Golden Naga with no nature or death? Mistake IMO. You need a pretender that can expand and site search, not to mention casting to summons carrion lords, etc. By not taking D/N you need someone else to search for those, and you _have_ to have at least one Panic Apostate to do your summonings, chewing up your gold income. Also, if you don't take Nature-4 on the pretender, you need a
lot of research before you'd be able to cast Mother Oak - with N4 you only need const-2 to do the +1 booster, otherwise you need const-6 for the staff, and chew up a lot more nature gems.
You can have 3 kinds of expansion pretenders, all of which can work well with CW. The supercombatant - Carrion Dragon is probably the perfect one for CW; with Zen's mods the Medusa is also possible.
A summoner - enough death magic to bring forth enough skeletons to take provinces. IMO, the lich is the only one worth doing this with, both because of cheap death magic and reincarnation for when it doesn't work.
Artillery - slower for CW because of the required research, but potentially better in the late game.
In any case - for CW I'd never take a pretender that didn't have at least 3 or 4 fire magic, probably 2 or 3 earth, plus the death and nature and depending on my whim, 2 more paths. One reason I feel fire/earth is mandatory - site searching for gems to turn to gold, which is only used to get mages or buildings, never troops.
Starting strategy : One choice is to prophetize the centaur to immediately start generating carrion, since he's not going to be much use otherwise. Another choice, and probably your best choice if you didn't take death/nature on the pretender, is to buy your one and only Panic leader for casting Carrion Lord, and prophetize him to save ... 12 gold a turn on upkeep? Or you cast your first Carrion Lord and prophetize it to give the battlefield wide regrowth, even if it doesn't affect most of your carrion because of good MR vice "easily resisted".
If the indie setting is 6 or less, you can usually take a province or two with your starting satyrs, especially if you can bring some carrion along. The point isn't just to take provinces - it's to get your satyrs
killed for upkeep reasons.
And, not even counting successful finding of nature sites, you continue casting Carrion Lord every 4 turns. Each Lord is turned to reanimating 90% of the time. Temples get build in every forest province for more & better carrions to be spawned there. Research and cast Mother Oak as soon as possible to afford more Carrion Lords, also later Lamia Queens for better magic availability.
Also, some of those nature gems should go towards vine men / ogres to mix with the carrion, and for castings of Swarm. Both the vine men and the swarms help reduce the casualties for the carrion.
And in the meantime, you do a
lot of site searching, hoping for mages with strengths you don't have. If you find 'em, you don't buy too many (unless, heh! You have a healthy enough income) - just enough for forging, summoning, and remote site finding spells.
That, with no-brainer cookie-cutter dominion for CW, has been enough to let me do very well with CW in general, presuming I don't screw up with getting my pretender killed.
