I am still playing Mind over Magic, which is best described as a colony sim game. However, in Mind over Magic there is a persistent threat to your colony, from an approaching fog, and later increasingly from monsters you liberated while exploring the Underschool. Thus some players approach the game more like a survival game: Gather resources, craft, build, in order to survive. The problem with that approach is that reaching basic survival in Mind over Magic is trivially easy. The closer the fog gets to your school, the easier it becomes to repel. Thus it is rather unlikely that your school is ever going to be engulfed by the fog. The fog is kind of a fake threat; it is better viewed as a means to respawn resources, thus letting the fog get close to the school and pushing it back is a basic game loop to succeed.

When playing in "survival game mode", players tend to be rather protective of their characters. After all, that appears to be the goal of a survival game. But once you understand Mind over Magic a bit more, that "survival game mode" clashes with some of the core game mechanics of Mind over Magic. Characters in Mind over Magic are an easily replaceable resource, which in some cases you might want to burn through to achieve certain goals. That starts with your first student, which you *must* graduate, and thus kick out, because only by doing so will you get the scrolls needed to promote another student to staff. Then Mind over Magic limits you to a certain number of staff, as hiring more requires steeper and steeper cost. Again the solution is to kick old staff out, in order to hire students that are better than your original staff (especially once you unlocked tier II wands).

In the late game you will find yourself increasingly limited by the number of arcane scrolls; you get those as loot from combat, and need them to unlock branches of the research tree, as well as to summon gifted students. The trick here is that when you push back the fog, you will sometimes uncover battles for which you only have 12 hours to complete, and which are very, very hard. These are nearly impossible to do without some losses. Each character has a number of death saves, and once a character is downed in combat more often than his death saves, he is permanently gone. But these fights give the largest amount of arcane scrolls, and are thus essential for late game progress. If you are too protective of your characters, you'll miss out on the fastest way to advance, and progress might feel as if it slows down to a crawl. The idea here is to "burn" your characters with tier II wands in these fights, lose some death saves, maybe lose a character or two, but succeed the overall fight with the help of potions. A three skull fight gives 50 arcane scrolls, a four skull fight gives 150 scrolls. Given that regular Underschool fights of one or two skulls just give 2 to 3 scrolls, and you need 96 for major steps in the research tree, the very hard fights are really the best method to progress. You just need to be willing to sacrifice some of your characters.