Yes, craftable by Alchemist. Bear in mind that the pips on the finished product are not a direct match to the pips required to craft it . This requires 2x3 Orange and 2x3 Green. I was able to make that early on through buying some potions from stores that had 3+ pips.
Looking forward to that for my alchemist run! In general, going from n-pip ingredients to (n+1)-pip output means there’s not going to be a direct match because the cardinality of the sets is different, but nothing wrong with some trial and error.
For my last necromancer run, I just had a bunch of dudes hanging around the cities and shops looking for ingredients. The only reliable 5-pip I could get was the black ash (I think that was the name) that was 3-orange and 2-purple, and didn’t end up being useful for what I needed. I lucked into two 5-blue items somehow, and then finally found a 5-green that I needed for the free-upkeep-in-domain upgrade.
Sadly, I don’t find any of the other trinkets you can make as an alchemist to be very useful. This is the only one I made and use.
Against my better judgment, I started an alchemist game yesterday. I started way in the north, and it’s kind of tough getting going. (Fortunately, I customized the difficulty from “balanced” and turned down world progression by a notch, which is technically still “balanced” according to the UI they have when you customize difficulty, but I’d call “balance-”.)
I did manage to take out a nearby circle mage (Uram, who was generally being a jerk about things), but it felt really early (week 10, not that early, I guess) and somewhat unearned in that I flew my tower there (not much, just the basic armor/damage bonus, but every little bit, right?) and on the first turn opened up four bottled elementals that sufficiently distracted his troops (though one did get mind-controlled, lol) for me to manage it. Lost my blimp-ballista thingy, but it was only level 1 and I can buy another.
Can someone give me a primer on alchemy, though? I’ve found some neat recipes (including bottled elementals!) but I still feel like I’m mostly just flailing around. Specifically:
- What do catalysts do? The in-game documentation says they make recipes more powerful or something, but they don’t seem to do anything. For example, putting 3 single-pip green items gives 2 rations, and the presence or absence of a catalyst does nothing.
- How can I build up my ingredient stocks? I’ve found recipes for bonedust from 3x remains, charged crystal from 3x [that blue water drop thing], and charcoal from 3x ash, but I can’t get enough of those to make it really work. (I need a couple of those graverobber glyphs…)
- Any other general tips? I’m planning to head south to, uh, Aluvyan (?), which was kind of useless before (except for elven archers) but I feel like I need that herb garden.
They fill in that extra slot(the one that requires ore as an artificer) and most just add more pips. But there are also catalysts like the magical water that will double the potions crafted by the recipe but requires one extra pip of each color you’re using.
There aren’t many options for bootstrapping higher level ingredients like an artificer can, so you’re more reliant on harvesting a lot of ingredients, looting, and getting the buildings that provide stuff. The Herb Garden is decent in that regard and its room extensions help a lot too by letting you choose specific ingredients to grow.
In my Alchemist playthrough I’ve had a much harder time picking up additional crafting slots than I’ve had keeping enough ingredients to use. So once you hit that point I’d recommend using that water all the time to double your crafting yields. Workers from where you’re headed right now come with swimming so can get you a decent supply of the stuff. Rations, Sealed Elementals, and Sacred Water are worth keeping ample stocks of as they’ll get you through a lot of battles very easily. I’ve found the higher level potions to get more situational and less worth crafting/using for the most part. Some of the more advanced healing options(healing potions, regen potions, the giant potion that doubles your hp) are probably worth keeping stock of, though too for when they are needed. Lenya(I believe one of the Herb Garden extensions grows it) is a good one to keep around too both for its crafting potential and focus regen usage.
So I just started this, maybe foolishly playing on balanced. Feels like there is way too much stuff going on on the map as I gradually expand.
Problem is I’ve just hit week 10, just hit cold war with the first circle mage, and he has forces everywhere. Not sure how worried I should be. I don’t have any super units yet, 14 more turns to research golems…
It feels like there is a very efficient optimal way to expand from the starting position and if you do anything else you are falling behind
You’re probably fine.
The other mages aren’t really equivalent to you, and don’t grow exponentially like in other 4X games. Think of them like glorified barbarians from Civ.
In my current alchemist game I just cleared Hokan’s Soulforge for the first time and see that if it’s in my domain, I can recruit Haunted Armor units in my tower. Awesome units and it should be interesting to add them to my living stacks. I’ve got undead artifacts and glyphs galore that I can then put to good use.
I’m already thinking about my next run and I want to shake it up with something different. So, I’m thinking next I want to try a run as a mentalist slaver. Pick mentalism as primary school, start near Orgash, get revered with them asap and buy cheap slave units. I’ll get the orc troops room at revered which means I can hire Brutes. With mentalism spells, I should eventually get the follower spell. That will let me turn all my slaves into followers instead. Seems like there could be some fun there.
I’m very curious as to how that works out! I would also like to hear how it works before you get follower on them–in my necro run I had a couple orc units and I would regularly get offered upgrades for them that seemed like they would be useful in stacks with enslaved units. (One that I remember particularly would refill the action points of an enslaved unit for the cost of one action point of the orc unit.) I’m also curious if you could pull off enslaving as a way to acquire units; I managed it once but it’s kind of tricky to get the morale low enough for it to kick in without just killing them. I never tried using enslaved units beyond that because (a) it’s icky and (b) the penalty seemed pretty steep.
I actually have an enslaved medusa in my current alchemist game. I had a potion that enslaves a unit when disordered. Back when I was in that big tower fight with Yria, her medusae all got broken after I pitched all those sacred waters on them and, being curious, I threw the potion at the one I could reach. It worked and now I have the below medusa warrior. It doesn’t matter that they’re enslaved because their stun is awesome and it gets heavy use in every battle.
Yeah, I could see it working well for support units where the actual damage output / tanking capability is less important than something like a stun. It does seem a bit of a shame for Medusa Warriors, though, because they are pretty capable fighters on their own, and 20% is a big hit. Is the gaze skill 2 focus? Then you’re doing it for five rounds, which is probably going to be most of the battle, so you’re not really losing that much, since IIRC it ends the turn after one attack. (Though on my necro run the fact that it was ranged white damage (and not an inconsiderable amount) was rather tricky for my undead stacks.)
Yeah, the stun only costs 2 focus so that’s really all they do the entire battle. I’ve not been in one yet where they run out of focus before the battle ends.
I have some mentalism spell pages so my hope is eventually to turn them into a follower with the mentalism spell and get rid of the enslavement penalty.
In my first game, balanced, I went super slow. I carefully avoided any actions that would damage relations with Circle mages, and took up any options to improve them (random quests). I focused on building an economy, and building a gold and mana surplus. To do this, I kept my stacks and total units below the level that enabled a surplus. I bought enslaved units from Connaught and follower Militia from Sevenkeeps to give me free units to take care of revisiting towns and as scouts for my main stacks, and I sold off parts of my inventory that I was confident not to want later periodically.
I won that game, no earlier than week 40 or so. It was a lovely, relaxed game. Only towards the very end, when I decided to take out a Circle mage I had gotten into war with, was there significant escalation in pressure, in the form of the other mages ransacking or capturing my lodges and nodes.
I can assure you ‘balanced’ has no puzzle-aspect (or finding the only feasible way). Just don’t engage with more than one of the mages too much. Fight what’s in your backyard, don’t go out for the big adventure; take your time to get strong before you explore much. (There’s no falling behind as long as you armies level up well enough by fighting whatever’s going on in the neighborhood; and if your research’s also good enough. The golem coming up sounds about right. The game’s good at intimidating you. Don’t let it ; )).
So, other than Shaper Secrets and the two Lost Page locations, are there any other sources of spell pages? I’m finding my research is outpacing my spelllbook as the game progresses.
Yes. You get a spell page when you take out a circle mage tower. I’ve also gotten one in my current game from finishing a quest.
And part of that is just luck in getting later pages for a certain school of magic as those spells get way more expensive to research. I do wish you had a little bit of choice about what pages you pick up.
As for the orc conversation/enslaved unit conversation, orcs get a boost to willpower damage, and I think their casters can also get an ability that further boosts that. When I built an orc stack it very frequently had enemies routing just a few turns in.
Yeah, I ran into that with Gor’s orc armies several times. Especially attacking his tower. He routed my army pretty good several times in tower attacks. I look forward to being on the other end of that.
How the heck do these work? More precisely, what do they work on?
As Alchemist, I got excited about producing a bundle of these and building myself a slave army of hand-chosen units encountered in combat. However, after several fights in which I carefully reduced opposing units to broken status, I am yet to find anything these actually work on. The text indicates they only work on Slaveable units, but what are Slaveable units?
I began out by trying to enslave various Beast units, given that one can hire enslaved beasts from Connaught, but the ones I tried it on - Gryphons, Ironbeaks, Bears, did not appear to be slaveable. I am wondering whether instead, it needs to be humanoid type units.
Did you get their morale down to broken or routed?