Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

I assume that it specifically targets astral mages, so a magic duel can actually occur... and well, most regular astral mages don't have a huge MR, just standard, so I guess it's around a 50/50 shot, than with at least S7 you should win almost all magic duels. but ahhh, you don't actually kill the enemy mage, just feeblemind it heh? well, that totally sux... I guess it's still viable to open the door to mind hunts(no astral cover) but not much else, unless you're facing a strong astral nation, in which case you can put a major hurt on them.

also, at what frequency does it occur? once per turn, once per turn for each enemy province under your dominion, totally random, etc?

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

This would still more or less work, you'd just need to take either an arch mage instead, or a sleeping void lord. You'd miss the early expansion of course. But LA r'lyeh is the only native uw nation in LA, so it's not necessarily so bad. Anyway you can get 7+s and 2 of everything else easily enough with either of those two options, and 9+ dominion. Awake void lord is... rather less good, but still helpful for filling the gaps in your magic diversity. Whether it's a good strategy is debatable, but it would certainly be a funny one.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Ghost King is a perfectly plausible early SC. I used one in NvVIII and Water Total War (which I won) to good effect. They're especially good at SCing underwater because the usual bane of their existence early on is archers, and there are no archers UW. (As long as you avoid Hydromancer provinces, the GK has no problems UW and can ignore most afflictions he picks up).

Of course, combining the GK with enough S to want to cast Strands is a little rougher. I'm not convinced you actually want to cast Strands though. VoT covers 4/8, and you have enough S,D nationally to search those. That only leaves N really, where you might want N2 for remote searching. And B is a non-issue UW (although you'll want to search H1, but you get lots of H1 commanders just randomly). Basically, Rlyeh is already well-situated for site searching, making Strands much less appealing.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

yeah, I was thinking similarly to your EA Ermor guide in which you suggested going for that very underused Acashic Records spell. also since R'lyeh doesn't really need to get conj early, and Evo6 also opens up Mind Hunt, Wrath of God(if you put A+S on your pretender it might be worth it) and other goodies, and of course only +1 for Nether Darts. so rushing for it has other benefits besides the Strands, thus keeping up with the tempo which you discussed quite a lot in this guide. but I guess it's just too hard to pull off if you need a high S+rainbowish pretender to actually make it work like that.

otherwise, I think either a GK with S6D5N4 or Lich(not master, the regular) with S6D6N4 with Dom9 T3S3C3D3L3M1 is very affordable and leaves only 2 and 4 unused DPs respectively, so a very efficient build too. didn't try the Lich out as an SC too many times but each time I tried the GK UW I kept running into Hydromancers :( and it's not like they appear in scout reports so you can never know until you run into them, which is why I'd probably prefer the immortal Lich(also allows for D6 instead of D5 but it isn't such a big deal) as long as he can actually take on indies as well as the GK.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

If you see krakens in a province, it has a hydromancer. Avoid it with your pretender. So you really can know beforehand =)

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Just wanted to post an observation from an test game.
Tried to get an Slave Mage nature random as fast as possible, so I was recruiting only Slave Mages on turn 8 one of those got Insanity (8), the next 2 turns he did what he wanted not what I wanted...