Use of mages

[Crafty]

Thanks I will be using those now.

Thanks for the idea about summoning.

I'm familiar with construction, alteration (mostly buff spells, alter fate! personal luck! Mirror image!), evocation (battle field attack ., Magma bolt! Flare! Blade wind!), enchantment (mix of buff battle field and ritual Gift of heath! ) and even thamutary (site searching, province attack) i kind of get.

Unfortunately conjuration it is a school that I least understand and familiar with, next to Blood.

Most of low levels summons (lv 5 and down) look like lemons
to me. The blood summons look okay, but i don't do blood magic. But that's another thread..

[MaxWilson]

Yeah, well, most of the low-level summons *are* lemons. Except for some of the nationals. Right now, I like LA Agartha's Conj 4 Sepulchrals. Sacred, high-damage (24 Str + 11), decent attack, great protection (E9 + Legions of Steel = 20 Prot), cheap (4 death gems). Zero-encumbrance, and we all know how important that is. 65 hp and size 4 means even anti-undead spells like Dust to Dust don't have an easy time taking them down.

Flame Corpses (also LA Agartha) look promising, but I tried them against EA Pangaea's centaurs and they didn't kill many, probably because they centaurs have so many hit points. I think I'd rather spend the fire gems on Lightless Lanterns, but if anyone knows a good use for Flame Corpses I'll be glad to hear it.

-Max

[Aleph]

If you aren't using magic, you're not advancing up the only tech tree there is in the game.

The classic uses of non-national low level summons are Vine Ogres and Corpse Men (technically, a construction not a conjuration). Both benefit from decently tough basic frames but can be summoned cheaply in large numbers with the right equipment (see manual). You probably won't be able to put together overwhelming numbers of them until mid-late anyway (since you'll want maybe 5-10 properly equipped mages casting the appropriate spell monthly, and earlier in the game research is king), but they are available quite early if your basic forces need a bit of backup.

One battlefield spell in particular you might want to look more closely at is Raise Skeletons (Enchantment 3). It is one of the earlier spells in the game that you can use to obliterate indeps without much effort, especially in conjunction with solid ranged troops. It's a nice spell because a. it doesn't miss b. it doesn't have a range at which the computer won't cast it c. it gives you endlessly reusable chaff to eat up whatever casualties indeps might otherwise inflict which would slow down your momentum. Particularly nice against heavy cav, to have them break their lances against.

[Humakty]

I think that, for a total beginner who wants to discover battle magic,EA Abysia is a good option, as it has powerfull fire mages with fire immune troops. Put three or four(or more !)mages in your main army with whatever script you like, and watch your ennemies BURN !

[llamabeast]

Agreed - although you'll need to research Fireball (Evocation 3) before they can really cause any pain.

[Kristoffer O]

Don't they start with flare? Or was that MA Abysia or dom2 abysia?

[quantum_mechani]

Dom2 abysia.

[Edratman]

I also took considerable time until I learned how to use mages for something other than research and construction of items. (I attribute it to my extensive Civ experiences.)
You can win on medium sized maps without much magic.

But following some sage advice I received here I started making maps to allow 30+ provinces per player, set gold and resources to 50%, indies to 9 and magic research to easy. I started out getting crushed by the AI, but eventually learned to adapt. Instead of having 20 or more capitol only mages sitting in my capital researching spells that the field army commanders can't cast, I find I only keep about 5 there for forging, and most of my research is now done by indie mages (with skulls or feathers).

[Jazzepi]

I've found mages quite useful in battle. Of course there's a tradeoff, especially if you throw a large force of them into the fray because you're losing research. I believe this can be recovered in the long term by the extra income produced from taking over another nation early.

For example, I put about 8 crones of Avalon into battle as Man against MA Argatha. By using gems to up some of the crones to cast level 3 air magic we were able to rout huge groups of heavy infantry our archers would have been unable to touch by casting Thunder Strike. Thankfully the armor piercing qualities of lightning made them a perfect counter to Argatha's highly armored, highly arrow resistant, troops.

Jazzepi