I am wondering about sensible Nation/Pretender combinations for picking the Water Cult Theme. Suppose you want to play on a smaller map with quite some water on it and that you need to compete with nations that naturally have less difficulty with moving under/over the sea...
Since the water cult only gives sacred troops the ability to move into the sea (right?), one should take a look at nations with sensible sacred troops.
Another difficulty is to ensure that adjacent Water Provinces remain under friendly dominion, so one should take a higher dominion score and look out for good (possibly stealthy) preachers, no?
So my first guess for a suitable nation would be Ctis: Good priests and two sacred units (the not-so-nice sacred serpet and the nice serpent dancer) (both having poision resistance, which might be helpful against tritons). What would be a sensible pretender then? Which other nations would make sense?
(Another option instead of water cults might be a high water-based pretender: Blue Dragon, Frost Father (or the sailing Rime Mariner if you fancy Zen's Mods). Any suggestions for suitable nations for these?)