Well rune magic is not very different from the others. There are damage spells in it, there are spells that give you rage and mana, spells that decrease duration of negative effects from your units. It's an interesting magic school, it can even provide you lots of extra gold. You have to test it yourself to see exactly how it is though.

Wait... what ? I'm a lvl29 Soothsayer and my int is 24... am I missing something ? How the hell did you get it this high ? I want this much int too...

- Permanent boosts from altars.
- Equipment (Almost all of my equipment slots have an intellect-boosting item)
- Spirit and Magic Talents
- medals

My Soothsayer has 44 Intellect.

I believe only 16 of my Intellect is from learning talents. I have about 13 from my equipment (which is pretty low). The other 15 are apparently from altars, shrines, and medals.

My Skald has 28 Int at Level 28. It's not that hard if you explore.

Dont forget to put points into Scouting and Learning from Mind Tree, you get +6 int from there too. Besides that they are useful skills to have anyways. I see Nevar already mentioned Spirit Talents but I wanted to be more specific. :)

I fully explore everything, I even try to dig in every single pixel of the map, I do have both scouting and learning at max, and I do have most medals maxed. Is it possible I had horrible luck with shrines ? Because I remember only a few granting me int. My def and attack is almost the same as my int (18 and 19 respectively) so... maybe ? I don't know, but if so this is pretty frustrating.

It's possible, why not? Some games have more goodies than others. You might have rolled a "lower-intelect" game. But don't be discouraged, I'm pretty sure the game can be won even in the worst bad luck possible situation :)

Odd. Do you have a lot of attack and defense items? My attack and defense are both at 9, WITH equipment on. With mages, I find that INT is just way better, especially if you start summoning Ancient Phoenixes/Books of Evil.

I have only 2 items on me that increase defense or attack. So that proves that I'm really unlucky in my run, dammit! Now I'm considering a reset. While it's certainly doable I'd love to have that extra 20 int instead...

should be able to get like 60 int or higher

at least in KB:Ap that was pretty much easy doable:D

I am almost done with game 0 losses so far. Trick is to install the mod for different units on starting zone :] Paladins and rune mages(think they are called just woke up).

You can say its cheating to use other units other then Vikings but I disagree totally. I play video games for choice's not fixed boring character at start.

All you have to do is make sure you fight stuff that is deadly and it makes the game really fun and sometimes a challenge. But no matter the units this game needs a super impossible mode even if you just use vikings at start.