[Stryke11]

Since I feel like I should post something on topic:

1st of all, I'm not sure about the neutral site, but if you are playing LA Pythium, Renatus and Renatas are NOT HERETICS. They are a splinter cult of the Serpent Cult and accepted by them. They are also incredibly useful for that nation as they provide the only real chance to get Death 3 (Renatus have 1D plus a random D, plus a skull staff they can build). Same for Water 4 with the Renatas. The Reveler provides access to blood magic (something I didn't take advantage of but now that I read above about special summons I may look into it). The green heretic lady (sorry, forget the name) is a potential E2, E3 with boots, and the ONLY earth mage of LA Pythium (the little non-heretic version has a very small chance of getting earth one, but that's useless). Oh, and she heals wounds. It's rare to get the 2nd earth pick, but if you do, excellent mage to keep with the troops.

The fire heretics are useful, too, and if you have fire on your pretender you can kit them with Fire Helms and Flaming Skulls and then even your Leo's can support the (fire resistant border troops) with flaming death.

The one caveat to all this is with a low gem income you are SOL. I upped the magic site frequency to EA game levels for this purpose. Without boosters your mages are of little value, but with them you can excel at pretty much everything (even Air and Astral, with boosters and your Theurgs - capital only).

As for Heresy in general. I put two serpent priests with crappy random picks in a province way in the hinterlands and sent all my heretic mages with equally crappy picks (the green ladies with 1E1N rather than 2E and the fire guys w/o 2F) there, and with a temple and two priests preaching, I still had five candles in that province, so heresy ain't all that bad. Oh, and your Theurgs can cast telestetic animations (sp?) which can preach for the same effect.

This is all for single player tho. I'm sure in multi it would make more sense to focus on one strategy/path than all of them at once.