Magic Heavy
 

I'm in the middle of learning Dominions 3 (after having the game for several months I've finally gotten around to playing it) and so far I've been sticking to fairly low magic avenues of success. So far I think I've gotten a handle on the army management aspects, site searching, and forging equipment and now I'm looking to jump into magic as a combat/offensive tool. With that in mind, I was wondering if anyone had a suggestion for a faction/race with the highest potential for magic diversity?

I know it should be relatively easy to do this by myself, but with the numerous factions out there I'm getting swamped looking over the details of them all trying to figure out what to work with. Primarily I'm just looking to have a faction I can play a couple times over to get a good feeling for magical options across all the schools, rather than picking specific factions for a specific magic type.

Re: Magic Heavy
 

Bogarus has great diversity in Astral, Fire, Air, Blood, and Death. All of those paths are very good for battlemages. As a bonus, their troops are terrible, so you're pretty much forced to rely on magic to do well :)

Re: Magic Heavy
 

If you are looking for some races with wide magic path, then the first one jumping into my head is TienChi (EA&MA), follows EA Arcoscephale.

But I think it is a better way to start with some magic focused races, and try to understand the most usage of that single path. like Abysia for Fire, Pangaea for Nature, Agartha for Earth, Caelum for Air, etc.

Re: Magic Heavy
 

For magic power/diversity T'ien Ch'i and Arcosephale are both good in any age. MA Pythium would work.

I like the later Arcosephales. The elephants can help with early expansion and, in SP, cover you until you have enough research for the mages to come into their own.

Re: Magic Heavy
 

Marignon doesn't have so much diversity, but is a good one for learning some magic skills because their fire mages are viciously deadly, and you can start using communions to power a wider variety and greater power of spells.

Re: Magic Heavy
 

By "magic diversity" do you mean on recruitable-anywhere mages, or just in general? It really isn't difficult to bootstrap to several levels in most paths to forge magic items or cast rituals. Take Nature, for example. Find a province with shamans and start cranking out shamans whom you send site-searching until you find Enchantresses or Gnomes somewhere. (That gets you into Water, Air and Fire as well.) Obscuro usually finds me Sorceresses eventually.

However, I like to play on large maps, so if I want to throw around fire magic it really doesn't do any good to have the Grand Temple of the Heliophagus (or whatever it's called) clear on the other side of my empire. Some races that have good, diverse recruitable-anywhere COMBAT mages are:

* EA Ermor, strong fire/death. Enough Earth to cast E3 buffs w/ boots, E4 w/ boots + gems.
* C'tis, all ages. EA has mostly death/nature, MA has a stronger focus on water and nature and less on death, LA is death/fire. (Hello, Banefire!)
* Ashdod, strong death/earth, good fire/astral.
* LA Agartha, strong earth/death/fire.
* EA Marverni, strong earth/astral, good nature/water.
* MA Shinuyama, strong in several battle paths.
* EA Yomi, good death, fire, enough nature for Eagle Eyes. Hannyas will need skull staffs/skulls of fire but still quite good.

I'm sure there are others, but of the nations I've played I think Ashdod, Marverni and LA Agartha were the ones that gave me the highest percentage of "fun" battlefield mages. Partly that's just my biases--if I used more battlefield gems I'd probably miss having easy access to Living Clouds and Fog Warriors.

-Max

Re: Magic Heavy
 

I would suggest you take this advice :) First practice with focused magic, and when you know the strength and weakness of each path, then try the more varied ones. I'd like to add to the above list EA/LA Mictlan for Blood, Pythium for Astral (and communions), MA Ermor for Death, Atlantis for Water.

Re: Magic Heavy
 

If you're willing to find some tricks from existing guides, I suggest reading Baalz's guide to Marverni.
Also, check the magic path boosting guide, listed in the strategy index. That's another great guide, and it's useful for all nations.

Re: Magic Heavy
 

I would suggest Helheim. Great Death/Air/Earth, and some fire and blood thrown in. Air and Death and Earth means lots of nice thugs.