Wastes and swamps are supposed to have the overall highest site frequency, IIRC. And yeah, Acashic Record is pretty spendy, but in certain situations can be relatively lucrative.
PoD does have a low (really low
) base Enc, but he needs real armor sooner than the Clops does, in fact an E9 Clops is at 29 base already, and doesn't actually ever "need" armor to still be better protected than almost anyone else. My favorite for the Cyclops is a Robe of Shadows, though upgrade options are fairly limited if all you have is an E9 Clops and then the F/S/B that Abysia gets. It's very complicated really, such limited forging options are going to be a hangup in the late game no matter how you slice it. And taking an awake SC doesn't tend to be the best way to get much diversity, so far we're only talking about adding either E or D, D doesn't give much SC gear, E does but mister Cyclops will have to do some site searching to exploit it. Seems to me having Acashic Record ready is more useful if you hope to get some decent indie mages, and you want to get gems for them to forge with as fast as you can, especially if they don't necessarily get you 2 in a path so they can remote search.
So hard to really expect to make them truly competitive against some of the more well rounded nations out there.