Magic Diversity

[ComTrav]

I'm still relatively new to Dominions, and I wanted to see what the community's opinion was on which schools are the best to expand into. There's a lot of threads mentioning to expand a nation's national diversity (usually through your pretender) but it would be useful to me to talk about which schools are easiest/best to expand into. (Obviously, this is partly dependant on your country, as some nations already have very good magic diversity; in SP EA Tie'n Ch'i I managed to summon all four Elemental Royalty.)

Nature and Death seem to both be at the top of the list, as they both have lots of summonable mages and have at least one booster that's easy to forge. Nature is probably more common on indy mages than anything else and has good globals. A little death can very useful for skull mentors, and they can have excellent summoned thugs.

I had a really hard time getting into fire (as MA C'tis, even though I had a ton of gems from Marignon's capital). There's some decent forged items, but hardly any summons, the boosters required high or cross-paths to forge, and besides Flaming Arrows there's not much in the way of buffs. Fire seems to me to be mostly about the blow-stuff-up school, and unless you can already recruit a bunch of decent-path Fire mages its tough to get going.

Earth/Water/Air seem in between (although the 'intermediate' summonable air mage is from Nature) with lots of specialized utility spells. Earth and Water have the advantage of easier boosters. Wind Guide can be a big advantage to a country that wouldn't normally get it (remember, it helps Mages' precision, too) and Arrow Fend can be helpful in the right circumstances. You can get into Air from nature with Faerie Queen, Hidden in Snow gives Death/Water access to Earth (works for LA Atlantis, and although its totally unthematic for MA C'tis, it's doable--it sounded like the patch just changed the impact of the spell based on turmoil/luck, not temp)

I really haven't had a lot of experience with Astral (I've yet to play a full SP game with a 'big astral' nation), but getting Luck/Ethereal from items is huge, and astral window can be nice, too.

Blood is of course an entirely different beast, I imagine now one bothers with it if they don't plan on it.

[sector24]

Astral, Blood, and Death are the only paths with spells going all the way up to level 9. They are also generally the most powerful end-game paths with things like Wish, Tartarian Gate, and Bind Demon Lord.

Air and Fire are tough to break into, so they're probably lowest on the priority list of magical diversity. If you have them, great. If not, their usefulness is limited to mostly forging. You might have one or two units supporting important armies, but you'll never have them en masse.

The other paths are somewhere in between. They all have useful spells, but you never need a mage higher than level 6 to cast anything. So when you account for boosters, it's not too hard to "max out" on them.

I would say if you don't have natural access to Astral, Death or Blood, those should be your first priority. Sometimes blood is not an option. Second for me is Earth and Nature. Earth for forging, and I just like Nature. Water, Air, and Fire are my lowest priorities, but having Air magic on an awake SC pretender is a big boon.

[vfb]

I think this may be of some help to you, it's sector24's guide to diversification:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=575981

The only thing I think it doesn't cover is diversification through indy mage recruiting as a result of site searching/indy pop types.

[Velusion]

For generic MP play when it comes to spell castings (battle and ritual) I would say these paths are the most desirable in this order (best > worst):

Astral
Death
Blood*
Earth
Nature
Air
Fire
Water

*Blood only applies if you have access to blood mages - otherwise you usually don't worry about it.