[Antpile]

I've been playing the game for a few weeks now, maybe a month. I am a newcomer to the Dominions series as well, so no prior knowledge. This is useful because I have very recently been in your shoes.

First off, the nature of a FFA vs many opponents is that sometimes you will just get screwed over. Not much you can do about it, it was just bad luck. If you end up in the middle of 2 or 3 comps and they need to go through you to get to anyone else, well, you are just plain in trouble.

The computers do fight eachother, yes. If you use scouts liberally you will see them fight.

There is no diplomacy as far as I know. The computer will often leave you alone until it feels it can beat you though and will send you a message letting you know it's about to open a can on you when it is ready.

Magic can definitely be a game breaker. However, you don't HAVE to be a heavy mage to win. This game has many strategies that can be quite potent if pulled off correctly.

This is a tough one. You need to design your pretender with a specific use in mind. Some are rainbow mages made mostly to find magic sites and cast a variety of spells, some you make with the idea of their bless being potent, some are for casting a specific high end spell or combo of spells, some are for combat, etc. The thing is, you have to know the race you are playing and the goal of your pretender and get them to work together, then design the pretender accordingly.

One thing that eventually just clicked with me is something akin to when building decks for Magic TCG finally clicks. At first you are just throwing together cards that look cool, but eventually you get to the point where you are building it with a specific purpose in mind and you cut out all the un-needed stuff. At first you are haphazardly building a pretender and tilting scales this way and that, but you don't really know what you are doing or what you are going for.

In your case with the monkeys, might I suggest taking a master lich (for his immortality, so you can use him in battle without worrying too much) with fire 3, air 2, astral 2, death 4, and nature 2. Give him a dominion of 8 (to spread his dominion quickly, since immortality does not work where you don't have dominion.) Put 2 into heat for your free points and 1 into magic to aid with research.

Now, you don't start with fire or air gem income, so this is a somewhat risky move, but your pretender will be a good site searcher and his immortality lets you move him around without worrying. If you don't get the gem income you need just alchemize them as you won't need many. The goal is to get to enchantment 4 quickly by recruiting a lot yogis when money is tight and guru's once you can afford it. While your white ones are researching away move your pretender to any squares you liberate to search for sites.

The monkeys have a plethora of ranged units and are one of the few early era races to get the longbow. This is a fact this pretender is built to capitalize on. Once you hit enchantment 4, give him some fire gems, put him in an army that has a lot of archers backing it up, and script him to cast flaming arrows first thing. Your archers should take care of the rest. Also, as soon as you hit enchantment 4 start researching alteration to level 4 for wind guide and script him to cast this as well. He'll need air gems for that one.

Once you have those two spells going on a mass of archers there isn't much they can't handle. The only things you'd have to be real careful of at this point would be caelum using flying units to get to your archers or abysia and their fire immunity. There are some magical spells that can render your archers useless, but the computer is unlikely to use those and a human player might not reallize what you are doing until it is too late.

After this you can always use your probably huge gem income to empower your pretender up a few more levels to cast some of your national summons if you like or just clean it up the ol' fashion way.