Heroes learn spells?

Only your avatar and his descendants can learn spells.

Pick one of your heros of appropriate sex and propose to them (it is a button in action menu)

You will then have 4 children over time who will grow up able to cast spells.  (Your mate is still active.  If they die before any/all children are born, game over on the children.  No second chance.

Chris.

Yep. Your sovereign has an "Imbue" spell. You can use that on the overland map to target the hero you want to have spells. That transfers 3 essence to the target and turns them into a spellcaster. (At level up you can buy more essence to give them more mana.)

Due to a UI thing you need to put the target in a tile beside the sovereign, by themselves for it to work.

There is a spell Imbue champion that turns another hero into a caster.  It costs 3 essence points and starts you new hero on their way to becoming a channeler. I recommend only doing this on lvl 1 heroes as it quickly let you level their essence up.  You need 16 mana to get most of the best summons.

EDIT: Whoops, cancel that, beat to the punch twice...

Mmmh I think differently. When you start adding some shards and a couple of temple of essence, with a simple imbue (that gives 3mp) is easy to rack up the remaining +2 max mp bonus useful to cast a teleport or a Rise Land, so imbuing champions, even if they have low essence and you do not raise it higher is actually a viable strategy. Also remember, if the only caster you have is your sov, you regain 1 mp x turn, if you have 2 you regain 2 mp x turn (one for each caster) and so on.

Also, if you research level 2 quests you can find potions of essence on the map. one potion of essence can give a hero 0.5 essence. It isn't much, but it's enough to get them started. Take them on battles, level them up and choose essence as their level up. You'll eventually have some more capable casters.

One thing Ive been doing is IMBUEing all champions with INT >12 There Int will affect the damage dealt plus (maybe wrong here) it seems to affect the "To Hit" of spells too.  My caster with 15 INT does way more damage and seems to hi more often than one I used with INT of 10.

Another thing I do is pile all new casters with my Sov and run around levelling up the group fighting NPC's doing Quests and such (early thru early mid-game) If I get 6+/- casters plu my Sov thats a lot of mana each turn and at 8 and 16 essence they get access to some nice summonings Minor Elementals and Elemental Giants.

Finally, when I can afford it I start equiping my casters (unless they also have fine Str AND Dex AND Con attributes) with bows and keep their mana near max without being maxed and then use the bows as much as possible...works well so far and since the out of memory bug amoung others is preventing me from finishing any game, I will just play until I cannot then begin a new game...sort of feels like I bought a half-baked potato!  But I do Look forward to playing through an entire game!

Cheers,

Gene 

Yes INT modifies dmg, also there is no "to hit" you simply roll damage (wich has a lousy range starting from 0, that's way you see a lot of "miss") and defense. So higher int---> highest success rate of spells, since you overcome def more easily!

edit:spelling