[Edratman]

I've stumbled across a out-of-the-box game variation, thanks to a prod by Gandalf, that dramatically alters the game play as I knew it.

In the game setup menu, I set resources and money to 50, indies to 9 and research to easy. The alteration in game play was quite astonishing to me. Large armies are pretty much unattainable, the ratio of mages to units is increased and early expansion is very slow, unless you go for an awake SC pretender. But you really need good scales with this setup and the pretender selection seems even more critical IMHO.