[Endoperez]

1) Example supercombatant:

A Wyrm (two-headed giant snake available as a pretender) with Air 4 and Earth 4. It is equipped with: Horror Helmet,Horror Helmet (both increase Fear), Amulet of Reinvigoration (removes several points of fatigue each turn) and Pendant of Luck (every damaging thing, from swords to missiles to spells, has a 50% chance of missing).
He is accompanied by a mage who has few picks in Astral. You have researched Alteration. The mage casts "Body Ethereal". It makes all units in one battle square (3 humans, 2 horsemen or 1 Wyrm) Ethereal, making 75% of all non-magical forms of damage miss them. It doesn't protect against damage. The Wyrm itself casts the following spells:
Earth Power (more reinvigoration), Mistform (makes him very hard to damage without magical weapons), Mirror Image (makes him surrounded by illusions, making most strikes miss him), Invulnerability (gives him protection 25 and lowers his poison resistance), Air Shield, then attacks.

In positive dominion, the Wyrm will have hundreds of hp, massive regeneration, most strikes won't hit him, even fewer will penetrate his protection, those few hits will be regenerated in a turn, etc. Even if someone manages to burst in (removing Mistform and the mirror images), he's almost impossible to kill.

This isn't even from the tougher end, as he starts with lots of fatigue which will take several turns to go down, and fatigue makes him much more vulnerable, and he won't have much attack; and especially because his magic resistance isn't too great so enemy mages will eventually succeed in Paralyze or Soul Slay or even Sleep, and he'll be an easier (but not exactly easy) target.

You can't really kill a Wyrm like that with mere armies. Especially if he's supported by an army.



As said before, decide what you want to do. You'll always want to specialize into something. This something could be Air Evocations, as an example, or level 2 in all paths your national mages won't get so that your pretender can find all the interesting magic sites, or Fire 9 to give your sacred units flaming weapons AND your pretender access to all Fire spells. Then you want to choose scales, like some Magic to help you research Evocation faster; or maximum Growth to keep your old mages from getting sick, some magic to research, and some order for money while affording this with Sloth and Misfortune and relying on getting lots of research done fast and then using all those gems for something very, very good; or you could just take high dominion to be able to recruit lots of sacred units in all castles and make your pretender Imprisoned and take as good scales as you can afford to build massive armies backed up by very agressive sacreds, aiming to get some good Fire spells for your pretender to use his skill in Fire for something really impressive once he wakes up.

Once you get the full game, the manual will have example strategies for the different nations. They aren't perfect, but they'll give you lots of ideas.