Knowledge or strength?

Knight of Light, I completely agree with your post! I'll add briefly: mana is actively consumed by the most valuable spells: - transport spells: City Portal, Flight, and Dimension Door; - combat spells: advanced attack spells and almost all high-level spells. How much knowledge you'll need for traveling depends on whether you've mastered the aforementioned spells, the number of cities per unit area of the map, the presence of wells and magic sources, the Dungeon with the Mana Vortex, and how often and intensely your hero has to fight (more on this below). Sometimes you have to spend the night in a city to replenish your mana. But if you're lucky with the Wizard's Well artifact, the problem disappears. How much knowledge you'll need for battles depends on whether you've mastered the necessary high-level spells, the strength of the enemy, their arsenal of means, and whether the battle is final: in a final battle, you can worry less about losses and remaining mana. Regarding losses: I usually strive to minimize them in battles. This is facilitated, in addition to skill, by the ability to resurrect the fallen during the battle (a separate discussion about necromancers). This can be done either by archangels or by Resurrection. The amount of mana spent in particularly long battles with powerful enemies depends almost entirely on what/who we have at our disposal (this happens regularly on XL maps). Resurrection requires a lot of mana and a high magic power stat. If we have archangels, it's important how many we have, and whether we have Clone and expert water magic: if we have both, we can resurrect archangels with Clone until the mana runs out. And usually, the opponent with more mana wins, because the enemy is often already powerless against their spells (I've seen how effective "simple" Blindness is, and I use it myself regularly).