Elemental is heavily resource based game. Things like research, gold or arcane knowledge, are really poor without city having some resource boosting it, since most buildings give just multipliers, exempt a few at 1st level that give +1 point in corresponding field.

So, exempt doing massive lvl1 city spam or conquering/settling any territory with arcane temple, I don't see any other way of boosting spell research.

I'm on a medium map with only two arcane temples, possibly a third in the one remaining AI city in the game.  I wanted to try out the Spell of Mastery victory for giggles, but about 100 turns to research?  The only actual arcane research generating building I can make is the basic lore shop, so even with a multiplier building on the cities next to arcane temples I'm getting slow research. 

I'm not sure if there's a random tech that permits other arcane research generators I was just not lucky enough to draw in this game.  There's no way for me to view the tech tree that I can see, and the wiki is still in it's infancy (growing nicely though). Unless there's some way to access it in the hiergamenon that just isn't apparent to me?