[Tuna-Fish]

Originally posted by Ice Sickle:

1) Basic magic strategy:
I feel compelled to have a rainbow mage regardless of which race I am playing. This lets me find every type of gem and forge nearly every item.

2) Searching for Magic sites
I usually send out a mage with about magic areas (fire, earth, death for example). But of course he/she can't find everything. I want to find them all so I'm tempted to send out my pretender searching after about turn 15 or so. Later if I have a good astral gem income I'll use that reveal all astral spell.

Yes, but do you need to be able to find everything and forge anyhting? Remember that you can only search 1 province every 2nd turn that way and forge one unit or cast one spell. Having a damned lot of options isn't of much use when you can only choose one. I'm not saying it's bad, just saying that if you instead bought a solid magic base in one or 2 well-chosen paths and put the rest of the points in scales, esp. order, magic, production, and a good cheap castle, you could buy a lot more troops to take territory lot faster and to build more mages to search that territory faster so your options would be more limited but you would be able to do more of those few limited ones.

Also, sitesearching by spells, (***spex, augury gnome lore, (thaumaturgy 2) Dark knowlege, voice of apsu (conjuration 2 and 3) and arcane probing (evo 2) ) is generally better than by moving mages around because you can search sites faster with less mage-time, and without having to move your mages to all kinds of vulnerable places out of your castle. They also find the hardest-to-find sites you really wouldn't want to miss. Also, this leaves your pretender free to do what he is supposed to, being either burrowing his nose in the books like a real sissy or putting some fear of god to all those pesky pagans, depending on what you prefer.

3) How do you do this without a rainbow pretender? If you have no water mages you can't find water sites so you can't empower a mage with water gems to find water sites. Do people just not bother looking for gems that aren't primary to their magic?

If I have no water mages, I dont really need water gems or do I? Instead of figuring out how to get gems that are useless to me, I could be getting gems that ARE useful to me, preferably from the closest neighbour.

4) Castle strategies. Because of administration I am loathed to put two castles closer than two territories from each other. What's some wiser thinking on castle placement.

Build as many as you need, except in long-Lasting multiplayer games build them everywhere, or face some painful raiding. After research reachs higher levels, basic troops lose most of their usefulness as some high-level spells and summons take them out without much effort. So, in the end high resources dont matter all that much, what matters is how many mages/commanders you can field.

5) How many gems do you put in the hands of mages as you send them into battle? I don't have a good feel for this. I tend to want to pile up gems for empowerment and magic items but I realize that a mage without gems can't do much. On the other hand I have most of my mages doing research anyway rather than out there fighting -- at least in the early game.

I never give mages gems "just for the heck of it", when I do give them some I script them to cast some special spell and give them as many gems as they need and no more. Scouts, preferably flying ones can haul them extra gems for the next battle.

Also, you menion empowerment one time too many: in 99 cases of a 100 it's better to do something else with your gems as empowering is hideously expensive. If you gotta boost magic levels, items are usually better in it.
http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/magiboost.xls
is a very good file listing all the magic-boosting items with their building requirements.