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Well, I just got through the game. As it turns out, it's actually quite winnable even without using half the spells in the game. I had to cheat a little at end there, since for some reason no one seem to want to teach me heal, even though I got it in a previous game easily enough. Really, there are only maybe two or three spells that I would consider essential and they're all druid ones.

Overall, I'm not sure I'd consider this game a strategy game, or if it is, then it's not very good one. Most of the strategy bits are in the first 2-3 years of the game when your tribe consists of only a handful of champions, and trying and expand/explore while keeping an eye on neighbouring tribes. What makes it different from the initial phases of other games like Civ or Master of Magic, though, and why it's so difficult for new players, is that the game puts far less emphasis on territorial expansion. The only real reason to ever take and hold territory in this game is Prestige, which you need to convince champions and other tribes to join you. Resources (especially food) are practically limitless in almost every province in this game, and is more a factor of how many champions you have than how much land occupy. In fact, having too many provinces only make it more likely that your neighbours will attack you.

The only things in this game that actually matter in CT are your champions. If you don't have enough of them, it doesn't matter how much resource/culture/power/prestige you have. Once you figure this out, the game doesn't really offer much of a challenge. Incidentally, Rodrudan (3 starting champions, awful positioning) and Falias (4 champs, no warriors!) are probably tied for the hardest playable tribe in the game. How the Rodrudans survived until the very end in my game and even captured one of the neighbouring tribes, I will never know. My guess is they managed to get some high level travelling champions to join them early on, since CPU seem to have much easier time convincing them. I had one tribe where the highest level champion was lvl 14 when everyone else in the tribe was around 9 or 10.

Anyways, once you manage to usurp a couple of neighbouring tribes and absorb their champions into your ranks, your tribe just basically steamroll over everyone else. At this point it's not even worth trying to micromanage your provinces anymore. Unfortunately, in my game I had about half my provinces built up to Lvl 47 Culture and Power by Year 8 and mass produced items and carefully distributed them so that all my champions were armed to the teeth only to realize you were only allowed 7 champions to fight the Fomors! All that time micromanaging every single one of my 100+ champions, only to have them sit at home twiddling their thumbs during the apocalyptic battle. Wonderful.

Oh and another thing: Culture and Power are worthless. Of the two, Power is the only one that even remotely matters and even then, soldiers aren't worth a damn in battle, and chances are, if your champion have a decent Charm, he will get the maximum 100 soldiers that they're allowed anyways. You're better off sending your champions off to play hurling instead of wasting time building up your infrastructure. LOL

And speaking of horribly skewed priorities in CT: you're actually penalized for finishing the game too early. The thing is, the Fomors' forces will always remain the same throughout the game. Whereas, your champions gradually get stronger over time as they get experience and learn new skills (well, okay, just Might). Furthermore, the Fomors will never attack until all the tribes have been unified, so you're actually better off leaving one tribe alive until all your best champions have attained the maximum level before going in to finish them off. At Year 8, it took me 3-5 retries before I could beat either of the final battles, and it would have been much worse if I didn't somehow manage to snag a level 14 druid from one of the tribes.

If you go to your ruler's Citadel, you can click on Delegate and have the CPU control some of your provinces. Only works if your ruler is in the province though.

Actually, Balor won't attack the province you're in, just some random province in the north. In fact, you can't select the champions in the attacked province, because Balor apparently incinerates them all along with the province. Do NOT keep any of your champions in any of the coastal provinces in the north if you intend to use them during the final assaultz.

Except he doesn't have Heroism, which affects both Melee and Duels (or so the game says). I only ever use him for swordsmithing. Then again, he's only lvl 8 in my game.