[Zenzei]

I've been testing the following in SP and it worked nicely for me. Dormant S6E4 Son of the Sun with dominion strength 9. Scales were order3/sloth1/heat1/misfortune1/magic1.

Use starting army boosted with gladiators/retiaruses for initial expansion around your capital, this works really well. At this point you have enough resources to build enough palantines/palantines with javelins even with the sloth scale. If you need more troops/turn, build more forts and you should be doing that anyway because your mages are so cost effective. Serpent acolyte is second only to Mictlan priest and Yogi when it comes to good cost/research ratio. Aim to have 3 castles up and running by fall of the second year.

Buy hydras during the early turns whenever you have the extra 250 available. 5 snakes plus serpent acolyte as a leader takes indies easily. Because additional castles and snakes cost a lot of money you are really going love that order 3.

For site searching mix & match two mages so that you have WNSDH covered between them and send them out to find sites. Of course you should search for FAE gems too but WNSDH are the important gem types you are going to need later on, so they are a priority.

Research alteration 3 first and construction 4 second. After that you want to have at least alteration 5 (bone melter & mother oak), enchantment 7 (guaqmire/foul vapors/relief/serpents blessing/stellar focus etc), construction 6 (path boosters) and thaumaturgy 4 (gift of reason). When your gem income starts to shape up you need to decide whether to go for alteration 9 (seraphs and other wishable goodies) or conjuration 9 (tartarians) in order to have a good late game. It's kind of fun to able to make up your mind during the game because both options are totally available to you. If you go alteration 9, remember to clam spam with those renatas.

Word about pretender. Once awake, he is very capable SC provided you give him some items and script buffs like personal luck, body ethereal and ironskin. He can also forge some seriously important stuff like rings of sorcery/wizardry, crystal coins, dwarven hammers etc. You could go with great enchantress or oracle and get slightly better scales but I like the additional security SC god provides. Sun god is the fun god.

So there you have some tips. I find it very hard to give good well formatted advice because this nation is so tangled, everything affects everything.