In Dominions, all non-Holy spells are organized into one of seven schools of magic. Where a spell's path represents the power source, the school a spell belongs to ostensibly represents the methods used to manipulate that power. In order for their mages to cast more advanced spells and forge more powerful magic items, the player has to invest research into these schools. Each school has nine levels of research.

The order in which these schools are researched is decided through the Research Screen, which can be accessed by pressing F5 in-game. Simply left-click on the name of a school to queue up one level of research into that school. Any research points left over after the queue is finished will be assigned to an unfinished school, starting from the top of the Research Screen.

Each nation begins the game with an amount of RP based on its pretender's magic/drain scale. This free RP is not influenced by the age the game is set in and cannot be disabled.

If the game is using the "random start research" option (the default), the RP is allocated to random schools in 50-RP parcels. The default total is 150 RP; each level of magic adds 50 more RP and each level of drain subtracts 50 RP.

If the game is not using random start research, the RP is divided evenly between each school. Due to rounding, the total amount of RP will be slightly different from a random start research game:

The amount of research points that has to be invested in a school in order to reach each level is dependent on the game's settings. Most multiplayer games use the standard research difficulty setting: