you add. If you decide to try it, though, I'd love to hear your results!

[Manxome]

Publicado originalmente por gussmed:

For Moonlight, just put a Mana Lantern in the rec room they visit regularly. Mana Lanterns emit moonlight, and if you're keeping up with recreation needs, that's 2.5 hours of guaranteed moonlight.

Where is "2.5 hours" coming from? My tests with the enchantophone suggest you need roughly 3.1 hours of recreation per day if you want to balance out daily loss. (Assuming 6 hours of sleep.)

[gussmed]

It's 2.5 hours for staff, 3.1 hours for students. Recreation decays faster for students.

[gussmed]

Publicado originalmente por Prometheus0000:

That assumes you even bother with recreation though. I've always found it to be pointless other than for trials. It just takes way too long, and wears off way too fast.

If you're having troubles with Conviction due to Wand needs, you definitely want to avoid the -10 for Craving Recreation. If you're avoiding the -10, you might as well maintain it so you get +10 for part of the day.

If you don't care about the -10, you shouldn't care about the wand drawbacks either.

You don't have to "outweigh sunlight." Light doesn't work like that in the game. If there's *any* moonlight in the room, it counts toward the moonlight need.

I know this because that's how I run my school and it works.

[IxianMace]

Fire is the worst because unlike all the other magic types, you can't engineer your school/schedules to increase the likelihood that the need will passively increase on its own. Getting the Victory need refilled requires the fire mage going out of their way to kill something, which if you don't micromanage it requires construction of facilities that serve little to no purpose other than to keep fire mages satisfied.

Lightning and Water are the second-worst because they restrict the activities of their mages to either avoid or seek out the presence of other mages (and of certain types of mages). Because the Introversion and Extroversion needs change during sleep, you end up allocating your mages to beds based not only on who they want to share a bedroom with (if they have that quirk) but how many mages there are and the type of mage. This isn't so bad, but if mage A wants to share a bedroom with mage B and mage B wants to share a bedroom/eat/recreate with mage C, it can get a little inconvenient keeping everyone together.

Nature, Dark, and Air needs are all easily fulfilled by combinations of windows/glass roofs, mana lanterns, stairs, and ladders, which are things I put in my school anyway. I don't even notice the Earth need because of the way I build my rooms and my school overall.

[gussmed]

Publicado originalmente por Prometheus0000:

Because when I put a mana lantern in my greenhouse to grow night plants it didn't work (growth 0%).

If you had a problem, it's because the room the Mana Lantern was in was too large. I *do* have a greenhouse with a mana lantern to supply moonlight during the day, and I know it works.

For plants, the game compares the amount of light of the correct type - sunlight or moonlight - in the room vs. the total size of the room.

If the room requires 300 light to be fully lit, any you supply 150, you get 50% growth. Mana Lanterns supply 150 Moonlight. If the room requires 1500 to be fully lit, you're only getting 10% growth.

This usually shows up as a problem with Woodcutteries that don't have enough windows. Only it's not enough sunlight to fully light the room, not moonlight.

Greenhouses are always 100% lit (sunlight during the day, moonlight at night). You may have noticed that the walls turn to glass, not just the ceiling, if you meet the criteria.

[Soul4hdwn]

Publicado originalmente por IxianMace:

Fire is the worst because unlike all the other magic types, you can't engineer your school/schedules to increase the likelihood that the need will passively increase on its own. Getting the Victory need refilled requires the fire mage going out of their way to kill something, which if you don't micromanage it requires construction of facilities that serve little to no purpose other than to keep fire mages satisfied.

As an initiate, yes it's bad and requires repeatable battles in underschool.
As apprentice or staff, use a rat farm, setting higher priority for the fire mages based on need. There's your automatic.
Edit: so focus on the platinum trial then upgrade them

[Manxome]

Publicado originalmente por Soul4hdwn:

Publicado originalmente por IxianMace:

Fire is the worst because unlike all the other magic types, you can't engineer your school/schedules to increase the likelihood that the need will passively increase on its own. Getting the Victory need refilled requires the fire mage going out of their way to kill something, which if you don't micromanage it requires construction of facilities that serve little to no purpose other than to keep fire mages satisfied.

As an initiate, yes it's bad and requires repeatable battles in underschool.
As apprentice or staff, use a rat farm, setting higher priority for the fire mages based on need. There's your automatic.

What did you think IxianMace was referring to in the part that you quoted where they said "facilities that serve little to no purpose other than to keep fire mages satisfied"?

[Prometheus0000]

I really can't understand the 'little to no purpose' part though. Like, do they not need sinew, viscera, ectoplasm, brains, eyeballs, or meat? If not, I don't think they're playing the same game.