[MaxWilson]

By "Sirens," do you mean Lure of the Deep? Since it only works in the caster's dominion, you don't have to dispel it. You can build temples and push your dominion instead.

I don't play MP, but at least in SP I agree to an extent about the difficulty of fighting water nations. (I still don't know how to fight LA R'lyeh.) Currently I'm playing LA Agartha and they have nice amphibious Umbrals, but otherwise (especially with NI maps/mods) it can be really hard to recruit decent underwater troops, and even if you have Barrels of Air, etc., your troops suffer the Poor Amphibian penalty underwater. On the other hand... underwater nations have equally large difficulties getting onto land (especially because there's no water equivalent to Barrel of Air that lets you bring aquatic armies on land), and there are always many more land provinces than water provinces. What this means is that you can concentrate on knocking out your land-based opponents and winning the economic race; by the time you get around to seriously tackling Oceania (instead of e.g. just raiding occasional weak provinces) you'll have magical superiority and many more units (Siege Golems, Iron Dragons, armies of Wraiths, etc.), and his underwater bonuses won't help him. Size matters.

Edit: yeah, yeah, obviously this won't work in MP because the aquatic nation will be busy e.g. clamhoarding. But then, in MP you can actually convince other players to *help* you attack the aquatics--since he'll border on lots of other players--instead of tackling him by yourself. AI passivity cuts both ways.

-Max