[Nick_K]

Are all the freespawn mindless? I'm not sure about ghouls.

SCs should generally work against all AI nations, but LE Ermor is harder to hit with them than most.

A hue downside to R'lyeh is that your indep priests will go insane and be difficult to deploy. As for your dominion killing population... this won't help Ermor that much. Their dominion is more deadly than yours anyway and they won't get freespawn in provinces with your dominions, so this should more than compensate for any extra soulless they might reanimate.

The sea provinces are useful to give you income. You should be able to defend them quite well as undead are poor amphibians... but you'll need to strike a killer blow from the land which means you need a solid base there to recruit priests and (maybe) archers.

As for pretender design... I'm not sure. Sloth is probably fine for R'lyeh. Order is always useful. Taking heat 3 or cold 3 is ok if you plan to get most of your income from sea provinces, but I'm not sure if the map has enough of them.

You might benefit from some nature magic on the pretender, in general I don't think you can make much use of a bless strategy so keep costs low. Perhaps an awake combat pretender such as a high-dominion wrym might give you a boost with early expansion.