Request for assistance

[Graeme Dice]

Renegade 13 said:
Both times I've ended up with roughly 20 provinces, a few moderately sized armies, and all provinces explored for magical sites using the Acashic Record spell.

Acashic record is usually not worth the gem cost. If you find one gem producing site, it will only pay off 25 turns later for an astral site, and 50 turns later for any other site. Use the individual school searching spells or level 1 mages for those schools that you can't cast the searching spells in.

So, essentially, my question is how to avoid this, how to avoid the pitfall at this point in the game.

Recruit a mage at every castle every single turn. Use the spells that target large numbers of troops such as blade wind to destroy unarmoured AI troops.