[Cainehill]

Caveat - relative newcomer to Dominions myself.

As Gandalf said, 2 to 3 is good for searching. Myself, I'm kind of partial to 4 - not only does it grant the bless effect, some of which are kinda handy (extra defense, extra magic resistance, 20% of not getting hit by missile weapons) even at that minimal bless level. More importantly - from what I understand, you never need more than 4 in a magic path to find _all_ sites in that path.

Maybe it's just me, but I hate micro-managing my mages, "Ooh! I have a fire 4 mage now, I should send him to check all the provinces I only checked at level 3 before!" With 4, you [i]know[i] you found 'em.

Again, similar to what he said, I like my pretender to complement the nation's magic, so I can search (and cast) for magic the nation can't itself manage. But I also like to have at least one path that matches up with the kind of magic gem income the nation has. This allows me to forge items (since being able to forge a -great- item but having 0 gems of the required type isn't very fun), and also allows some synergy from magic research. If there's at least one shared path, you can research to get a spell that's great both for the national mages and the Pretender - I prefer not to research to a level that only gives a benefit to one or the other.

Besides forging, another reason to have at least one magic area in line with the nation/theme's strengths is summonings. Maybe you're not having much luck expanding, so your army is stalled, with upkeep nearly matching your income. Being able to get a couple decent summonings off with your pretender can make a big difference. (Most summons require gems, and more than a few have a better effect according to the mage's magic levels. If lvl 2 gets 1 summoned creature for 2 gems, lvl 3 gets 2, and lvl 4 gets 3 creatures for the same 2 gems, etc, it's better to have a pretender with better than mortal magic skill in that area.)

Hth.