[Maltrease]

Caelum is my favorite nation. An effective early expansion strategy is to only buy archers (production scale helps) and use your initial infantry for guard duty. Then spread 4 archers across the front to act as decoys for arrow fire and infantry. This will almost ensure that enemy archers are not a problem and will give you another 2 rounds of shooting (and smiting) on most ground troops.

This will usually allow you to take barbarians, tribes, archer cavalry and light troops (basically anything with low protection). If you combine your profit you can even take on a little heaver stuff (in small numbers) with smiting. 40+ archers are very effective and lets your mages stay in the lab early on. With your mobility and some scouting you can pick out the missile vulnerable provinces.

This works good with getting an awake sage pretender and researching to evo4 (thunder strike) . You can reach this fairly easily on turn 8 or 9. Then with a few eagle kings and archer cover any indy province is yours for the taking. And with your mobility you will rapidly be able to take advantage of this.

So imagine spreading out sucking up weaker province and rapidly “claiming” territory. Then once you have thunder strike you rapidly consume all of the tougher provinces sprinkled in your territory (or leave a couple for defense if the income is not high).