Oh boy alot of questions

[Jam3]

Ok I just recieved my full Version the other day. I have read through the walkthrough and the manual, played a few times, and still have tons of questions!

1) One of my main questions is about animate dead. I have mainly been playing C'Tis.

The manual does a good job exaplining that ghouls come from your population points in a province and souless come from the number of corpses. What about Longdead and Tomb wyrms? What exactly is that taking from to build?

2) The whole "no diplomacy" thing is kinda taking me for a loop. Mainly once I meet up with another dominion at the start of the game it seems to go like this, grab all the land you can and establish a border. As long as you don't move into the same territory as your opponent you can usually establish a line and not get into an early conflict.

Basically i like searching my provinces for sites, getting a little research and maybe making a few magic items before fighting another major power.

Does this seem to basically jive with how people see "peace" with other dominions?

3) The whole simultaneous movement thing is throwing me a little. It basically seems that the defender can NEVER get the advantage since a) you dont' know where an enemy army is moving AND b) enemy armies seem to almost never sit still. This is probably the worst part of the entire design system

if

x is my opponent
0 is me

0
0x0
0

if the 4 provinces 0 is in all move into x's province and he moves into anyone of 0's, he completly bypasses them all, this just doesn't make sense. Maybe if spies/scouts etcs gave you a report that told you the armies intentions like "40 units, they plan to occupy this province" or "50 units they are marching on X province".

Does anyone understand this better so you can actually stop a rampaging army? If not then its really just about playing a luck game in trying to determine which province the army is moving into next.

4) Magic - just a quick one but I assume that the individual magic school levels of commanders is just as important to research for as your pretenders schools?