At the moment, I am a bit unhappy with the way Spells are researched. There are many fun, "nice to have" spells, but having to research one spell at a time greatly limits my available spells and encourages me only to pick the best spells or just research the next spell level. This gets even worse at higher spell levels, since research times are becoming increasingly long and simply are not worth the research time. The spells certainly look fun and I would use them at some occasions, if I had them, but they are not essential to winning,and spending 30 turns on researching a spell that I could instead invest in researching the next spell level and thus getting closer to winning the game through the spell of making, is simply a bad tradeoff in most cases. Once I have reached Level 10, i have perhaps 5 or 6 spells, usually the starting spells, Imbue Champion, and one or two summons.

Now styles may vary, but the problem becomes most obvious in Level 10. There are some cool spells there (including the much-advertised Volcano), but they require just as much research time as the spell of making that simply wins the game.

Some of these problems would disappear by deactivating the master spell victory condition, but it does not make spell research more rewarding.

My suggestion to solve this would be to learn spell book levels instead of single spells and remove the "increase knowledge" option. So instead of researching "brilliance" you research "Enchantment Level 1" which gives you not only access to brilliance, but some other enchantment spells that are nice to have and use but most would never research.

More powerful spells would require levels in more than one spell book (e.g. volcano could require Earth Level 5 and fire Level 5), and the spell of making which is the signature spell of having truly mastered magic could for example require Level 5 in four or more spell books (plus some other non-research requirements, but that is a topic for another time/thread). Exact data and research times for each book need to be determined by balance, of course.