A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

I have two questions and thought I'd gather them in one post.

1: I have a bunch of (2a, 2s) sorceresses I want to use in a reverse communion to spam thunderstrikes. The idea is for two communion masters to cast storm power and power of the spheres, giving all the slaves 4a for thunderstrikes. As I understand it, the key to this is for the masters to be below the slaves in the unit list. How does this work if the communion members are all cloud trapezing directly to the location of the battle? If all are originating from the same province, is their order preserved upon arrival? Any way to know what the final order will be if they come from different provinces?

2: Second, how important do people feel it is to expand into fire magic? Playing as Man in a game (midgame), I have lucked into a modest fire income due to finding combined F/E sites. Either I can transmute it to astral which is really useful for me right now, or I can try to save up 50 to empower a lamia queen. This will let her forge flaming skulls and fever fetishes, and she could cast augury. The latter could be good, because I am pretty sure I am sitting on a couple of good fire sites (one spreads heat, the other spreads turmoil). The turmoil-spreading site has recruitable fire mages, unless I'm mistaken. But I'm not sure how useful fire really is at this point, so it could be a lot of effort for not much benefit. Are there any special fire spells or synergies that would make this worthwhile?

Re: A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

1) Yes, the order is preserved no matter what throughout the whole game. The only complication is if they're coming from different provinces there is no way for you to tell what the order will be - but it will always be consistent if you paid attention earlier.

2) Entirely situational. Fire magic's highlights are flaming arrows, fire brands, shields of gleaming gold, lightless lanterns, incinerate, falling fires, and several really nice situational things like flambeauxs and rune smashers. You only need to go into fire if you need to go into fire. ;)

Re: A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

A few fire mages in your armys could spam resist fire somewhat lessening the vulnerabilty of protection and wooden warriors being cast.

Re: A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

Early game flame arrows is kick butt for man

Re: A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

Fire magic is very nice. With it you can warm your bones at the hearth after a tough bout with Nief.

Re: A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

What Baalz said.

Lightless Lanterns are superb. Put them on your cheapest researcher, +6 RP for 3 gems with a hammer. Even a couple F1 guys can drastically improve your research power.

Flaming Arrows does go a long way for Man's offensive punch. It's castable with an F2 guy, I believe--Phoenix Power, then use 2 gems (3 in CBM). Only worth it for big battles unless you have an F4 guy, but very worth it then.

Fire Brands are also very useful (requiring a F1E1 guy). The same crosspath gives you Shields of Gleaming Gold, and F1 gives you Dragon Helms--Dragon Helm plus Fire Brand gives 100% FR to someone starting without any, which is always nice.

Flambeaus are nice, but if you only have F1 you can get by with Just Man's Crosses and Holy Scourges.

So even low-level fire can be a substantial force multiplier--I'd rather have multiple F1 guys than 1 F4.

Re: A couple of questions (teleporting communions, fire gem use)
 

Its better to say that there is no easy way to do it, rather than it being impossible.

The only way you can test ordering of units in different provinces is to temporarily give them move orders to a common province and then use the 'y' key to check their mutual ordering (before reassigning them back to cloud trapezee). Temporarily equipping boots of flying can make this process much easier. Of course, you cant do this to every unit you want to check - but the unit ordering is static across your empire. So if you test the first/last unit from province A against the first/last unit in province B, you will understand how their orderings interact. You can then chain this testing from one set of labs to the next to determine the full ordering of every mage involved, assuming they are all within 6 provs of each other.

While it is a fair amount of micro-management to do the above tests - the results can be invaluable. Allowing you to reliably land communions composed of mages from across your entire empire.