Question: Overcoming the barrier to understand Dom 3?

[Executor]

Originally Posted by Yskonyn

I was under the impression that it was good practise to get as many magic paths as possible?

Yes, this is generally the case, but non blood nation don't normally try to get into blood, unless you find some indie mages but than that's just luck not careful planning.

To goal is to diversify as much as possible without losing or forsaking too much, which might get you killed. The general consensus for non blood nation is not to dabble in the blood arts unless there is a very good reason to. Like massive blood stone forging in vanilla with Agartha for example.
Non blood paths are easier to get going than blood, and rightly so. You don't need to invest mage time to collect gems like when you blood hunt. And the only one who can blood hunt (efficiently) with non blood nations is a pretender. Than you spend that little you hunted on more hunters and so on. So if you want a stable blood economy it's very hard to accomplish, but if you're aiming at a certain aspect, like massing just a single low cost item, than it's doable but it's still a gamble.
The cost in taking blood with a non blood nation far outweigh the gain.

As for Caelum magic, I will work under the assumption you're going EA, meaning you get A/S/W/E I think.
S1 mages can site search remotely, as can any of your A mages. Water is a little harder but once you get a few water bracelets from const 6 you can site search for W. For E you only need earth boots. That's W/S/A magic covered by national mages, E is covered with a E2 pretender so that leaves you with N/D/F to deal with.

Nature is usually one of the easiest paths to come by. Indie nature mages are everywhere. Site searching would be easy once you get a nature booster for those low level indies. You can take N2 on your pretender to forge boosters, trade one with a neighbor, rely on finding higher level N mages like enchantresses or just empower for 30 nature.

That leaves fire and death to go for the rest of gem types. You could get a higher level (3 or 4) pretender to manually site search or just leave it to in game chance. Not every type is a must.
A rainbow mage would work nice in this case. N2/F4/D3/E3 or something. You'd get a jump start on research and access to other gem types.

Cheers Yskonyn,
If you found a Dom PPP guide for Caelum with blood, that was most likely from Jacques Vidal (aka Nagot Gick Fel in these forums), I had the pleasure of getting my arse handed to me by his Blood Caelum in one of my first dominions game.

He was a top player so it's an excellent guide, but part of it no longer applies to Dom 3:

1)-IIRC, back in Dom PPP Caelum got 2 unrestricted random picks in its High Seraphs, so you could roll 1B or even 2B mages in every fort for 180 gold. Once the Dominions series evolved, Illwinter concluded that such unrestricted magical diversity in national mages resulted in all the nations playing more or less the same way by the end game, so the nations are nowadays restricted to picking their randoms from 4 or so types of magic, instead of all 8.

Also, back then scouts could be equipped with dousing rods to blood hunt, and at Blood4 you could summon Ice Devils for 30 slaves, and Fathers Illearth at Blood5 for 50 slaves IIRC, so getting into blood with a Fountain of Blood pretender was much easier than it is in Dom3, and much much easier than in Dom3 CBM.

2)-Back in Dom PPP the lesser elemental summoning in Conj3 did not require gems, and elemental mages would literally spam the spell.

Apart form the above, the rest of the guide should mostly apply nowadays.

Look at the strenghts of your nation: long range raiders, efficient patrollers, lightning resistant troops that synergize well with lightning spells, and the same with cold resistant troops & cold spells. Many troops carry magic weapons!

Your fliers have troop density issues, but your temple guards do not:
Do not underestimate your temple guards when it comes to holding the line, their ice armour gets better in cold3 provinces (their stats get much higher that what you see in the recruitment sheet), so name your pretender Prima Donna the Ice Queen and spread the cold love with a high dominion and liberal use of Wolven winter.
Add some winter wolves or undead with cold auras (ghosts, wights...) to your front line for some extra punch.

edit: I type slowly and did not see your last message: it's not Jacques then, but the advice looks similar.