Quote:
Originally posted by Guest@Mar 26 2005, 11:15 AM
If you Customize a wizard and choose all Perks and dont actually choose any magic books you can research the two quickest things and after that Spell of Mastery will be available and you will be able to start researching it way before you should... It might be tough to stick it out without having any magic spells but just get some strong units protecting your city and then have another beefed up unit go out exploring it worked for me on Hard. Its easier cause you got many Perks too.
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The wizard customization is one of the many truly great features about this game IMHO.
The no spell book route can certainly be tough going. You start on the myrran plane with a myrran race (trolls or dwarves make good selections for this particular setup). You won't be able to cast any spells to help your units in combat (except for dispel magic and disenchant area...). It is true you can find spell books in nodes and some lairs, but those tend to be tougher fights. Moreover while you can START researching the spell of mastery relatively soon, you won't necessarily finish any sooner than you otherwise would.
The research cost of EVERY spell that you RESEARCH (not trade for or find) is subtracted from the research cost of the spell of mastery. So the more spells you research PRIOR to researching the spell of mastery, the less expensive it is when you finally do research it.
That being said, if you want to try the game casting very very very few spells, this is a good way to do it.
Some things to keep in mind:
The difficulty settings. Successful tactics at one setting may not be successful on another. The nodes and lair fights will become progressively more difficult as you go from "intro" to "impossible" settings. Also while the AI does not necessarily get better they certainly get more bonuses as the difficulty setting goes up:
At the impossible setting enemy wizards get several advantages. They start with more initial "picks". Meaning they can start with more spellbooks and special abilities (like alchemy, or archmage, or conjurer, etc). Moreover their "picks" are not bound by normal selection rules. For example, normally you'd need 1 or more spellbook in chaos, nature, and sorcery magic in order to select the "nodemaster" pick. Also, if you've played much on the impossible setting you may wonder how they can afford/feed their vast armies (usually of spearmen or something equally silly... but they DO have a lot of them). The enemy wizards get large "bonus" multipliers to their gold, food, and mana incomes. Spellbooks give you 1 "powerbase" each (the powerbase is just the total of all of your magical "income" from shrines, temples, nodes, certain races (dark elves, draconians, beastmen, high elves), and mineral deposits (mithril, adamantite, and the crystals found in deserts), volcanoes you've raised also add 1 each. The enemy wizards get something like 4 times that for each. This is why it is usually a good idea to keep nodes out of the hands of enemy wizards (the benefit to you is great, but what it takes away from them is greater still). Warp node (a "rare" death spell) is particularly useful in this regard. Particularly when you can "explore" the planes with the earth lore spell (a "common" nature spell).
I am captain typo (Vebose = Verbose) such is life.