[KissBlade]

I generally prefer a 4earth/4nature green dragon (safer for particularly aggressive games as a dragon does tend to deter early wars simply because they're a hassle to track down) or maybe even a master druid with 4nature/4earth/1 astral. Note that you do NOT start with astral though so heavily consider at least one point of it on your pretender because the ability to make luck pendants make a HUGE difference later on for your dai oni's.

Scales you can run are order 3, sloth 3, misfortune 1 (I normally take 2 points of misfortune, but new players generally have a harder time dealing with bad events), magic 3. You might also consider a heat scale simply for your hannayas and death scales as well depending on your use of sorcerers (who are actually very cost effective if you don't take death or end up taking growth). Do NOT recruit many oni troops, they are not that great beyond tanking for some indies. If worse comes to worse, they do provide a decent gold sink if you need to troop flood (in which case, I recommend the fireball onis as well as the ones that can split poison + throw flames). Make sure those onis are near the fornt of the battle field with "fire closest". For the most part your army should consist of mass bakemono archers with perhaps a few bandits to give some morale mixed. If you're going bless, I heavily recommend prophetizing one of your starting commanders and recruiting an oni general straight off the bat to "tank" by using /him/ as a decoy and scripting for fire closest. To be honest, the manual's "recommended strategy" is not written too poorly so it's not a bad choice to follow it. For research purposes, I recommend going enchantment heavy till you reach enchantment 4 (flaming arrows). Your hannayas can cast it with 2 fire gems if I recall and it's a very very deadly spell with your archers. Speaking of hannayas, they're great in battle as both raise skeletons spammers or fireball/falling fires off phoenix power casters. For your "meat" I recommend either getting a second fort and literally spamming oni generals out of it or using indies for heavies.