After reading the analysis, I thought I'd try these Yomi in Early Era. I must admit, I kind of like them.
Since the troops for Yomi is so cheap on resources, Sloth 3 + Order 3 seemed a good choice. Having heard of their poor research skills, I took Magic 3 to compensate, and also a single luck for more gold. A bit of heat for points, and 3 earth, air and astral for various protection raising troop buffs completed my (sleeping, I think) pretender.
In the beginning, I found the little devils mixed with the little archers quite efficient. The death generals can lead an impressive number of these, and the classic "stay back+fire(none) + guard commander was as effective as ever for most indies. For archers, I placed the archers all the way to the front, placed the meeleers right beside them with attack and this work pretty well too.
For research I went for the obvious F3 Flame arrows, which turns those little archers into killing machines, and for all those easy-to-get mass buffs (legions of steel, strength of giants, wind guide) My plan was to use my pretender for anti-magic besides the wind guide, but I never found any astral gems, so that plan didn't work out very well. Still, the massed (60-80 seemed to work well) squads of flaming archers were extremely effective. At one point I had a fire immune Dai Oni SC in the front working with those archers... that work extremely well. He'd go in, smack a few enemies, and then watch them all die in a hail of flaming arrows.
I found death summons quite effective... reanimating, skelespamming, behemoths.. that kind of stuff. That also served to dilute those banishment, which are definitely the weak side for early Yomi. Small squads of crushers and behemoths made for some good shock troops, though the attrition rate was higher than I'd liked.
Things to improve: The luck scale was definitely a bad thing. I found that the game still had the "lucky" events "56 useless light infantry" and the (since I had no bless worth mentioning) equally useless flagellants. I used a lot of indie commanders to scoop these up and use for arrow wards and sacrifices, mixing them in with devils for better morale. The astral was a mistake... I'm not yet quite sure how to deal with the priests. And I should, as always, create more SC, though I still think that those are quite silly
Please note that I quite suck in this game, so probably, the above guide is what *not* to do .o)
P.S: Completely offtopic... but why the spell check button? Doesn't every browser under the sun a spell check built in for forms? (But I suppose it doesn't hurt)