[B0rsuk]

Guarranteed spells have been removed in one of the official patches. Now you only spawn with Common spell for each book in a school beyond the first, and if you start with 11 books you get a rare and uncommon spell too. Since you're talking about Nature + Life, you must've been playing an old version.

There are interesting ways to beat paladins. In my current game Jafar was stuck on two islands linked by a tower. A turtler got his wish granted - he started with High Men. I went with Klackons and Chaos. Long story short I assaulted his islands with a stack of 8 chaos channel (wings) stag beetles and a draconian shaman (removed from each battle so he can live). I cast Warp Reality each time I fight a significant number of paladins (4+). It gives all non-chaos units -2 to hit. Wings meant beetles weren't scared of first strike, in fact with innate fire breath they were the ones doing first strike. The beetles were otherwise fairly basic: Elite with no magical weapons (Alchemy) or even Metal Fires. I'd be much more afraid of pikemen and magicians if I didn't pick Flamestrike from a myrran lair.

The game can be wonderfully surprising and epic. In the same campaign, I strayed a bit too far on my quest to raze Horus's cities. I entered Myrror and torched a city in the same turn. Two heroes with 60 casting skill each made it easy. Next turn Horus casts... Planar Seal, and I'm a bit behind in casting skill and nowhere near researching Disjunction. I had to camp in a draconian town while fighting then challenging groups of priests, bears, pikemen, catapults deprived of my most powerful heroes. By the time I got them back