[taltamir]

level 19 mage.
Started out going for combat damage, but later on switched to much more powerful battlefield control.
I got chaos3, order3, distortion3, destroyer1, higher magic2, nighttime operations 3. alchemy3. and well, a bunch of prerequisits...

Int is only 16, no wife, equipped items: +5 int archmage staff, +2def +1 attack boots, +10% experience tome, +2def lvl1-3 +5def lvl4-5 shield, anga's ruby (replaced my snake kings ring when i got dryads). some other items.

I abandoned my high damage ideals for leadership and % based spells, phantom, magic spring, mass bless, mass weaken, etc etc. And of course, the lovely resurrect, bringing everyone back to life. I was stuck with fireball from the begining of the game, I only got geyser recently and i didn't bother upgrading it (saved, upgraded, saw damage output, loaded and left it at level1), never saw lightening, ice snakes, armaggedon, or whatever. With nothing but fireball, at around level 10 it was simply not enough.
The battle mage dependancy on finding new more powerful spells, and then using enough crystal to level them to lvl3, and sinking a bunch of runes into low return skills... are hugely problematic. I can already defeat anything with 0 losses (provided that they are not many levels above me), any new distortion/order spell is just gravy. If I could do it all over again, I would skip chaos magic.

Here is an example tactic:
have int15+
have dryads/mother plant/whatever create summon stacks for you. Send them towards the enemy, the enemy is now engaging them. make sure they are low initiative summons. Wait with a unit. When the waiting unit is up again, use its turn to cast a level 3 magic spring (5 mana, 6 actions duration due to +1 from int) on one of the summoned. skip move on that unit, since it waited, its immidiately a new turn, use level 3 magic spring on the other summon, cast acid rain on both of them and the nearby enemies. Before the turn is over each magic spring should produce 5 mana 6 times, so 60 mana return on your 10 mana investment. The enemies are also not attacking you, since the are all surrounding the summons and hitting them. This gives you some time to use that 60 mana to resurrect as needed, or create some phantoms to hit the enemy with.

My biggest problem with attack magic... when it is the end of battle, you need to spend many turns farming mana to resurrect your units, when you finish doing that, you will just pop off the last enemy units with an archer and end battle, no need for chaos magic.
When it is the begining of battle and you have a bunch of mana. YOU COULD use an attack spell, but the enemy has stacks of 1000 pixies / 500 spiders / 100 griffins / whatever... And they often have LOTS of move action. And they have so much HP that your fireball spell is nothing to them, and the enemy has 5-10 stacks, AND the enemy has archers who will decimate your forces.. the first priority in battle then is to waste most of your mana on phantoms/summons/control to put something over in the enemy camp that holds the attention of ALL enemy stacks, all 5-10 of them, and then whittle them down with archers as you do so.
When it is the middle of battle, you have to balance farming mana with phantom/summon to continue holding enemy attention.

I cant wait to get the demon wife. 2 weapon slots will take my second archmage staff +5 int and my archdruid staff +4 int, as well as my ring of +3 int. that will put me very close to the magic 30 int needed for spells to last 1 turn longer.