[Chazar]

Can't help much with pretender design, as my only time as Vanheim is an on going Shepherds Game, but Good Scales and low Dominion Strength seems counterproductive to me...

As for early expansion: Air Magic is truly powerful, but only after a lot of research. So I used dwarves exclusively in the beginning. Go for Con3 and Evo4 (you need both anyway) so that your dwarves may cast LegionsOfSteel and BladeWind. 2-3 swarves backing up a couple of SkinShifters set on the flanks to attack rear and some hirdmen/huskarls/einheres in the middle on hold easily conquer independents without much losses. I quite like the regenerating skinshifters with LegionsOfSteel cast on them to minimize my losses - and the skin shifters go well in the case of taking sloth as you mentioned it (I am unsure whether sloth is acceptable for Vanheim). Sort out Dwarves with unusal paths for forging and use them for research meanwhile. I only recruited two air casters: a vanadrott for site searching and a vanjarl as my prophet to cast fanaticism in the beginning and divine blessing for the vans in the end. By they are expensive so it might be sensible to wait until expansion is rearly going...

This worked for me for the beginning. Later on I would switch to Air as soon as research allows and Vans almost exclusively. I guess Vans should come in numbers to avoid expensive losses. Maybe at least 16-20, depending what you are facing. I would recommend to spend the vans a blessing during pretender design. A water blessing probably cannot hurt, as extreme stats (in this case: defense) are usually not a bad choice. However, water magic is not that useful...