Q: New to game, need advice - getting wrecked

[Aleph]

There's acashic record which searches for everything (unlike tiamat which is only elemental) but is cost inefficient for 25 astral unless you're already dominating. I believe certain land types have higher percentages of magic sites (wastelands, and starred provinces on certain maps) which might make them a useful target for akashic, but otherwise it's not a good idea.

In the current iteration of the game, you can have 1 spellcaster at a time doing monthly (SHIFT-M) search spells/spell and it will target okay - so 1 guy doing dark knowledge, 1 guy doing voice of apsu, etc. It tends to target newly acquired provinces 1st and will sometimes turn off for no reason or target capitals, but in general its a decent low management solution if you have low ranked mages of several stripes to spare.

There's no pdf manual to prevent piracy.

Bless is 100% nation specific, as are pretty much all strats in the game - you want strong non-capital only sacred troops, or absolutely amazing capital only sacred. Mictlan, one of my favorite nations, has good non-capital sacred troops and a ton of sacred unique summons. Playing them with the same scales you would play with Yomi is a roadmap for frustration.

While the nation names stay the same between eras (at least, for the most part, as there are some nations which are not present in all era), the units tend to change pretty dramatically from era to era. Agartha, for example, loses most of its Pale Ones as the eras progress and ends up a heavily armed and armored human nation with pretty strong death/fire/earth battlemages and some kickin' national summons. The most dramatic change award goes to Ermor, which starts out pseudo-roman with a little death and ends up 100% undead, with no national units able to be purchased with gold, the best magical income in the game to fuel a large variety of unique national summons, and a hostile domain which decimates population and reanimates freespawns everywhere it reaches. Mictlan changes a ton from Early to Mid (similar troops but losing its defining magical competency) and then goes back very similar to early in late.