[Baalz]

Having drawn MA Atlantis as a random selection in the new cross-era game, I find myself a bit at a loss coming up with a strategy that will be competitive against the other water nations.

The good:
Reasonably strong mages for the price (physically and magically) with pretty good magic diversity
Most of the infantry deals some light poison damage, which will be effective against some types of enemies.
Strong recruit everywhere priests

The bad:
Sacred troops are decent, but cap only and not strong enough to justify an investment in a good bless
Non sacred infantry are middling – slow, lightly armored and lacking any ranged backers they struggle against indies much less most other nation’s elites.
War lobsters are interesting enough, but are expensive and expendable, a combination which makes them ill suited to hang a primary strategy on.
Mages are powerful in paths which require significant research to be effective, compounded by the lack of available underwater combat spells and difficult research (in the game I’m playing).
Magic diversity is based on random picks, which will make it hard to depend on a strength of more than one in anything but water.
Very few pretender chassises to choose from, limited choices for cost effective magic paths. (I thought about using the consort guy as a reasonable 80 gp sacred thug chasis, but what he really needs is a N/E bless and there’s no way that’s affordable on any of the pretenders available)
I’m sharing the water with EA Oceana, EA R’yleh, and MA R’yleh…I’m not going to have the luxury of having much research done before I’m hard pressed by good troops.

So, what to do, what to do? Playing around with some SP builds, it seems like war lobsters are capable enough to push some initial expansion, but they’re ruinously expensive at their attrition rate and cranking them out indefinitely will really cramp mage and castle investments (and they’ll be comically ineffective against mind blasters and heavy blessed triton knights). The “heavy” infantry likewise seems to take significant casualties against the average indies unless having an overwhelming advantage of numbers and they’re not cheap enough to make that feasible. Shamblers seem a bit fragile for the cost and the fact that they’ll usually be outnumbered (at that price) makes them drop pretty fast. There doesn’t really seem to be any effective underwater combat spells available early on. The mages seem like they’d make decent thugs, but only after significant research in multiple paths – and they’ll never be up to par with the EA water nation’s recruitable thugs.

So, what am I missing? An awake kraken would help with initial expansion, but what the heck do I follow that up with?