For the very first game, I roll this guy. He starts with 2 Sorcery books, 6 Death books and 1 Life book. Books determine how many spells the wizard starts with, as well as the spells they can access through research. As you can see, picking so many Death books also allows choosing which spells to start with, as well as which spells get guaranteed in the next tier. The default selection here is good enough, so I don't mess with it; I'll bring up what the spells do as I (or an enemy wizard/unit) use them.
Picking 2 Sorcery books allows choosing exactly one (1) Common spell from the Sorcery realm. While seemingly measly, it can still be fairly powerful. I pick Resist Magic to offset the bad resistance of Death's summons.
1 Life book doesn't offer any choice, but does add some Common Life spells for research. Considering that Life's Common spells are among the strongest Common spells around, this isn't really a bad thing.
Finally, let's look at the words on the bottom. These represent the wizard's traits, which offer unique benefits outside of their spells. They can be obtained at the cost of some books, and indeed, some powerful wizard builds sacrifice a bunch of books to rely on stacking the right traits.
Anyway, Channeler makes this wizard hurl spells for the same mana cost, regardless of how far the battle is from his capital. Normally, wizards pay a markup based on distance, which goes up to three times the original cost for distant fights! Naturally, this makes participating in distant battles more viable, and skirmishing more effective. This is actually considered one of the most powerful traits, and the game even acknowledges its power by having it cost 2 books!
Benefactor, on the other hand, is an interesting trait. It makes heroes and mercenaries show up for hire more often, and buffs any heroes under the wizard's hire. It also makes artifact merchants show up more often. Artifacts, to put it simply, are heroes' equipment, worn to boost their stats and grant them magical powers. Basically this is a very hero centric retort. I will try to use some of them in this playthrough, but they are a bit fickle by nature, and circumstances may work against them.
That being done, I pick a color, and let the game roll the wizard's capital's race. It picks Orcs, which, contrary to what most fantasy would have you believe, are just a jack of all trades, excelling at nothing, but not being poor at anything either. They're meant to be a "beginner" race, letting new players learn the nuances of city building and regular units with hands on experience. As such, they're a great fit for this game.
The empire starts pretty small, with just a capital, two spearmen, and two settlers. The capital itself is modest, supplying 7 gold and 16 food. Of the latter, each 1000 units of population, represented by the figures of orcish figures near the top, eats 2 food, and the four units currently available eat 1 food each, leaving only 2 food as surplus. Gold can be stockpiled, but food can't be. Presumably it rots when left for too long, and storage facilities can only do so much.
The capital also supplies labor and power. Labor simply depicts the amount of labor that gets utilized for any productive activities, like making buildings or units, and power is what fuels your wizard's spells, research and casting skill. The labor here comes mainly from the populace, obviously, and the power comes from the wizard's tower, which is part of every capital.
Now, let's look at how the power is distributed. As you can see, there's 20 whole power, which is roughly equally split between researching new spells, generating mana for spellcasting, and improving spellcasting potency to be able to cast more spells quicker. Right now, our power is too pathetic to support all of them at once, and being a Death heavy wizard means focusing on summons, which, well, need to be summoned via their respective spells, so I'll be channeling all of the power to mana production for now.
The Alchemy button lets you turn mana to gold, or vice versa. It's a pretty nifty and important feature, considering how much spellcasting is involved in this game, and makes it so that a strong "mundane" economy can support a wizard pretty well. Conversions have a 2:1 rate, so a fair amount of resources do get "lost" in the process, but mana is usually more important than gold, and with proper planning it's not too hard to raise a good amount of it. I convert my measly 80 pieces of gold into 40 mana to get my spellcasting going.
Here's our first glorious army - two Ghouls! 😆Ghouls are pretty strong creatures actually, with decent ranged and melee attacks, a whole slew of immunities, and, most importantly, the ability to turn their victims undead. Their major weakpoints are their speed, their low resistance (which does become a problem against the things they're not immune to), and their relatively high casting cost. It's hard to amass them, but if you can manage it, they're pretty powerful early on.
Their first fight is against a singular ghost in a ruined temple. I know, not very exciting. But it does give them an opportunity to destroy the lair before it can become a threat to the empire by spawning monsters, and also lets them pilfer its loot for the great glory of their wizard! Lol. Lairs often have substantial rewards and can be undermined with the right tricks for little expense, making them quite profitable. Besides, you want to take them anyway, why risk having monsters knock down the cities you worked so hard to build?
Speaking of! The capital is coming nicely, having built a marketplace for more money, a library for more research, a dock for the production of ships and also food, and now stables for cavalry and some additional productivity. Cavalry are rather brittle units, but they have amazing movement clearance, allowing them to work excellently as scouts and skirmishers. Not only that, they also strike first, meaning that, as long as they can do enough damage to kill their target, they will escape getting hit by a counterattack.
This is a pretty powerful ability, actually, as attacks and counterattacks normally are delivered at the same time, meaning most melee fighters are going to take some damage, no matter what. That being said, their frailty and poor stats mean that they aren't going to see much fighting, at least not in this playthrough.
It doesn't take long for them to find a inhabitation outside the empire. This is a small, sleepy village of Gnolls. With two ordinary swordsmen guarding it, it's not exactly a hard conquest, and the ghouls conveniently turn them to our side! Gnolls are a pretty good find though, excelling at creating strong military units which can deal oodles of damage. The defenses on them are a bit lackluster, and they are poor economically, but the capital, and later, the empire can easily make up for that.
Speaking of which, the two starting settlers have been settled, and have grown into small villages. Of course, they're not very productive, having very few people and next to no infrastructure, but with time, this will change.
Let's end this with a look at our first hero. He's an archer with healing spells who costs no money, grants 10 gold per turn, negates the penalties of movement tiles in the stack he's on, and raises the resistance of all units in his stack! This is pretty good, and a good sign of what you can expect from later heroes - he's actually one of the weakest heroes you can hire! That being said, he showed up this early only because of my wizard's Benefactor trait - normally heroes are extremely finicky about even showing up! I hire him because of course. Why wouldn't you?!
Alright, that's enough for the first session. A lot of time had to go into explaining the mechanics, and this early on you usually don't get to meet other wizards or fight memorable battles. But not to worry, things will become more interesting, and very soon. See you then!
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