[JaydedOne]

I like variable Holy costs as well.

From my standpoint, I'm still experimenting before deciding what is and isn't useless. I do know that heavy bless strategies have been decidedly effective, much moreso than my rainbow mage or beautiful scales strategy. I haven't tried an Awake SC/rainbow Pretender strategy (and wouldn't go with an Awake blessing strategy) but my sense is that they just wouldn't be as effective as leaving the Pretender out of it for the 24 or so turns and getting the 150 points.

After all, breaking down the math, a rainbow mage will only get about 12 searches, probably more like 10 depending on map layout, before the dormant gods awake. Even on a high settings map, that's not going to mean a huge gem income difference. A SC pretender might grab a few provinces at indy setting 5, but I'm again not sure that they're worth passing up on the scales or having an army of super-blesses that will be more effective than he will come the mid-game.

I don't know. My concern is that I'd probably take bless strats about 90% of the time from my current experience and I'd probably take Dormant/Imprisoned about 95% of the time. To me, those ratios are too high.