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[E. Albright]

If you can cast RoS, you can forge a ring of floating or suchlike for your EQ caster...

[Shadowlord]

Yeah, probably. The game ended before I got around to trying that.

[Cruxador]

Rain of Stones is another possibility, but it's harder to not die to, and for some target armies a single casting may not kill anything (except the squishy mage who is casting it - for humans, even if wearing armor, especially). It also seems to only hit about half the squares on the battlefield, but against certain kinds of armies it's still effective at eliminating half their number with one casting.

Yeah, RoS is the go-to for a reason.

If you can cast RoS, you can forge a ring of floating or suchlike for your EQ caster...

It's generally easier to spam RoS casters, and harder to counter them. Paying more for something less effective is seldom your best option.

[Shadowlord]

In my case, Earthquake probably would have been a viable option, since I was playing MA Ulm and had Earth Blood Deep Well up (and was primarily fighting C'Tis and Asphodel). I was spending most of those gems on iron angels and a little equipment for them (but they were very good at wiping entire C'Tissian armies and even SCs).

[AlStar]

Well, the SC battle didn't go quite as planned:
I had an Arch Devil do a combat drop into a defensive army and cast fire storm. Unfortunately, even though I didn't tell him to be stingy with his gems, he decided to save 2 gems and go all the way up to 200 fatigue. This could have been fine, but a single water elemental ran ahead of the enemy army and, while my devil was still peacefully sleeping, killed him instantly.

End score: 1 Arch Devil (99 slaves) and 1 Devil (5 slaves) for 630 gold in enemy mages, 145 gold in commanders, and ~500 gold in chaff. Honestly, I'd call this a loss - especially if any of the gear my SC was wearing got salvaged.

[E. Albright]

Let's, ah, just say that definitely was a loss.

[sprinkled chariot]

Wait, you can decrease spell fatigue with dem gems?
How knowledge of path decreases fatigue for spell?
How far in research/ province capturing should I be in the end of first year to be able to compete in multiplayer?

[chaoticag]

Wait, you can decrease spell fatigue with dem gems?
How knowledge of path decreases fatigue for spell?
How far in research/ province capturing should I be in the end of first year to be able to compete in multiplayer?

Just gonna answer the first two questions here, sorta, gonna answer them both as one kind of answer here. Lemme first get the basic idea of spellcasting fatigue down from the wiki.

Battlefield spells cost a certain amount of Fatigue. Each spell has a listed fatigue cost which a caster incurs when casting that spell. For each skill level in the required path that the mage exceeds the minimum, he incurs 1 / (1 + (mage skill – minimum skill) of the listed spell fatigue. In other words, having an extra skill level means the mage suffers only ½ fatigue, two extra skill levels means he suffers only 1/3 as much, three extra is ¼, and so forth.

So there you go. Wait, still need to explain how gems reduce fatigue. So the trick about gems is you can use one gem to give yourself a one path boost once per turn. So both are intimately tied here.

As for the third question, the province answer is straightforward, more than your fair share. The research question is a bit tricky, as it depends on what nation you're playing and what spells you have access to. In general, someone like Marignon would want to hit evocation 3 sometime in the first year since their mages make decent leaders and can toss fireballs. Your research is effectively useless if you're not making use out of it though, so knowing when a good time it is to commit mages to wars and expansions makes it more tricky. No real straightforward answer here.

[Frumple]

Though to expand a little on the province question, the general rule of thumb is averaging one province per turn, up until you can no longer expand without attacking someone (and possibly then, too ). If you're below that level, it's relatively likely you're going to have trouble, especially compared to everyone else that isn't.

Naturally, more than one per turn is better, but that's usually cited as your minimum.

All that said, though, if you're playing an entry level Dom4 MP game, you may not exactly need to be that efficient, heh.

[Delta Foxtrot]

How far in research/ province capturing should I be in the end of first year to be able to compete in multiplayer?

It depends. Research really depends, some nations rely on early research more than others. It's easy to catch up in RP if you have four times as many forts as the other guy.

Expansion depends. What's good for R'lyeh is pitiful for Pangaea. But several per turn is good. 1 per turn would be minimum. Less than 1 per turn is reality in low skill matches.

[Shadowlord]

My starting strategy generally goes like this:

On the first turn, my starting army usually sits in my home province and I recruit troops to add to it in preparation for sending it out on turn 2. Some nations have really strong starter armies and may be safe to launch attacks with, others are really weak and risky to send out on turn 1. What I recruit also depends on the nation. If the nation lacks holy-3 priests, I usually prophetize my starting commander on the first turn as well. Otherwise, I sometimes go without a prophet until I recruit an H3, since prophetizing an H3 results in an H4 prophet.

After turn 1 I try to expand as fast as possible, which means raising new armies to increase my expansion rate (and recruiting reinforcements if I'm losing troops, and sending them to the army instead of sending the army back), watching battles and then adjusting my army formation, composition, and orders to try to optimize their performance, capturing farmlands to increase my income to increase my ability to build armies, building palisades in places where they can get lots of resources (e.g. adjacent to multiple forest and/or mountain provinces) to increase my army building rate, and recruiting and sending out scouts to find out where the other nations are (generally recruiting them every turn on repeat from one or two provinces).

But I also try to balance that with increasing my research rate by recruiting mages as often as possible from as many forts/palisades as possible, with site-searching once I have a decent research rate, and with scout-recruitment (I prefer recruiting non-fort scouts, if possible).

Once I start running into other players, my army composition tends to change - or I build border forts - since in EA and MA you can roll over indies with a fairly weak army, and other players' armies can be considerably tougher, especially if your troops are weak and theirs are badass (so you rely later on magic or summons, or blessed troops that you recruit slowly over a large number of turns).

Diplomacy also comes into play in most multiplayer games I've played (generally as early as possible). You don't want to end up being the guy that everyone gangs up on - unless you can actually take them all on at once.

[ThtblovesDF]

Sooo does Gift of Health still give income increase like in dom4? Google couldn't answer this question : / - any %?

[Frumple]

You're... thinking of the wrong global. GoH is +health, slower aging, and affliction healing. You're thinking of Gift of Nature's Bounty, which is the +income one.

[ThtblovesDF]

My bad.

The new transformation seems to have a fairly high chance to feeblemind casters and with the cost of 8 gems, should I just not cast it anymore? Even on pans?

[AlStar]

My bad.

The new transformation seems to have a fairly high chance to feeblemind casters and with the cost of 8 gems, should I just not cast it anymore? Even on pans?

For what it's worth, you might've just gotten unlucky - from what I've read, it's only about a 15% chance for a bad result.

I've had only limited experience with the spell myself (maybe a handful of casts), but haven't ever gotten a feeblemind result.