ShaperV
Experienced.
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Some answers, explanations and clarifications:
Attacking Threats
Unfortunately the bandits, beastmen and pirates all operate from hiding, so you can't just march out and attack them with your forces. Once you decide to take action you'll need to assign some of your forces an action like Hunt Threat (Bandits) or Hunt Threat (Beastmen). Then they'll spend the turn searching for the designated enemy (odds of success are a lot higher if the group includes rangers and/or Dita). Depending on what they find they'll either attack (if they think they can win) or report what they find so you can respond appropriately.
Diplomacy Mechanics
Skills are intended to be pretty broad in this game, so Diplomacy can be used for pretty much anything an experienced ambassador might do - negotiate deals, detect lies, make a good impression, convey misleading (or accurate) impressions, etc. A high skill will let you succeed against more skilled (or more obstinate) opponents, or achieve a higher level of success against easy ones. Right now Dominic has gone from (Charm 3 + Diplomacy 0) = 3 (decent, but not quite on a professional level) to (Charm 4 + Diplomacy 1) = 5, which is better than most skilled professionals.
Healing
While you aren't going to be instantly restoring people to full health like a computer RPG healer, even relatively simple healing spells can still be quite important. They can stabilize a dying character, counteract magical curses (which are one of the more common forms of combat magic), stave off environmental effects like hypothermia and diagnose problems caused by disease or poison. Also, healing spells let wounded characters recover in cinematic time (i.e. days to weeks) instead of realistic time (weeks, months or possibly never).
Spell Progression
One thing I think still needs clarification is how to get to high-powered spells. You may have noticed that every research action gets you some kind of improvement in what you can do with your magic, but what may not be clear is that you can gt more powerful effects by continuing to work on the same thing. For instance, you could try making your burst of strength have a duration, then make it work on others, then make a group version, then try for an AoE version, then maybe a stackable or higher-intensity effect, and so on. You can keep doing this until you hit a limit imposed by either your Soul (which controls how big and/or intense an effect can be) or your skill (which controls what effects you can create, and how many modifiers you can stack onto the basic version).
So again you have a playstyle choice. You can research lots of useful little utility effects fairly quickly, and each of them will be a simple spell that you can spam frequently even with your current Soul. Or you can spend multiple actions working up a really powerful version of one effect, but then you won't have as much flexibility and you'll be more prone to running low on energy if you try to spam it.
Spending
Sadly, the primitive state of Borjeria's medieval economy means that you can't spend money until after you collect it. If you controlled a town big enough to have local moneylenders I might give you some flexibility on that, but since you don't everything is on a 'collect the money the turn before you spend it' basis.
Splitting vs Maximizing Stats
Dominic started out with sufficiently high stats that in the long run you should become extremely powerful no matter what route you take - having 3 in everything plus three sorceries and three actions per turn makes him pretty broken compared to most NPCs, and there are several different ways you can eventually end up stacking permanent buffs on top of that. So this isn't a question of whether you can build a powerful character, but rather of which road you want to take to get there.
Raising one attribute to 5 would allow you to get into superhuman levels of ability with sufficient training, but getting the full benefit will also require focusing a lot of training time into building up the skills based on that attribute. Taking a pair of 4s instead will give you a lot more flexibility, but your skills will max out at a level that's less extreme (4+4=8, instead of 5+5=10). Either approach will work just fine with intelligent play, they'll just require different problem-solving approaches.
Attacking Threats
Unfortunately the bandits, beastmen and pirates all operate from hiding, so you can't just march out and attack them with your forces. Once you decide to take action you'll need to assign some of your forces an action like Hunt Threat (Bandits) or Hunt Threat (Beastmen). Then they'll spend the turn searching for the designated enemy (odds of success are a lot higher if the group includes rangers and/or Dita). Depending on what they find they'll either attack (if they think they can win) or report what they find so you can respond appropriately.
Diplomacy Mechanics
Skills are intended to be pretty broad in this game, so Diplomacy can be used for pretty much anything an experienced ambassador might do - negotiate deals, detect lies, make a good impression, convey misleading (or accurate) impressions, etc. A high skill will let you succeed against more skilled (or more obstinate) opponents, or achieve a higher level of success against easy ones. Right now Dominic has gone from (Charm 3 + Diplomacy 0) = 3 (decent, but not quite on a professional level) to (Charm 4 + Diplomacy 1) = 5, which is better than most skilled professionals.
Healing
While you aren't going to be instantly restoring people to full health like a computer RPG healer, even relatively simple healing spells can still be quite important. They can stabilize a dying character, counteract magical curses (which are one of the more common forms of combat magic), stave off environmental effects like hypothermia and diagnose problems caused by disease or poison. Also, healing spells let wounded characters recover in cinematic time (i.e. days to weeks) instead of realistic time (weeks, months or possibly never).
Spell Progression
One thing I think still needs clarification is how to get to high-powered spells. You may have noticed that every research action gets you some kind of improvement in what you can do with your magic, but what may not be clear is that you can gt more powerful effects by continuing to work on the same thing. For instance, you could try making your burst of strength have a duration, then make it work on others, then make a group version, then try for an AoE version, then maybe a stackable or higher-intensity effect, and so on. You can keep doing this until you hit a limit imposed by either your Soul (which controls how big and/or intense an effect can be) or your skill (which controls what effects you can create, and how many modifiers you can stack onto the basic version).
So again you have a playstyle choice. You can research lots of useful little utility effects fairly quickly, and each of them will be a simple spell that you can spam frequently even with your current Soul. Or you can spend multiple actions working up a really powerful version of one effect, but then you won't have as much flexibility and you'll be more prone to running low on energy if you try to spam it.
Spending
Sadly, the primitive state of Borjeria's medieval economy means that you can't spend money until after you collect it. If you controlled a town big enough to have local moneylenders I might give you some flexibility on that, but since you don't everything is on a 'collect the money the turn before you spend it' basis.
Splitting vs Maximizing Stats
Dominic started out with sufficiently high stats that in the long run you should become extremely powerful no matter what route you take - having 3 in everything plus three sorceries and three actions per turn makes him pretty broken compared to most NPCs, and there are several different ways you can eventually end up stacking permanent buffs on top of that. So this isn't a question of whether you can build a powerful character, but rather of which road you want to take to get there.
Raising one attribute to 5 would allow you to get into superhuman levels of ability with sufficient training, but getting the full benefit will also require focusing a lot of training time into building up the skills based on that attribute. Taking a pair of 4s instead will give you a lot more flexibility, but your skills will max out at a level that's less extreme (4+4=8, instead of 5+5=10). Either approach will work just fine with intelligent play, they'll just require different problem-solving approaches.
