[K]

Micah said:
K- Look at my example scales for an awake PoD. Note how they are not in fact remotely close to being bad.

Yeh, the scales are decent but that guy is not an SC. I ran several test games and he died somewhere between turn 4 and 8 when he accidentally hit a province with Calvary.

Maybe on turn 12 or 13 when you have some equipment for him he is decent, but the risks you are taking with that guy are pretty big.

Micah said:
The supposed SC counters you just listed are more straw men as well. A PoD is immune to Vengeance, and every single pretender has 30 morale, so fear is pretty unlikely to bother them much.

Yes, one of the potential SCs can't be affected by one of the potential counters, and all are a little resistant to another.

Crossbowman do perfectly fine if you don't have very high armor or Air Shield. Calvary don't even have a counter since they dump their payload of damage on turn 1 or 2.

In fact, the sheer number of SC counters in the LA are too numerous to mention. Baalz's LA Atlantis guide shows that even base troops have a good chance of killing an SC if you try.

Micah said:
And yes, I am saying that if you start researching on turn 7 like you suggest that having enough research to have construction 4 (360 rp) + teleport (200 rp) + evo 5 (560) for actual useful battle magic as opposed to having your mages sit around casting blink + conj 3 200 for phoenix power is pretty much impossible, since that's 1320 RP. Researching starting on turn 7 you'll only have about 660 RP if all you do is research after your 10th staret researches for a turn. Add a bit for magic scale, still not enough.

OTOH, if you start making starets on turn 1 you'll actually have enough for all of that with some to spare for site searching. 1440 total RP after your 15th Staret researches for a turn. More than twice as much research. TWICE AS MUCH. That's probably got something to do with the resistance you're describing to your exarch spam idea. Sure, its fine if you're desperate, but it starts looking really obsolete right about turn 15 when you're losing out on casting falling fires and soul slays instead of smites.

Actually, I never said Evo5 and Conj3 in addition to those other Paths (and eParchs are the H3s, not the H2 eXarchs).

I also don't think that Falling Fires is a great solution when nations generally have very high amounts of armor, but I get your point (and considering Bogarus's communions potential, deadly magic is actually much closer than you'd expect if you go some other route like Thaum 5 for Leeching Darkness).

But, here's a little test game where I was just tooling around and not planning it out too much, and I have all of those things by turn 21 even after I made dumb mistakes like forgetting to set mages to research or attacking provinces with too little troops because I forgot to check if I had blockers. I'm sure with a little more practice with Bogarus and more aggressive play I could cut it down to 17 turns, search more provinces for sites, and probably conquer an enemy (I have several armies doing nothing for around 9 turns). Considering that I said Turn 17 to 19, I'm actually not far off from my estimate.