Re: Fort placement
For most all of the questions you asked the answer tends to be, "What nation are you playing?" One of the attractions of Dominions is that the various nations don't play the same. You have already gotten some good general tips, here are a few more.
1. Castles let you spend lots of gold with a good return. When you have many provinces and are generating more gold then you can spend on quality units, then you need another castle. All the advice the previous posters gave you to help in selecting castles is good. Oh try and select provinces that won't be conquered by enemy nations before the castle is finished, that is a painful waste of money.
2. Gems you can't use can still be useful for empowerment, so that you can start using them. Alternatively, you can alchemize them into a more usable resource. Empowerment and alchemy are both pretty pricey, an approach that is sometimes more fruitful is to use them diplomatically. Trade your surplus to a nation that can use them. You can get forged items, military support, and diplomatic concessions with the right sort of gem trades. Diplomacy is a very real element in multiplayer games of Dominions.
3. Check your spell ranges, mages that are never in range of the enemy won't get many kills. Spells that buff your troops are even less flashy than fireflies, but can make a huge difference in battles. Look in the spell index at the back of the manual for interesting effects your national mages can research for.
4. An early prophet helps to spread your dominion. At the very least he will be good for Divine Bless and Smite, also Prophets don't cost any upkeep. A later Prophet is likely to be on a better unit, and hence more useful. Most nations (with early and late era Mictlan being exceptions) want to appoint a Prophet quite early in the game, frequently the first or second turn.
5. Blood magic is very strong. It tends to be more useful for summons than for battlefield effects or rituals, but it does have some spells that are true gems in those categories as well. Optimal bloodhunters should be cheap and have blood 2. Construction 4 gets your blood mages the ability to forge Sanguine Dowsing Rods, which increase the blood skill of a blood mage by one, for the purposes of blood hunting only. You want to hunt provinces that are as close to 5 thousand population as possible, and keep them free from unrest. A good strategy is a 5k province at zero tax with three or four hunters with an effective blood skill of two. A province like that will reliably generate over a dozen slaves a round, several will power a mighty blood economy. One of the greatest appeals of blood magic is that it isn't dependant on the luck of the draw for sites.
6. Controlling a province under an enemy dominion is often bad. The best case scenario is no benefit, possibilities go down hill from there. Order and Misfortune are scales that are frequently combined, since Order reduces the frequency of events. Enemies experience only the bad luck with none of the mitigating reduction in frequency or extra income. Arcoscephale automatically scrys provinces under their dominion. There are several global enchantments that only work or have much stronger effects under the dominion of the casting nation. Finally you will be eliminated from the game if you allow your dominion to get weak enough.
7. You derive no benefit from armies for most commander tasks, but it is worth remembering that a handful of troops on guard commander make your valuable leaders much more survivable, particularly against assassination attempts.
8. This question is very dependant on your nation. Every nation derives great benefit to their forging economy with access to dwarven hammers, if your nation has no native earth 2 mages, you will need to get all of your hammers via trade with nations who do, or you will need to build them with your pretender. If your pretender isn't titan sized or ethereal, you might want to put 4 levels of earth magic on it just to protect your god from lethal castings of Wind Ride. For many nations your selection of magic will be based on the blessing you will receive, water is particularly powerful in this regard. Also, if you are playing early era R'lyeh, make sure your pretender has at least one level of both air and water magic.
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