Q: Effective use of magic resources

[ExitJudas]

Finally my dominions 3 arrived by mail. ive played the demo a littel and dom 2 quite a bit. However I am still only an intermediate player. Right now, I'm trying to figure out the following, and could use some advice:

I usually try to maximise magic resources every turn from the beginning of the game. I do cost/benefit analysis on research points/per gold and buy one of these every turn, after i have my prophet and primary commanders running.

I then start researching whatever magic school i find fits best to my nation and pretender.

My question is this:

1. when and how to invest magic resources (i.e. turns of action by magic users) in what?

It seems a waste of time to deck out a normal commander in magic items, since (at least this was the case in dom 2). commanders in melee tend to die, routing your army, so you need to keep them out of the action anyway. When should you spent resources on creating magic items? who should get them and how can they use them? are the trinkets worth anything at all?

i can see that giving your commander a ranged weapon is smart, since he can then do damage from safety, but it just seems to me that armor and melee weapons are not really usefull for anything but pretenders or the rare supernatural commander with tons of hp.

is it worth it buying multiple commanders, and decking them out in magic items, and having them fight together alongside normal troops?

thanks!