Mages at home vs in the field?

[Sombre]

Obviously it's a balancing act. There's nothing to figure out other than gain experience of what works for you.

I will say that when researching you want to have strong targets and you may even wish to have targets that make use of the mages you are recruiting for research.

As pythium for instance, you might be hiring guys who can cast frozen heart in a big communion. So once you've got those spells, you would probably want to send out your communion and use it to grab resources/kill the enemy.

[chrispedersen]

Yah everyone has their own styles. I tend to not like nations that need mage support for expansion. I prefer to hti research targets, and then support an army with just a few mages casting big spells, (darkness, life after death, relief etc).. rather than battle field things like magma eruption, fireball etc.

[Belac]

Everyone else is under the same constraints, so one must accept that research gets a bit slower once you've researched good battle magic.

Also, most nations are such that their weaker mages are more cost-efficient researchers. So once you have multiple forts, recruit cheap mages from most of them and battle mages from a few. Use the money saved by not recruiting lots of super-expensive mages to put up more forts, and eventually your research catches up.