[Squirrelloid]

So, even accepting that Starspawn priests are immune to dominion-based insanity, I still feel you want to be pumping out mages. You need to start generating different path combinations early and often, and those mages will be far more useful at a variety of tasks, not just researching. Effectively, you need your workforce to be capable of multi-tasking, and need to have the necessary magical capabilities already lined up before you actually need them.

It does suggest that once you have what you consider enough magical might (imho, somewhere in the 30-50 mage department is probably sufficient for awhile) you should purchase the priests for research duty (which will help free up some of those mage assets for other tasks even when those tasks aren't critical).