[Cainehill]

Personally, I like being able to get some idea of how I'm doing, but do agree that the current graphs mess up MP games something awful.

IMO, the graphs could be improved by showing your relative ranking just as it is now, but with no way to identify the other nations.

Or - there could be spells for determining the relative strengths, one for each area of the graphs. "Scry Research", "Scry Dominion", etc : people could learn the information, but at the cost of a mage's time, and magic gems.

Or, somewhat a la the HoMM series, have a tavern / thieves guild / etc that you could build in your capital. Each one built would give you more information, thus making one decide whether or not to invest the money in it.

But the current mechanism could certainly do with some improvement - while it's good and useful to know that your magic research is by far the lowest in the game, it isn't so useful (in the MP sense) to know _who_ has the best magic gem income, provinces, etc.