Elementals build idea

[KyuuMann]

Take any culture, and combine it with the mana channlers society trait, and the last astral affinity skill tree. Now research any tome of your choosing with an elemental, such as the evo tome, and now you can summ tier 3 elementals for the halved price of tier 1 elementals anywhere.

[RandyChihuahua]

I'd look into the last materialist tome. Undying earth. I want to try a mana based build, with only earth elementals.

[xDogSoldieRx]

Interesting idea, I never knew they were so cheap with that trait. I will try a summoning faction soon. Which tome and summons are your favs so far?

[DesertRose92]

Posted this in another thread:

Dark

Mana Channelers
Mana Addicts

Wizard King

Tome of Pyromancy

SUMMON LESSER MAGMA SPIRIT creates a tier 1 rank 3 battle mage, that evolves into a tier 3 unit upon hitting rank 4. With this you can get several tier 3 units within the first ~10-20 turns.

[snuggleform]

You're sort of forgetting something obvious - mana channelers doesn't affect the upkeep of mana origin units. Halving the upfront cost is something, but you're going to sink your ship with upkeep if you summon too many. That's why I avoid that trait as much as possible.

The other less obvious "issue" with elementals is that they don't benefit from your racial blessings/traits. So if you did all kinds of cool stuff like load your race with astral blood, keen sighted, etc etc etc, elementals simply do not benefit from racial bonuses.

[Midas]

Originally posted by KyuuMann:

Take any culture, and combine it with the mana channlers society trait, and the last astral affinity skill tree. Now research any tome of your choosing with an elemental, such as the evo tome, and now you can summ tier 3 elementals for the halved price of tier 1 elementals anywhere.

Yeah, I did this with High culture and fire elementals. they were being summoned in as T3 full elementals and got all the battle mage benefits from my faction. They were pretty devastating.

You can also do this with specific elementals by getting a rank up by role instead of from mana channelers. For example, Mana Addicts gives a +1 to battle mages, so Fire Elementals specifically will work, but not others.

[DesertRose92]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

You're sort of forgetting something obvious - mana channelers doesn't affect the upkeep of mana origin units.

That'S one of the reasons why Dark is good for this build; you get that -20% upkeep empire trait fairly early. Combine that with the hero skill and you can reduce the upkeep to 60%.

[Aunty Herbert]

A little fact, that I also missed for quite a time: Mana Channelers also works for battle summons:
Floral Stinger, the Divine Bacon vendor stall, Living Vines, Amplification Pylon, Totem of the Wild, Explosive Manifestation, Astral Reflection, Earth Titan.

The lower tier stuff mostly helps a bit with turtling on the battle map and is decent at helping ranged damage dealers stave off melee attackers.

Explosive Manifestation is AoE damage disguised as a summon spell.

Astral Reflection is a game ender, if you pumped up a hero the right way, and built up the mana income and ccp to copy them several times each battle,

Earth Titan is a simple, but brutal tier 5 summoned shock unit, if you go hard enough into materium affinity to be able to get the tome.

Zombies, zombie explosions and mass revival of undead also have the battle summons tag, but I doubt Mana Channelers will help with the souls economy.

If you want to actually field magic origin units in your armies, you should have at least a bit of shadow affinity, to get to Shadow Binding (40 accumulated) for -20% upkeep reduction, and you want a solid mana economy, so you probably want a bunch of astral tomes with conduits as special province improvements.
For actually getting all those conduits built, you probably should also get Transmutation for Transmute Resources, the one materium spell, that every astral mage should have in their scroll cabinet.

The best thing about summoned units: You don't have to walk them in from whatever city had the draft capacity to recruit them, you can just pop them right into your army to close gaps and keep cruising.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by DesertRose92:

Originally posted by snuggleform:

You're sort of forgetting something obvious - mana channelers doesn't affect the upkeep of mana origin units.

That'S one of the reasons why Dark is good for this build; you get that -20% upkeep empire trait fairly early. Combine that with the hero skill and you can reduce the upkeep to 60%.

Can you help me understand the math here? First off -20% from empire trait with hero -20% to me is -40% when added together. But even if -20 and -20 added up to -60, I also heard that there is a hard cap of -50%.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Aunty Herbert:

A little fact, that I also missed for quite a time: Mana Channelers also works for battle summons:

...

Yeah but isn't the limiting factor in combat not the mana, but the casting points? That's another reason I really don't like mana channelers - neither does it affect upekeep which is the real limiting factor for persistent troops, and in combat troops you're actually limited by casting points, not mana. Upfront mana cost being reduced by 50% is simply not that appealing to me. It's something, but it doesn't get to the bottleneck of upkeep or casting points.

[Aunty Herbert]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Originally posted by DesertRose92:

That'S one of the reasons why Dark is good for this build; you get that -20% upkeep empire trait fairly early. Combine that with the hero skill and you can reduce the upkeep to 60%.

Can you help me understand the math here? First off -20% from empire trait with hero -20% to me is -40% when added together. But even if -20 and -20 added up to -60, I also heard that there is a hard cap of -50%.

Easy math 100%-40% is 60%. She didn't say it reduces upkeep by 60%, she said it reduces the upkeep TO 60%.
Take Shadow Binding on top, and get to 50% upkeep, because of the cap.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Aunty Herbert:

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Can you help me understand the math here? First off -20% from empire trait with hero -20% to me is -40% when added together. But even if -20 and -20 added up to -60, I also heard that there is a hard cap of -50%.

Easy math 100%-40% is 60%. She didn't say it reduces upkeep by 60%, she said it reduces the upkeep TO 60%.
Take Shadow Binding on top, and get to 50% upkeep, because of the cap.

Right, thanks for pointing that out. I definitely misread to not by.

You guys continue to overlook some good points I made earlier though - elementals don't benefit from racial traits, and mana channelers reducing mana doesn't get to the heart of upkeep nor combat casting points.

[Aunty Herbert]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

the bottleneck of .... casting points.

Powerful Evokers gives 5 CCP per battlemage or support unit, Death Magic gives 5 CCP for every unit (friend or foe, walked in with an army or summoned by various means) that died, there are also some city structures and special province improvements that add more, but I would have to look up which ones specifc. And naturally, you get CCP from researching tomes, 5 per level.
Gist of it, if you put attention to it, you can rip that CCP bpttleneck pretty wide open pretty fast.

The upkeep can be reduced to 50%, and mana,... well either you have it, or you salivate about stacking even more enchantments onto your High culture archers and don't have it.
The way you get it, I pretty much already outlined above.

If you don't want to go all in on mana ramping, Pyromancy has a pretty solid Forester special province, that produces a bunch just from being surrounded by a lot of forests. It doesn't have the epic potential of full condo development projects, but it must be the most efficient way to get an OK-ish mana flow fast.

[snuggleform]

I'm aware you can increase the CCP cap through various means, but at the end of the day it's a bottleneck relative to mana. It's wayyyyyyy easier to increase your mana than it is to increase your ccp. I simply do not understand the fascination with mana channelers, there are many other traits I'd rather pick over that one. It simply does not address either mana upkeep nor CCP, it addresses a non issue which is bulk mana. You can correct bulk mana quite easily either by investing that empire trait that shoots your mana up 1000 points or better yet by making a lot of conduits.

Bulk mana is already the easiest resource to correct, and choosing mana channelers to addres that resource doesn't seem prudent to me. There are bigger fish to fry so to speak in terms of mana upkeep or CCP.

[Aunty Herbert]

Sorry, but you are clearly speaking from theory, not from practice. CCP is really not a problem, the biggest bottleneck in battle is the number of spells you are allowed to cast per turn. I had to stock up on more expensive battle spells to really start seeing a dip in my CCP pool, before the battles were over.

And if its so easy to produce mana, why are you so worried about mana upkeep? Summon in a few units for a battle, and disband them, when you no longer need them. Saves you a lot of running to and fro your cities to heal and replenish ranks.

That said, I also currently don't use Mana Channelers, but you seem to have a bias against summoning overall, which I don't share.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Aunty Herbert:

Sorry, but you are clearly speaking from theory, not from practice. CCP is really not a problem, the biggest bottleneck in battle is the number of spells you are allowed to cast per turn. I had to stock up on more expensive battle spells to really start seeing a dip in my CCP pool, before the battles were over.

And if its so easy to produce mana, why are you so worried about mana upkeep? Summon in a few units for a battle, and disband them, when you no longer need them. Saves you a lot of running to and fro your cities to heal and replenish ranks.

Ah but you're making a really fundamental mistake. I said it's easy to produce bulk mana, but I never said it's easy to maintain mana upkeep. That's why I love picking the rune trait that reduces enchantment upkeep for example, but I will avoid bulk mana discounts like mana channelers.

You need to think carefully about the difference between the two and if you don't understand the difference between the two, it's you who has the problem of speaking from theory.