How difficult is this game?

[llamabeast]

I guess my issue with them is that they are virtually the only nation he ever plays.

Who? Me? I've only played them once! I do really like them though.

I remember I spent my first Dominions demo game carting a single fire-2 mage around, getting him lots of experience, waiting for him to become fire-3. It was very frustrating! (It turns out it doesn't work like that at all).

So you're telling me that you can research all these powerful spells and have no one capable of casting them?

You have to plan what you research for the mages you've got. And always you will have heaps of spells you can't cast.

For example, as Marignon, you should research Evocation, to give you fireballs and stuff. Evocation also includes water spells (like water strike), air spells (like lightning) and so on - but they're no use to you, so you might as well ignore them.

When on the research screen you can press the 'f' key to show only fire spells - and equivalently 'w' for water, etc.. The only non-obvious one is 's' for astral. This can be very useful for seeing what spells will be useful for you.

After a while you also get a feel for what each school is likely to do. The most obvious ones are Evocation, for directly attacking people (fireballs, lightning), conjuration for summoning things, alteration for buffs (spells that make your mages and troops tougher) and construction for enabling forging of items. There are some non-obvious things though - for instance Phoenix Power, which gives fire mages an extra level of fire magic in battle, is in Conjuration.

Although there are a bajillion spells, they are all quite distinct, and after a while you will get to know a few that you like. If you're Marignon, you'll get to like Fireball, Falling Fires (both evocation) and Phoenix Power.

[Fenris99]

How do I get gems?

[Amhazair]

First, you have a gem income from your capitol, this will generally be of a type your nation is strong in. Then, in each province there is a chance there will be 1-4 magical site, most of which will give you gems of some kind. A few of those sites you will discover when you conquer the province, but most will remain hidden until you search for them.

Searching can be done in two ways: first a mage can search the province he's in for sites in the paths he possesses. Sites come in levels from 1-4, and you search in the path and levels of your mage. So a Fire3 Astral3 mage will find most, but not all fire and astral sites, but will not uncover sites of other paths. Second, there are site-searching spells spread around the different research schools. There is one for each path of magic, and casting that spell (select the 'cast ritual spell' order on a mage in a lab province once you have the appropiate research, then select the spell in question from the list you get) will cost some gems, and will search a province of your choise for all sites in that path. There are also 2 spells that search for sites of multiple paths, but one is underwater only, and the other very expensive.

Thus getting more sites of the paths your nation is strong in is quite easy, as you will have both the mages to search manually, or to cast the remote search spells, and the gems needed to cast those spells (from the gem income of your capitol), but finding sites in other paths will be harder. There are several ways to do this, the easiest being designing what is known as a 'rainbow pretender' A rainbow pretender uses a pretender chassis with cheap access to new paths (take a look at most 'human' pretenders, they fit the bill perfectly), and will buy low levels (often 2, sometimes more) of magic in as many paths as possible. This is useful for finding sites, and if you take care when choosing your magic picks (this will come with experience) will allow you to forge many useful items your national mages might not be able to forge.