It's not 'cheating' anymore than anything else is in single player. But you aren't going to impress anyone by using an infinite resurrection combo starting from the first island :P. The point though, is that you don't have to impress anyone. If you enjoy it, that's fine.

I'd only reset if you really want to play a mage focused on damage spells. Int is not that important for buffs and other stuff (maybe some of the summoning spells). I would be surprised if the difference in altars was that huge, and you can always get the medals and talents. The biggest difference may be in items, and I think you get at least one +5int ring fixed (the snake ring). With that, my lvl27 (or so) soothsayer has 29 intellect iirc, and I do not have great incentives to raise it right now (no powerful damage spells except blizzard, no powerful summon spells except ice ball). I can get 10 more intellect from talents, I believe.

Your ipse dixit means nothing. Manipulating a game's rules from outside of the game world is cheating. It is irrelevant if a game is single player or multiplayer. Cheating doesn't apply only to multiplayer games.

REAL summoned creatures (Book of Evil, Ancient Phoenix, and Ice Ball) benefit tremendously from Intellect. I'm talking units capable of fighting stacks with double your leadership. For the rest, it just adds leadership to the summons, which is meh.

The problem with not having high intellect with a mage is that you will be forced to rely on buffs/debuffs to help your weaker-than-average army. You'd basically be playing like a Skald with half the army size. I.E. you'd be handicapping yourself.

Still, like I mentioned, my own Skald has 28 Intellect, with a lot of that from altars. I can't imagine the difference in altars is huge, either.

I just tried lvl3 ancient Phoenix..wow..just wow
roughly 400-700 dmg, 2.3k life, close to 200 atk and def, this is what I got with 37 intell, and I don't even have point in creation yet.


I got to Greenwort with my mage a bit early, at level 14. This summon gonna make my mage's life at Greenwort so much easier.

Your final Ancient Phoenix will have starts that are off the charts. No literally, the attack is so high, that you can't see the minimum damage.

I think mine was ~700-1400 damage? ~300 attack/defense, ~4100 HP.

If you start with Greasy Mist, you can do ~6K dmg per hit (high crit chance) to 3 stacks, and chance to retaliate (if it survives the counter attacks) all for 35 mana.

Very good tank + damage combo until you have super nuke spells.

Nevermind it can interrupt most enemies due to high initiative (you can summon him after your interdictor unit has moved half way through the map or 1/3 in).

Some spells consume runes on the units you cast them on, either one specific (Gift, Negation etc) or several out of all the runes available (Chargers, Rune Chain). But there is also a bunch of spells (especially damage spells) which aren't anything special but are ice-themed such as Blizzard and Frost Snake (which was a Destruction spell previously).

Out of curiosity I used code to max out my skill trees and compared the lvl 3 Ancient Phoenix with lvl 3 Book of Evil at 53 intell. BoE has some insane number of attack and defense, like 800ish, and over 9k life. But AF comes out on top with far better initiative, speed, AOE attack and rebirth. Not to mention the amazing synergy with other spells.

@goldenpath
Real problem here is that if enemy have defense 1 , and you have attack 61 you make 300% dmg to it. But if enemy have 1 defense and you have as mentioned 800 attack you still do 300% dmg to it when hit. So att over 150 is pure waste.
Better look for dmg of summon, hp, initiative and so on.

Damage spells doesn't scale enough? Personally I find they are among the few spells that are actually useful except maybe stoneskin and trap. I have Rune Magic lvl 3 and maxed Sonic Boom. It does tons of damage to the whole army, around 3000 with an int of 42. Also, try to get Trapper III as soon as possible. I start with three traps at 3000-4000 damage every fight and it also stops the enemy from advancing. I didn't bother leveling up Chaos magic because you don't need to since Fear works at lvl 1 and Fireball isn't that good. In AP there was a godly spell called Geyser but I don't know which school it belongs to. You could kill half the opponents army with it. If it's Chaos Magic then I suppose it would be worth investing in after you get that spell. For me it's this order: Rune > Distortion > Order > Chaos.

My tips is to get Higher Magic as soon as possible, cast a small spell first and then a big nuke. General tips are always keep your distance to strong units until you have weakened them enough. CC archers or attack them first with ranged attacks, since you can't control what they will attack. You can also use a spell called Target on a tank if the enemy isn't undead. Get some dragons, paladins and a unit that can summon a tanking troop. Ice Dragons are exceptional but Dryads or Engineers are good too.

I am a mage lvl 28 on hard btw.