does this work?
 

A Nation with almost no bless or magic, imprisoned cheap pretender, and the scales tipped to positive effects and the dominion candles cranked up. I hear a lot about SCs, thugs and heavy bless but I kinda wonder how a productive nation with a lot of foot soldiers and forts and gold and resourses and luck ect to back them up would work. Maybe one of the nations that likes the temperature scales tipped to increase the points further... I dunno which nation to try this with or in what age, I'm thinking the Caelum(those are the winged guys with ice weapons right?) Abyssia or one of the lizard races...(I do like playing EA or MA if only for the soundtracks)

Re: does this work?
 

I did alright with a dormant rainbow pretender and really good scales for LA Man.

Re: does this work?
 

If you're going to do that, you need a nation with hot national troops and powerful mages (so they can get SCs/globals going later). EA Caelum would be ok at it (mammoths plus eagle kings), but they'd probably need some sort of magically diverse pretender waiting to wake up for the later game.

Re: does this work?
 

Pythium is excellent at this.

Re: does this work?
 

I'm sorry. I just had to share this picture. You've probably seen this before, hence the apology.
http://xs321.xs.to/xs321/07474/1362599_02bcdea730.jpg

Pythium of what era?

Re: does this work?
 

I have had success with an imprisoned s9 statue (for rings of sorcery/wizardy/wish) with EA Tien Chi. Their diverse magic and decent national troops means that you'll be a mid/late game powerhouse with counters for everything.

Re: does this work?
 

Another nice option is MA Tien Chen. They were seriously reworked in the last patch and you now have two excellant capitol only rainbow mages and a host of decent mages available in all castles. I use a cheap non-combatent rainbow pretender whose paths include 4F,4E, 4N and 4A, and very good scales. The pretender can work in conjunction with the capitol only mages to forge all the boosts required to turn the non-capitol mages into a diverse and formidable spell casting force.

I like this diversity for 2 reasons. Primarily you don't get gem starved in your key path, and you get to use virtually all the spells in the grimmoire.

These also enable me to get the 3 globals up that I love to have, the forge, natures bounty and gift of health.

This is probably only good for SP. I have yet to see the MP studs praise MA TC.