[HoneyBadger]

Thanks NT Jedi. That's a good start. Avoiding or dealing with Arena challenges is definitely an important consideration.

I don't know how feasable it would be to add useful equipment, without modding, because most of the useful equipment out there takes research in construction. Maybe if people don't mind sitting on their nations for the first year while they play the AI side? That might actually be worth it, in longer SP games.

What I'm really after with this thread is how you would use the starting points to build specific Pretenders for the AI to use though. Like, how you'd deligate points/magic/scales to a Cyclops or a Scorpion King for Abyssia, for instance. In order that someone reading this thread could use it as a reference for quickly building Pretenders for an SP game, in order to add to the SP challenge. So, which Pretenders work best with which AI nations? You can divide suggestions into different categories, like which Immobile, which SC, etc. so that players can mix and match what type of Pretenders they want to see that AI fielding.

P.S. I wish there were a way to mod the game so that Pretenders couldn't participate in Arena combats.