I'm sorry if you felt like you wee being lectured, that was not the intention in the
2 spells thread. My comment is the only one there that could be considered so, though it was made as a more general comment on the board at large, not toward you in particular. Unfortunately tone of voice does not carry through text too well.
One of the reasons there is sometimes frustration among the veteran players when faced with questions covered by easily found material (such as the FAQ) is that more often than not the questions are posted without even trying to look for any information, whether in the manual or somewhere else. This is often due to the fact that unlike many other games, Dominions 3 almost requires that the player actually
read the manual instead of ignoring or just skimming through it.
That said, the manual does not have all the answers to common questions and some answers it does have are a bit hard to find. That is the reason why the FAQ was posted. In most forums I have frequented, the forum FAQs are considered more or less required reading and I suspect most of the veterans here think the same way about the Dom3 FAQ. Doesn't mean that it necessarily needs to be religiously studied right off the bat, but a quick skim through the FAQ by reading just the questions (in boldface font) will give an idea what kind of information there is.
As far searching for a specific phrase, that is often a good tactic, but a dangerous assumption at other times. The reason being that if you use an exact phrase and whoever wrote about the subject did not use that particular phrase, you won't find anything. Searching for just 'affliction' would have found the relevant FAQ section immediately. It's not exactly a common word outside Dominions circles and even in the FAQ it only appears in the section dealing with them. The forum search function would also have netted an answer, especially if tried with acouple of variations like "heal afflictions", "healing afflictions" etc.
You are right that the crowd here is on average a lot older than in many other gaming communities and what you say about attitudes toward searching for information is true, we deal with that every day at work. So we tend to apply it outside of work as well and that's why we also do the things we do with writing FAQs etc. It is sometimes easy to forget that others may be far less experienced in doing that. This leads to less forgiveness for cases where the information has been made easily available through e.g. the FAQ or other manuals like the modding and mapmaking manuals. It's different when basic information is easily available, but must be applied in complex combinations to get the desired results. In those cases questions that look basic on their face can be anything but. In Dom3, modding and mapmaking are subjects where both the common and seemingly common but actually truly complex questions can easily arise.
Then there is also the factor of inauspicious coincidences. Someone comes to the forum and posts a slew of questions that would all have been answered by reading the game docs, the FAQ and the manual, they get answers to their first few questions, perhaps even detailed ones, but sooner or later the answers start getting shorter and less friendly as frustration mounts. Then somebody else comes and asks one or two questions instead of a whole slew, but gets a curt answer nonetheless because of the previous person. I know that should not happen, but it does because nobody here is anything other than human.
Do not take this as a rebuke of your above post, but as an explanation of how interactions on forums like this often go and why. You have a lot of good points in your post and you have legitimate reason to be frustrated and angry at what you saw as disrespectful treatment. I am not angry at you for saying those things and I don't think anyone else is either. It is a good reminder that the old hands like me sometimes take some things a bit too granted and expect more from new players than we perhaps should. Not always, but sometimes, and we need to work on that.