[Crafty]

Like the OP, i have being playing SP only but in EA. I've tried maybe about 8+ nations so far.

Yeah, personally I find the battlefield magic relatively weak , until level 4-5. Before that it's mostly use for bluffing SC's and thugs and site searching spells.

So early game most of the mages i recruit are for researching, but by the time i get good spells most of my mages are behind the line and it takes heck a lot of effort to get them to the front lines (unless they have air 3 for cloud trapezie).

It's kind of irriating like with forging stuff and recruiting capital only troops but at least for those i can use the extra commanders as mules...

But it sure is fun watching the mages cast all the flame based spells - flame bolt,fire blast fireball, flame erruption, Flare,Falling fires etc though to be honest
a lot of them look pretty similar to me.

I suppose there is an art to it by looking at different AOE, and range since the damage all look the same (plus minus 1)

And i suppose the larger the AOE the better (after damaage)

I figured out that there is no point in scripting very short range spells like Flame erruption as the first or second turn, cos the enemy won't be close enough....

Though with ranges 25 and up to 40, don't seem to make any difference to me...