So I'm actually kind of enjoying this game now. Finally got magic and forged items to do useful things for me... although not in either of my multiplayer games, heh heh. Started a new Sauromatia SP game, ended up building baby's first thug by giving some scouts skele spamulets and sending them to kill province defense. Not a good design but somehow worked. I'm thinking instead of doing that, I'll take the no-path soothsayers you have a 25% chance of getting, give each of them one handful of acorns and a skeleton amulet, and send them after poorly guarded border provinces. That's... about 10 expendable units for each of them, per battle that they survive, and its only ten gems invested. And technically some gold, but a mage with no paths isn't exactly worth money.
I finally got around to finding a combat magic I understand. A medium sized forward army got utterly wrecked by some Unmarked and a giant wolf SC pretender. Like... holy shit, 45 casualties, one enemy killed. So I panicked a bit, and gathered most of my forces into a 200 strong horde. I took 12 soothsayers and 4 Enarie and setup a mind burn spamming communion which actually worked quite nicely. Not that I ever got to use it on anything strong because instead of meeting me in the field the AI has been leaving small or medium armies in my path to die while taking back territory behind the army. Some asshole claimed a throne that filled the world with disease, so between that and the starvation there's been like 40 non-combat deaths. But in theory the mind burn should overcome the fact that my wimpy spears and arrows can't hurt the enemy giants.
I also got a rainbow great sage, who found all sorts of sweet gems for me. Unfortunately I can't use most of them, and his paths are too low to forge anything useful except for the Astral boosting ring. I guess the idea is since I'm focusing on Astral I'll be able to convert them on a 1:2 ratio and that combined with my solid research will let me do baleful star, wish, doom, all that fun stuff.
Not sure if I'll actually continue it, SP seems a bit too much work. The strategy I'm using in my SP game (not in the MP one, don't really have a strategy for that) involves moving around a bunch of cheap Soothsayers and independent commanders around. It all takes a while. I'm actually looking forward to my MP turns for once, so that's nice. I almost want to join another but for a while I was terrible at submitting turns and not having fun so I'll wait to see if this lasts.