[Wish]

with marveni you want a sage, and this is why: its not about recruitable troops - clearly they are sub par, but the mages are POWERFUL, so you want some decent evocation and at higher construction levels they can make decent Golem thugs/SCs and armies of mechanical men. At medium enchantment they can make armies of living statues.

I have been tooling around with marveni a lot and this is the only feasible solution i've come up with regarding them...

so you go with a sage,who can help them get the research faster. Give him a little death and he might even be able to replace himself with skull mentors then go around looking for magic sites to power the marveni machine.

alternatively, the SC pretender is very useful as well, since Marveni is very bad at early expansion. so I have to agree with GD there.