Creating a new leader for the campaign.

[♠Snorl4xxer♠]

I'm a little bit lost. I managed to *kinda* finangle through the stats and abilities, but now I'm stuck at the magic spheres totally lost on what spells any of them might have and thus... what to do.

[Draco]

You don't really know the exact spells of the respective spheres beforehand, at least if you play it for the first time. But it's recommendable to choose Life or Death spheres respectively, depending on if you're playing a good or evil race. Additionally, I always recommend lots of either Air or Earth spheres; I love their spells.

[Crawling Chaos]

If you pick 1 sphere of a certain element, it will give you access to 1 lvl spells of this element. 2 means 2 lvl spells, 3 means 3 lvl spells and 4 spheres means 4 lvl spells. Max lvl is lvl 4 so to have all spells of the particular element you need 4 spheres. By the end of the campaign you will have 7 spheres and you should have 4 spheres of 1 element and 3 spheres of another element because learning more than 3 different elements is not the best idea, it is more sufficient to have full access to 4 and 3 lvl spells of 2 elements.
Elements:
Earth - absolutely useless, most spells are very bad because they just change the landscape. At level 4 you can summon Earth elemental but it is not so good to be honest and also you can cast Earth mastery which gives defence to your units.
Water - good battle spells, for example ice ray and great hail. Healing Water spell is pretty good too. Very fun spell Flood but it is useful only if you play as lizards who can freely move across water.
Fire - many decent battle spells. At level 4 you can summon Fire elemental and it kinda sucks. Also you can cast Fire mastery and I don't really remember if it is good or bad spell.
Air - the best element in the game. The best battle spell on the very first level - Chain lightning. It attacks 4 enemies, deals decent damage and most importantly it can stun them for 1 turn and stunning an enemy in this game is really powerful ability. At level 4 you can summon Air elemental and it is super strong because it is immune to most attacks so 1 Air elemental can destroy the whole enemy party unless enemy party consists of priests or black dragons. Also you can cast Air mastery - it makes all your flying units move twice as fast and it works perfectly with Air elemental because Air elemental is a flying unit.
Life - decent element, good battle and buff spells, at lvl 4 you can sumonn very powerful Light dragon. Not as good as Air elemental but still very good. Life mastery kinda sucks.
Death - most spells are not very good. At lvl 4 you can summon very powerful Black Dragon. Death Mastery is as mediocre as Light Mastery.
So, for the first palythrough I would recommind picking 4 Air spheres and 3 spheres of any other element except for Earth.

[GreyHuntr]

Chain Lightning (Air) is extremely powerful. Even if you are out of range you can target the ground and still hit up to 3 other targets. Remedy (Life) and Water Healing (Water) are both very useful because they save you turns of resting.

[CHI LONG QUA]

http://arek.paranoya.info/aow/index.html

[BroadBread]

You can target the ground with Chain Lightning, and it jumps over?! Wow!

[Meridas]

Earth is not that bad, stone skin, entangle and gold rush are all good spells. Gold rush alone is enough reason to pick Earth at level 2. But I agree that higher level earth spells are meh, so I never pick earth at tier 4. Though its a bummer that it prevents you from getting air sphere.

Also gold and black dragons are much better than air elementals, since air elemental needs to strike to kill units and has very bad resistance and defence, along with low hp. Enchanted Weapons spells is easy to get and AI tends to spam that spell a lot. So Air elemental is not that great at destroying stacks. On the other hand, dragons have a lot of hp, decent defence and can deal with fair number of archers, and can safely use breath attack to deal with rest of melee units.

On the other hand, I heard Wind Walk (or was it Free movement from earth) allows ships to move across land so you can recruit galleon and other ships and use them in land combat, which turns them into much much stronger ballista.

Death mastery is great if you are not playing as good race, because it curses all good alignment units, and curse is the most powerful and annoying debuff in the game, since units cannot heal naturally. Also while death sphere combat spells are meh, they inflict cursed debuff.

Also if you happen to get one of your heroes killed, you need Life 3 or Death 3 at least in order to be able to resurrect your hero. Other spheres do not allow you to resurrect your dead heroes.

[Vantall]

Gold rush and freedom of movement are almost essential if you are playing on hardest. GR is great. Putting FOM on boats is amazing and broken, spam those dragon boats. It basically gives you the human tier 4 unit at the cost and installation of a tier 2. I also go heavy into earth usually because stone skin nice for having OP 10 stat heros, if you want to max everything and skills. Stoning is also a good combat spell and tremors can take down walls if you can cast it 2x. I dont go air for windwalk because its way more expensive and the utility spells of earth are better I think.

Otherwise, I usually go Life or Death depending on faction. Bless and holy champ are good, and the combat spells are good at every tier. I usually toss up between going 4 in life/death and earth, if only more life/death for summoning dragon.

[Vantall]

To add to what I said above. The utility spells of earth like raise and lower terrain are great. IDK why ppl say they are useless. I often use lower earth to flatten mountains around my cities so they have more farm income, this couples with gold rush to increase gold. You can also use the life spell rejuvinate to fix the lands around cities corrupted my alter of death or undead units that corrupt the land.

You can also use lower earth to get through narrow mountains that were impassable, or cut areas off with raise earth.

Brother JO, above, has good advice as well.

[Brieg Skåld]

Originally posted by Crawling Chaos:

If you pick 1 sphere of a certain element, it will give you access to 1 lvl spells of this element. 2 means 2 lvl spells, 3 means 3 lvl spells and 4 spheres means 4 lvl spells. Max lvl is lvl 4 so to have all spells of the particular element you need 4 spheres. By the end of the campaign you will have 7 spheres and you should have 4 spheres of 1 element and 3 spheres of another element because learning more than 3 different elements is not the best idea, it is more sufficient to have full access to 4 and 3 lvl spells of 2 elements.
Elements:
Earth - absolutely useless, most spells are very bad because they just change the landscape. At level 4 you can summon Earth elemental but it is not so good to be honest and also you can cast Earth mastery which gives defence to your units.
Water - good battle spells, for example ice ray and great hail. Healing Water spell is pretty good too. Very fun spell Flood but it is useful only if you play as lizards who can freely move across water.
Fire - many decent battle spells. At level 4 you can summon Fire elemental and it kinda sucks. Also you can cast Fire mastery and I don't really remember if it is good or bad spell.
Air - the best element in the game. The best battle spell on the very first level - Chain lightning. It attacks 4 enemies, deals decent damage and most importantly it can stun them for 1 turn and stunning an enemy in this game is really powerful ability. At level 4 you can summon Air elemental and it is super strong because it is immune to most attacks so 1 Air elemental can destroy the whole enemy party unless enemy party consists of priests or black dragons. Also you can cast Air mastery - it makes all your flying units move twice as fast and it works perfectly with Air elemental because Air elemental is a flying unit.
Life - decent element, good battle and buff spells, at lvl 4 you can sumonn very powerful Light dragon. Not as good as Air elemental but still very good. Life mastery kinda sucks.
Death - most spells are not very good. At lvl 4 you can summon very powerful Black Dragon. Death Mastery is as mediocre as Light Mastery.
So, for the first palythrough I would recommind picking 4 Air spheres and 3 spheres of any other element except for Earth.

There's absolutely no way an Air Elemental can be better or, even more, defeat a Gold Dragon. This dragon is strong enough to litteraly one-shot it and is also the most resilient of all the kinds of dragons. Judging magic spheres mean nothing without talking about the races they can be used with. High Men and Undead are way more powered than any other races due to their natural advantages.