[RamsHead]

OK, first off, I have never had as much trouble with Lammashtas as most people on this board apparently have had. There is a chance they will backfire and attack your own forces, but, in my experience, they seem to attack the enemy much more often.

Saurolich: I like him. Giving him some earth, fire, and air makes him a hard hitting SC early on, and later on he can make use of those summons, items, etc. that you have a difficult time getting access to. The fact that he is immortal also makes it so you can use him a bit more liberally than you would others. Putting all that magic on him can be quite expensive though.

Prince of Death: The PoD is rarely a bad choice. If you are not sure what to go with, a PoD is a safe bet.

Mother of Monsters: I have never used her, but after checking her out, I would say that her real advantage is being a titan-like pretender with rainbow mage-like easy access to other paths of magic. Mind you, she doesn't do either as good as the actual titans and rainbow mages. She is awfully expensive though with such weak starting magic, low dominion, and the obvious difficulty of using her in battle. I would say that there are better choices out there, but don't take what I say as the final word.

Mother of Serpents: I have only used her once and briefly at that. To me, her healing powers are primarily useful for healing herself if she gets hurt in combat. She is not as tough as other titans, but her stats are not bad. Those snakes she wields in combat are limited in power. They might be useful against the normal riffraff, but you should give her an item to take advantage of her great strength (which you probably already do). I have two main complaints about her. One, she is expensive. She has better dominion than MoM and better magic too, but it is more difficult to get access to other magic, which leads me to my second problem. She doesn't really offer EA C'tis anything that they don't already have. Death and nature are the two paths that your national mages best cover. With such difficultly in diversifying magic, a pretender with at least one path in another magic is preferred. You can put other magic on her, it is just going to be a bit expensive. If you want a pretender with multiple paths and be a powerful SC, the Saurolich is a better choice in my opinion.

Cyclops: Once again, we have an expensive titan. C'tis is not really in need of lots of earth magic. Some is good no doubt, but you can get that with other pretenders. Also, he has a penchant for losing that one eye of his.

Going with an order scale: I am not sure why you would need to change your magic strategy because of an order scale.

I am also not sure why you are constantly over taxing your provinces and patrolling them. I can only guess that it has to do with having little income without order, or maybe you are not expanding fast enough.

I don't believe taking a death scale affects where you start.