Question about Mana nodes

[jimi12]

i usually make sure i have a fire node for my mages and a dimensional node for the nexus. than if i have a lot of deserts a water node too. other than that it depends on who i am playing as.

 

[Breunor]

Seems like there are dozens of different types of Mana...... How do I decide which one to upgrade a mana node into?

This question gets to the heart of why I think the FfH is such a masterpiece, a truly magnificent achievement. I'm a pretty experienced player, and I still wrack my head. Kael and team did an amazing job of making this choice hard. Here would be my guidelines:

1. Pay attention to your starting (palace) mana. These will already set some of the parameters.

2. You have to decide if you want to build multiple mana of the same type or more different kinds of mana. Having two mana of the same kind means that each unit starts with the first level promotion for free; having 3 means that each gets the first 2 promotion (but they only get the second promotion once they have enough levels to cast the spell).

3. If you are going for a tower victory, you always build different ones. You have to look ahead and see what you will get from wonders, vassilization, and work backwards. Below, though, let's assume we aren't going for a tower victory.

4. A lot of times I'll get water as my first non-starting mana as long as I don't want the Armageddon counter based, or dragon related, fires to spread. The first level water spell, spring, is really important. It can change deserts to plains, and it puts out the fires. It can be super important after the blight (AC = 40) event to get your economy back, since the blight will turn a lot of your terrain to desert. If you play one of the elves, you want this even more since you want to make sure that the fires don't burn down your wonderful forests. It can be so important that you should try to get one node and the ability to cast magic quickly.

5. Probably the most important decision is figuring out how you are using your magic. That is, if you are conquering, are you mostly using a conventional army? Or are you using the magic users DIRECTLY to defeat enemy units? Do you use magic to enhance your empire?

6. If your magic is to help in building the empire, I highly recommend nature. The 3rd level nature spell, vitalize, is tremendously powerful, the 'Gaia's blessing' of the game (for MoM fans!) It can upgrade your terrain all the way up, from tundra to grasslands! Druids will get this spell. If you are vitalizing your production after the blight and the enemy doesn't, you will find your empire very powerful.

7. If you have characteristics that favor magic, use them. So, if your leader is arcane, it is logical to use your magic users as a key to the army. You want to look at the sorcery spells, since the arcane characteristic applies to them. By far, the best offensive mana type is fire. Fireball is a powerful second level spell, and can allow you to reduce city defense bonuses. Therefore, it is useful to a conventional army without artillery! The third level spell, meteor swarm, is quite powerful if used en masse.

8. If you are building a lot of sorcery magic users, after fire consider enchantment. Enchantment is probably the most 'one-sided' mana. First, it gives a happiness, never something to sneer about. The first level spell enchanted blade is quite good. The third level spell, enchant spellstaff, though, can make those meteor swarms even tougher. Enchantment gives NO summoned creatures, though.

9. If your leader has summoner as a characteristic, then obviously you should consider magic for summoning. Lot of good choices here. Note that elementals and some other summoned creatures have AFFINITY, meaning they gain a strength for each node of their type. Therefore, if you are building the game around summoning, if often pays to find a kind of summoned unit, summon it, and build 3 mana of that type. The actual summoners use their experience points to advance the strength of their summoned units instead of getting more spells.

10. If you build your magic as combat enhancers, body (haste) and spirit (courage) and very good low level spells. Haste will often double the speed of your army! That is, ONE magic user casting haste effectively doubles the speed of every unit, quite a spell. (note it only works on living units. Therefore, if you have artillery, it won't help. Better to use mages with fireball than the artillery in that case). Spirit mana allows courage. Without it, your units cannot attack demons, dragons, horsemen, or creatures that exude fear.

11. Needless to say, on archipelago maps and the like consider water even more. For instance, if you have water and the Octopus Overlords religion, your high level priests can summon krakons. You will quickly get control of the seas, these squiddies are REAL tough!

12. Mind mana can be very powerful. Domination can just be brutal, it doesn't just defeat an enemy, it takes them over and brings them to your side! How do you defeat a strong enemy -- use their troops against them!

13. When you have good magic users, death mana can be a powerhouse. It allows you to create liches, which means you are allowed to have more of the highest level magic users.

This is the tip of the iceberg! As I said, the magic system is just wonderful. There really is no replacement for playing around with it.

For instance, say I want to be a builder. I'm not planning to go to war for a while, I may be on a island. Then look at law mana. Each law mana reduces maintenance. And the third level sorcery spell, unyielding order, eliminates unhappiness in the city as long as the caster stays there. Build the city of 1000 slums wonder and grow the city to a behemoth without worrying about happiness!


You have started playing one of the greatest games ever made. It is complex and wonderful, and the magic system is a great part of it. Enjoy!

Best wishes,

Breunor

 

[xienwolf]

Great starting walkthrough by Breunor here

Minor corrections:

2. If you have 3 sources of a mana type, your arcane units will start with the second rank of the spell immediately. However this promotion is absolutely useless until they also have Sorcery or Summoning, which they shall not gain until they are promoted to a Mage or Conjurer. If that was confusing, just go with what Bruenor wrote as it is a nice interpretation that works just as well.

9. If you are going to get Summoned units with Affinity, I reccomend you make ALL of your mana nodes that type, because each one of them increases the strength of the summoned units by another point. So with 5 Earth Mana Nodes, your Earth Elementals are strength 16 instead of 11.

11. Minor translation of what Bruenor wrote here: You don't actually need Water Mana for your priests to have access to Krakens, priests for the OO will always start with access to water magic, even if you don't have any water nodes.

 

[Immaculate]

Ah,very helpful. I didn't know what affinity meant.
I.

 

[Breunor]

Thanks for the corrections Xienwolf!

One other point I would like to add. Late in the game you can build a wonder called The Nexus, which is very powerful, allowing you to airlift from city to city. It can be a game breaker on island maps and even continents. but you need Dimensional mana to make it work. even without The Nexus you can build these nexus points in cities, and it still needs dimensional mana (I think). So, if you want this wonder or features, dimensional mana can be a powerful later game feature.

Best wishes,

Breunor

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Dimensional Mana is not required for the individual obsidian gates, but it is for the nexus. (The nexus is also not nearly so powerful when I added a full dimensional sphere)

 

[Immaculate]

Are enchantment mana happiness additive? If i have two, do i get +2 happiness?
I.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Yes, all passive mana effects are cumulative, including happiness and health.

 

[Caradoc]

Lately, I've been liking Law more and more. The Loyalty-Valor-Unyielding Order combo, plus the reduced maintenance is very appealing.

 

[Roghar]

I've rarely found stacking many of the same mana type to be useful except where taking advantage of affinities (death, nature), or for producing good fireball mages quickly (fire, naturally). For all of the utility spells I've generally found a range of useful first and second level spells is better. The only passive effect I've ever really considered to be worth stacking is earth when playing with khazad (or maybe luchiurp) because of the huge synergies with all of their mines and production boni. Perhaps excepting enchantment none of the other passives are good enough to justify them as your choice of node or to double up on.

 

[Immaculate]

1) I'm not very experienced but i did look at the various summons and it seems that none of the first level summons have an affinity trait (that i noticed) while most of the second level ones do, so regardless of which type of mana you specialize in, most of your summons will not get a bonus for mana type. The exception is of course, your level 2 summons from your 3 national summoner units. Am i missing one? It would almost be worth stacking the mana node bonuses if there was a first level summon with the affinity trait.
2) Is there any sorcery that gets an affinity bonus?
3)

Body: +5% to heal rate of friendly units within your borders
Chaos: +2% to mutation chance
Death: -1 to AI relations (I believe this is with neutral and good civs)
Earth: Increases the chance of discovering new resources
Enchantment: 1 happy
Entropy: -5% to heal rate of enemy units within your borders
-2 to AI relations
Law: -5% to maintenance costs
Life: +1 health
Mind: +3% to research
Spirit: +5% to Great Person Growth

Is there a passive mana node affect for dimensional, nature, sun, air, water or fire mana?
If not, are they looking for ideas? Seems like there should maybe be one for either nature (growth of crops) or air (pollen on the wind) where new cotton, incense, cereals, etc could grow on unimproved flatland.

 

[xienwolf]

Death has Affinity at the Conjurer level.

No sorcery benefits from multiple Nodes.

Some mana do not have a passive effect because they were deemed strong enough without it due to spell selection (And in the case of Dimensional, it is essentially only in the game for the Wonder at this point).

 

[Fenboy]

Entropy mana has the same effect as Death mana with regard to AI relations, and the Amurite AI is the only Good/Neutral civ that does not care if you use either.

 

[Madhatter4]

Ok something strange just happened to ALL of my mana nodes. I had improved all of them towards the beginning of the game. However after looking over my empire Ive noticed my mana nodes are no longer improved. Instead they look just like they did at the start of the game. Whats going on here? Do they reset themselves after a certain amount of time?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Sounds like the Amurite World Spell to me. It destroys all nodes, making them revert to raw mana, and gives their arcane units 1 xp per node it destroys.

 

[Madhatter4]

^^^Yea I thought I saw a message regarding some kind of world spell..... that must have been it

 

[medusa001]

Could you help me with the two following questions:

1. When you subjugate another civ do you gain access to their mana or is it that you can more easily traded for/demand it in negotiations? I assume the latter is correct.

...
9. If your leader has summoner as a characteristic, then obviously you should consider magic for summoning. Lot of good choices here. Note that elementals and some other summoned creatures have AFFINITY, meaning they gain a strength for each node of their type. Therefore, if you are building the game around summoning, if often pays to find a kind of summoned unit, summon it, and build 3 mana of that type. The actual summoners use their experience points to advance the strength of their summoned units instead of getting more spells.
...

2. Do you mean to imply that the conjurers themselves gain experience from the battles of the summoned creature? OR that the "Combat" promotions of the conjurer are passed to the summoned creature? Again, I assume the latter is correct. I recall promoting several summoned creatures in past games, so assumed that XP was applied to the summoned creature not the conjurer and the conjurer either need to "get his hands dirty" to get XP or get it passively via the arcane promotion.

Thanks.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The Combat promotions all apply the empower promotions to summons (only +10% each)

Channeling1, channeling2, channeling3, and arcane provide free xp to arcane units, but it does help if you attack directly, at least when the chances are highly in your favor (especially after casting valor)


It isn't possibility (at least currently) to tie an summon to a particular unit that summons it, so if they were to try to give summoners their summons xp then there would be no way to decide which summoner gets the xp.

 

[westamastaflash]

I've rarely found stacking many of the same mana type to be useful except where taking advantage of affinities (death, nature), or for producing good fireball mages quickly (fire, naturally). For all of the utility spells I've generally found a range of useful first and second level spells is better. The only passive effect I've ever really considered to be worth stacking is earth when playing with khazad (or maybe luchiurp) because of the huge synergies with all of their mines and production boni. Perhaps excepting enchantment none of the other passives are good enough to justify them as your choice of node or to double up on.

If you are going for divine casters instead of arcane casters, stacking one set of mana is often fun - like Law Mana with Bannor (huge empires that cost nothing to run)!

 

[Breunor]

Could you help me with the two following questions:

1. When you subjugate another civ do you gain access to their mana or is it that you can more easily traded for/demand it in negotiations? I assume the latter is correct.



2. Do you mean to imply that the conjurers themselves gain experience from the battles of the summoned creature? OR that the "Combat" promotions of the conjurer are passed to the summoned creature? Again, I assume the latter is correct. I recall promoting several summoned creatures in past games, so assumed that XP was applied to the summoned creature not the conjurer and the conjurer either need to "get his hands dirty" to get XP or get it passively via the arcane promotion.

Thanks.

Right on both cases, I'm pretty sure. On 1, once a civ is your vassal, you can trade, demand. etc. Note that because of this feature, vassalizing is far more lucrative in FfH than is standard BtS!

2. As others have pointed out, the empower promotions of the summoner enhance the abilities of the summoned units. Therefore, summoners are tricky. You may want to give them strength like promotions instead of additional spells for this reason.

Best wishes,

Breunor