[AreaOfEffect]

I've already chosen my nation to play, it's Man. Trust me, I like Man for most of what you have said, and for a lot of reasons that you all have missed. Late-Age Man is an interesting faction. It's strength lies in the flexibility of their commanders and foot knights. A magister can fulfill a array of roles, as does also the judge. Their H2 priest is one of the cheapest in the game and that matters when Ermor is on the boarder. You can have your best infantry hold any line you want them to by setting them to fire. When you want punch, send in your cost effective mounted Knights. There is so much to love.

However...

I still maintain that Man underpreforms people's expectations. First of all, lets, for a moment, forget what your god can bring to the table. I prefer to first examine what a faction is capable of on it's own.

Without the aid of a god, the usefulness of half your gem income is generally limited to what a nature 1 indy mage can do with it. This of course assumes you can find one in the late age. As for site searching, thuamaturgy 2 is indeed not that far away. The magister arcana can reliably site search air. You might be able to search for earth if your lucky, but you still need earth gems after that. Going up a different tree, evocation, let's you now site search astral... with no astral gems. In order to site search death via spells, you now need to recruit a completely different commander, who isn't reliable at all. Manual site searching is limited to fire 1, air 3, earth 2, astral 2, and death 1. That's not impressive, especially since that spans all your mages with all of their unreliable randoms. Aside from air, none of this promises the really good sites, which you need for solid gem income and indy mages for diversity.

Your solution to research is apparently quill pens and a 70 cost mage that averages below 3 research. Less then three means that, on average, you lose the magic race because you can't simply match you opponents researchers one-for-one. Quill pens simply take the one useful gem income you have and wastes it on something that money is suppose to do. If we were to listen to all the advise above, those air gems are needed to site search air, make air boosters, and cloud trapeze your map move 1 mages. You need those gems for so many other tasks, making quill pens all the less viable.

Remember that everything has an opportunity cost. Simply ranting off all the things a unit can do or all the ways to compensate research doesn't outline a strategy. If your magister arcanas are site searching then they are not researching. If your making magister arcanas then your not recruiting your cheap researchers and you are inceasing your upkeep, which limits your castle building, which limits your troops. If your making quills then your not making boosters. Heck, you can't even make boosters without your god, so lets talk about that.

Let's talk about the needs of your god. So far we know you need nature. You should consider order scales, as you need money for magister arcanas and castles. You need growth to limit the death rate of your battle mages. Production might be considered a no brainier for this faction. I've already seen the suggestion for a rainbow god. Those aren't cheap at all. This makes sense though as you need better site searching, better research, and more magical diversity in my opinion. Yet, how confident do you feel about being able to turn away an early sacred rush? How about armored elephants? Making a pretender for Man is, in my opinion, one of the hardest gods to make in the game. You could take a great enchantress with nature, skip on growth, and use her gems to make shrouds for your mages. But to keep her awake or dormant you need to sack a lot of dominion and/or scales. Both are very important. Dominion because of Ermor and Ry'leh, and scales because of the nation itself. Taking the 120 from drain helps, but it isn't entirely free as it limits the research of your god and makes indy mages useless for anything but magic diversity. Other nations will have more points to work with as their free points are actually free.

I've got some solutions to the problem, but I don't really want to piecemeal my guide bit-by-bit in somebody else's thread. My point is that Man is at a great disadvantage against other factions in a fair fight. Bleeding their income dry with magister arcanas isn't helping. The mage ought to be revised.