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UninspiredName said:
If magic was weakened any between Dominions 2 and 3, it's still pretty damned tough. You cite it as pretty much the #1 way of killing generals, summons are the real 'heroes' of Dominions, national spells shape nations, and six E3 mages and a small team of heavilly armored men can fend back 120 somewhat skilled and decently armored troops (Happened to me once, my Nagarishis and Bandars vs. Jomon's samurai. I ended up losing, but only due to sucky morale checks. Jomon had no more than 10 units left, which were commanders, by battle's end. They massacared my sleeping mages). I'll admit the researching is a hit, but I don't see how it was weakened aside from that.
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I have to agree with GD that magic is considerably less important than before. Because resources were roughly doubled but the number of castle lab complexes wasn't you can recruit many more troops per mage and because of the supply increases (which are huge) you can field them too. Finally, the morale check changes seem to have made it harder to break troops. Before low-level artillery was useful because you could make and field enough to break a supply-limited army. Now it's pretty much hopeless until you've got a half-dozen castles because you've got twice as much to fight and you've got to dish out more per unit on top of that.
The best artillery strategy I've found so far is Pythium Communioned Smite. It was fun, sure, but even 4 communioned Theurg acolytes pitching Smite just didn't make a big difference with 200+ troops on the field. Only AOE or strong summons make a big difference now and prior to level 6, that's pretty much Strength of Giants, Bladewind, Wind Guide, Flaming Arrows, and a couple of level 4 summons like Fall Bears. Those mostly require gems, which mean you need to be searching too and in any case most nations can't generate a good supply of mages for any of those spells without path boosters, which means Con 4 or 6 too.
On top of that, your cost-benefit wasn't too good there. You lost 6 mages at about 180 = 1080 to kill 100 troops at, say, 15 = 1500. That's ahead, but not by much. Even if you can get some of the stronger early magic going it's possible to be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers, as you experienced.
I play SP, against 10 or so computer opponents, and by the time I can start using the magic that really makes a difference the game is effectively over. Either I'm on the exponential growth curve with mostly vanilla armies or there are huge AI armies rampaging through my heartland and I've given up.