[Twan]

Personnally I had good results with a simple bless + awake god (and total sacrifice of magical diversity - but I was lucky enough to find druids and sages early and later another s mages site).

As sacreds are cheap in ressources and cap only, the nation profits a lot of an high dominion, and it's sad to take one without an awake awe based SC.

So I've gone with an awake dom 10 W9 Dagon, and scales including luck 3 in hope to got some heroes/mages and high gold/items events (there is a so good one with death 3, I always take luck if I go death).

So I was taking one province / turn with the pretender + was able to create one assartut army sufficient to take provinces (eventually with the help of some indies arrow catchers) each turn the first year.

Amphibiousity + sailing meaning you can expand in all directions fast expansion is really fast. The only problem is to avoid to be ganged when you have about 40 provinces by turn 15 or 16.

Best way is to publicly start a crusade against Ermor (ideally) or Rlyeh (ouch harder), as others are happy to see someone doing the job.

Ermor has about zero chance in early game (and even up to third year, except you need to find some supply items), due to all the mages you recruited being also priests, your fast expansion meaning gold for temples, about all your troops having magical weapons to hit ethearal, and Ermor not having ranged troops (to exploit the big weakness of w9 assartuts). So if he is your neighbour (and everyone is with Atlantis blitz expansion) you can expect a nice +15d gems income very fast.

Then of course, you are at war with everyone (but the eventual very weak neighbour prefering to become your forge *****), but at this point you are really hard to stop.

(ps : on the other hand, my experience come from a game on Cradle = excellent map for sailing nations, with about 20 prov/player, without Rl'yeh = all the seas for me and with Ermor unluckily starting on same continent as me and Marignon ; may be a little harder with less favorable settings)