Is magic worth it?!?

[DireAussie]

>Late age game with Arcoscephale

Generally speaking late age has less magic; late age mages have less magic skills. As stated on page 97 of the manual - "The early age has a predominance of magic, and as the ages progress, the primacy of arms and armor becomes pronounced".

Here's one strategy for making late game arco a strong magic nation: Take magic 3 and a strong dominion. Recruit sybils until you get a few level 3 astral. Build cheap forts and labs and then pump out mystics en-masse. Set your sybil to cast light of the northern star and set all your mystics to cast mind burn. Watch the enemy die.

Another strategy for late game arco involving magic: Take luck 3, turmoil 3 and an awake pretender you can use for early expansion (eg dragon), with magic keep in mind a good bless effect. Recruit mystics and go for arcane probing (evocation) then conjuration 5. While researching conjuration, use arcane probing to find astral sites and use mystics that have a high magic skill to find magic sites (you should have lots of provinces you can search due to quick early expansion). By the time you have conjuration 5 you should have gotten plenty of magic gems from luck 3 and from magic site searching. Convert the gems to astral and use your mystics to cast ritual spell Summon Sirrush. Use your newly acquired uber blessable mutant-dragons to smash the enemy.

[Gandalf Parker]

If you are playing small maps, weak independents, many opponents, then you are correct. In those cases, magic is not as likely to be a big factor in winning the game.

But consider where you are on a scale between the smallest option of those, and the largest. There are game settings where magic becomes a major factor. This is also true of resources, or gold, or dominion strength, rainbow gods, SC's, or blessings. In some game settings they are important factors, and in others they are not so much.

On a large map, with half the opponents, and hard independents, I think you would find that magic becomes very important to winning the game. And more important on mid to late game combats.

[Sombre]

When I first started out I felt much the same, but later on magic picks up steam and becomes powerful enough to wreck entire mundane armies without breaking a sweat. Part of the problem is that low level spells tend to be so useless, but if you want a quick and easy demonstration of how effective magic can be, I'd suggest going with EA Abysia and going all out to research evocation spells. Then send out your fire mages to spam stuff like falling fires. Quickly gives you an idea of how effective magic is.

Note: I'm not saying EA Abysia is a great magic nation, just that they provide an easy to see example and you don't get friendly fire problems.

[Micah]

Nature has horrible evocation spells, and astral isn't very good against large hordes of troops, but mind burn spam is fairly nice if your opponent is fielding lots of expensive units, like cavalry, and soul slay for anything larger than that. Both of those paths are more focused on support magic. Astral is the king of winning fights off the battlefield, with great mobility spells (teleport/gateway/astral travel) and mind hunt which can take out enemy leaders, leaving their troops stranded. Nature has great global enchantments.

Astral especially has some really nice high level spells. Try casting astral tempest, antimagic and will of the fates in a large battle (against human-type opponents, astral tempest won't be so good against high hp or MR opposition since your own troops are fragile) and see how things go.

Also, drop body ethereal, luck, and regeneration on an SC chassis and watch them go to town, just make sure they have some reinvigoration and decent protection and they should be good to go.