New player seeks advice about playing a mage and the tactics for no loss

[Wendigo]

Here's a couple of strategies I found helpful in my normal mage game:

- Get the first stone from the cave in Bolo. You don't need to fight any battles to acquire it. Simply kite the boss away from the chest. Turning in the stone gets you access to Paladins on Debir and they help a lot.

- There's two quests on Rusty that don't require any fighting. The first one is the smuggler quest acquired in Scarlet; the second is the message in a bottle one from the pirate on the beach in Rusty. Both give you decent EXP at that stage of the game and thus much needed leadership.

- Work on that trap medal and use your dragon to knock enemy stacks into traps. Traps can really work wonders in the early stages of a mage game.

- As soon as your leadership allows for the 50 pirates etc. quest on Rusty, do it, get the key for the orc cave and pick up the green dragon in there. Again, no fighting necessary.

- Glory 3 is a waste of perfectly good runes in my opinion. Glory 1 is more than enough if you have a decent battle strategy and do the above as soon as possible. You might want to restart your game anyway; due to the whole random system, some games can be quite frustrating in the early stages with mobs that are tough to beat and few decent creatures to recruit.

- Remember that Inquisitors can spam rage with their holy whatever ability. Use it and use that dragon as much as possible. As a mage you lack rage in the early part of the game, so don't improve the important dragon skills to the point where you can only use them every four rounds. 100 damage every round (plus knocking back stacks) beats 400 damage every 4 rounds.