How worth it is to search for high level magic sites?

[General Jah]

Do you guys have any idea how many magic sites require higher level magic skills to find in the average game? Is it worth putting your mages that might have level 2, 3, or even 4 to search?

[Sombre]

https://larzm42.github.io/dom6inspector/

[Big Dog]

I like to search with the highest paths (up to 4) that I can.

[ExasperatedCultist]

The link Sombre gave is good.

The basic protocol is this: You want to site-search with every path that you have access to, at a minimum of 1, in every province you own. That is the main priority. In addition, you want to sitesearch every path as highly (up to 4) as you conveniently can. If you have lots of A2 access, there's little reason to not search it, and so on. That being said, searching two provinces at A1 is a lot better than searching one at A2. Going from 1 -> 2 is a fairly noticeable improvement, 2 -> 3 less so, and 3 -> 4 less still. The main exception to that is Astral; Astral has a relatively common lvl 4 site.

The Illwiki has some Dominions 5 magic sites charts[illwiki.com] showing expected gem income from site-searching, which are, of course, outdated for Dominions 6 - they don't have glamour, for one - but still give you an idea of the sort of distribution you're looking at.

[General Jah]

great thanks

[Bumc]

Also death has some common hard to find ones.
But you can generally pinpoint those by units unexpectedly getting diseased there, and send your big death mage or use Dark Knowledge there (death sitesearch spell)

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Note that the inspector is, so far, also out of date, mostly due to the addition of the cave layer - I've had the Shrouded Lands site turn up in caves, for instance. This makes it difficult to run a full census and get an updated chart like the old wiki had, so our information is approximate, but the rough principle holds, yeah. I'm OCD about sites, but even I count myself satisfied if I've searched all paths at 2. Anything beyond that is usually excessive, although there are certain specific exceptions - Astral is notable, for instance, for having a level 4 rarity 0 (the most common) site.

[timlagor]

Are the site search spells generally considered good value?

There's obviously very convenient but that's not the same thing.

[ExasperatedCultist]

Originally posted by timlagor:

Are the site search spells generally considered good value?

There's obviously very convenient but that's not the same thing.

Opinions vary. I am pretty firmly in the school of "no, unless you have a very good reason to assume this game will go very long", and you won't need the gems you spend on it for a long time.

[Draken]

Some are more good value than others. Voice of Tiamat for example will find you all elemental sites underwater. This can be very good as you can search off-path with water gems.
Any province with death scales that causes diseases is a good target for a Dark Knowledge as Wells of Pestilence are pretty common too.

I think they are also pretty good if you only have very limited access to a path. For example you get an Fire 2 mage via an event. If you have a few fire gems and no other access to Fire, it is both a lot safer and quicker to use Augury. If you send the fire mage around it will not only take twice as long, but you might also lose him to an enemy attack or a random event.
At least I consider that good value in that regard.

You can then use the fire income from the found sites to properly break into fire.
But that's just my opinion and I don't know how "good value" exactly that process is.

[Partholonian]

Mages cost a lot of upkeep and you can search a different province every turn instead of every other turn. And as Draken points out you can do it from the safety of a fort-lab. And most search spells only require a level 2 caster but can find any level of site. But it does cost some gems.
IMO if you're going to search on foot you want to send someone with several different paths, but of course those people are probably expensive and slow to recruit.

[timlagor]

Originally posted by Partholonian:

Mages cost a lot of upkeep and you can search a different province every turn instead of every other turn. And as Draken points out you can do it from the safety of a fort-lab. And most search spells only require a level 2 caster but can find any level of site. But it does cost some gems.
IMO if you're going to search on foot you want to send someone with several different paths, but of course those people are probably expensive and slow to recruit.

That's why I was so unsure. I think the gem cost of the spells is worth more than the gold for a second mage searching manually (to get the same rate assuming no pathing problems).

It would obviously be worth it if it was the only way to find sites but it isn't and you get so much better than half speed by searching multiple paths with a single mage.


My impression was that Path2 was worth searching widely but looking at the actual list it seems I had still been badly overestimating the value of going higher in most places. The value of searching for 2 somewhere you've already done P1 is also very low.


Voice of Tiamat is obviously a special case.
You'd obviously use a ritual on a site that was showing signs of a potent site you couldn't readily search for with a high enough path level too.

Only having access to the path with one mage (and no certainty of more) is also a consideration or the need to be able to switch them over to rituals/crafting/research from turn to turn for some reason.


Safety strikes me as mostly not a major concern but it's entirely possible I'm wrong and I wouldn't worry about the limited range of the rituals either.

[ExasperatedCultist]

Originally posted by Partholonian:

Mages cost a lot of upkeep and you can search a different province every turn instead of every other turn. And as Draken points out you can do it from the safety of a fort-lab. And most search spells only require a level 2 caster but can find any level of site. But it does cost some gems.
IMO if you're going to search on foot you want to send someone with several different paths, but of course those people are probably expensive and slow to recruit.

Mages don't cost that much upkeep, and gems are precious. Even on nations like Ashdod where you need to search each path with a separate mage, I still would be extremely, extremely reluctant to waste the gems on sitesearching when I could just do it manually.

[mestaritareenalla]

Originally posted by ExasperatedCultist:

Originally posted by Partholonian:

Mages cost a lot of upkeep and you can search a different province every turn instead of every other turn. And as Draken points out you can do it from the safety of a fort-lab. And most search spells only require a level 2 caster but can find any level of site. But it does cost some gems.
IMO if you're going to search on foot you want to send someone with several different paths, but of course those people are probably expensive and slow to recruit.

Mages don't cost that much upkeep, and gems are precious. Even on nations like Ashdod where you need to search each path with a separate mage, I still would be extremely, extremely reluctant to waste the gems on sitesearching when I could just do it manually.

The earlier you find those sites, the earlier you get gems from them.

When using a 2-path mage to manually search, you're already at same efficiency of searching 2 paths in 2 turns, that spells would have. So then, using spells isn't really justified. But for single paths, whether it's that your mage just has 1 path or that there's just 1 path left to search in a province, it makes a lot of sense to use spells.

Though remember that the more sites you've already found, the less you can expect to find in the remaining paths.

[ExasperatedCultist]

I am familiar with the mechanics involved, thank you.

Even for the cheapest of the effects, you're still spending two gems per path per province, all to save a mage turn and to get a tiny chance of finding an extra site or two.

The fact that people will happily do this while also forging items for others at the cost of mage turns for gains of only two or so gems per forging, while directly benefiting their opponents, shows an irrationality somewhere along the line.

It should not be correct to pour gems into remote searching while also forging for others.

[mestaritareenalla]

Doesn't sound like you understood the point. Earlier found sites = more gems. And each turn spent moving slows down the discovery in later provinces... If you have say, 10 provinces you want to search in a path, it takes 10 turns to search for 1 guy by spells, 20 turns by foot. You need just X / 10 expected gem income per province to come out on top gem-wise with the spells (X = cost of sitesearching spell). Plus those 11 mage-turns.

If you can use more sitesearchers, the net gem difference becomes less / turns around, but then you use even more mage turns moving, since each sitesearcher has to make a move both at the start and end of their route (if they come home to a province not on the search path).



For forging for others though, you don't want to benefit your enemies generally, better to trade with the enemies of your enemies.