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Originally posted by Guest@Feb 22 2006, 12:32 AM

My favorite setup is to choose at least 2 books from life, chaos, sorcery, then artificer and runemaster.* With this combination, you can make artifacts, then burn them into mana for twice what they cost you.* A +1 damage sword costs 38 mana to create, and gives you 75 mana when you convert it.

This gives you two advantages:
1. You get as much mana as you have skill every turn. This gets even better when you have heros with spell casting ability, who increase your effective skill for overland spells.
2. You can deck out your heros with superior artifacts.

For the noobs here, point 1, refers to the 'cheat' where the combo of runemaster +arifier allows you to make an artifact for X, and get back effectively 2x on breaking it.

A good thing to do at the start of the game, when you don't need to cast many spells You can start bootstrapping your mana upwards, by first building cheap sword+1, break it to get the mana, then repeat with a more expensive item, and so on. Of course, you could just keep building cheap stuff, but I find it takes a lot to micromanage. On the negative side, making expensive stuff that you don't intend to use and tie up your spell casting ability.

After my initial selection, you still have three slots to use. You can:
1. add 3 chaos books. This allows you to make weapons with lightning ability, which halves your target armor. Shuri with a lightning bow easily takes out sky drakes.
2. Add 3 life books. You can create armor with invulnerability. This makes your heros very tough, especially in the early going. An Invulnerable Brax will take out all neutral towns, and most light to medium defended nodes.
3. Start on myrror. Always a good thing, gives you more time to create those artifacts, better nodes and ruins to attack, and more mana.

Or, get 3 more socery books. So you can get access to magic immunity+ guardian wind.

Arm your heroes with archery or ranged magical attacks with misc items that provides flight.magic immunity,guardian winds and you can spend 99% of each battle happily shooting at enemy wizards troops inside cities (not nodes or ruins) without any risk.

They seldom have flying units, except for summons, and most of them like shadow demons, demon lords don't attempt to close for combat.

I actually won at impossible using this combo.