[Cainehill]

Yes, and you have 425 points to spend once you do CW's scales, even with a healthy 6 dominion. Carrion Woods is almost like Ermor's dying themes : you want the worst scales possibly, with the exceptions of luck and magic, and of course CW is forced to take 1 growth.

That's enough to get Fire-4, 2 of the other 3 elementals at 2, Death 3, and Nature-4, for just one example. You might choose to drop 1 or 2 elements (keeping fire) and take astral instead.

Research : I buy a dryad a turn until the gold runs out, if I don't find sages or some such first. With magic 3, that's 6 research for 110 gold, upkeep of 3.8 or so. If you don't waste gold buying and paying upkeep for a Panic Apostate, you can easily get 1 dryad a turn for most of the first 10 turns. That's 60 research a turn, _and_ your carrion dragon has been adding 20 for at least 5 of those turns. Not great - but adequate for CW Pangaea.

At some time after turn 10, you can be getting revenants for research (6 research per, 9 death gem cost), or save those gems for Conjuration 6, when you note the superior spectres, as well as lamia queens. Another option is to get some Carrion Ladies to do some research early on, and to ferry carrion / guard temples later.

Things are a bit tougher if you aren't using Zen's mods, since the balance mod actually makes Luck a good thing (most of the time) - without it, way too many of your events are outright bad, or crappy "good" - like getting militia. With the mod, Turmoil 3 / Luck 3 can wind up giving a _lot_ of gold. The test I just ran while writing this, buying a dryad per turn, at turn 11 I have 876 gold left, 30+ elemental gems, a magic item, and I haven't bothered to take a province yet, which would have given better gold income and possibly gem income or better researchers.

And yes - being able to cast Mother Oak immediately (or almost immediately, adding Const-2 for the Thistle Mace) is a good thing with Carrion Woods, considering that your nature income is the constraining factor for building your carrion hordes. If you concentrate solely on alteration at first, you can cast it between turn 10-14, at which point you can get an extra Carrion Lord every 2.5 turns, compared to one every 3.8 turns on the base nature income. That's over doubling your accumulation of carrion lords, thus essentially also doubling your carrion growth.

As far as using Panic Apostates to search for nature & death : one Apostate costs more than 3 dryads, delivering 10 research vice 18 research for over twice the gold upkeep - and if you use it for site searching, you aren't getting the research, which you say "is the biggest problem with Pan CW" : of course it is, if you're using so much gold for site searching while still missing a good chunk of the best death/nature sites.