I guess I'm just having a really hard time wrapping my head around accomplishing all of this with the pretender. There are massive amounts of gems being thrown around in these plans, and no real way to get the incomes going, other than indies, or manual site searching with the pretender. Manual site searching, it will take 2 years of game time to search 12 provinces, which will probably net ~30 gems/turn or so, depending on site frequency, and of course dispersed between the available paths.
This leads me to three conclusions -
The first being, that you need to narrow the focus of the pretender, to be able to assume actualization of your intent, in most games. You can plan for minimum needed to accomplish what you want with maximal use of boosters, but ultimately this means you are either searching with pretender, or relying on indies. But you get the indies whether or not you have the path on your pretender, and if you don't get any indies, you are unlikely to leverage your pretender's paths into doing anything really large scale in a diversification path.
Second, this means drop the Blood. Again, you're either Blood Hunting with your pretender (hard to do while they are crawling around, site-searching, and vice-versa), or you are relying on indies/0Bs to do your hunting. In the former case, your pretender just has too much on their plate, and in the latter, you are hunting with someone else, to empower someone else. Your pretender hardly has time to forge a Blood Stone a turn and do anything else useful, so this is a sideline for other people, no?
Which brings us to third, Astral will get you further than most paths, as you can use RoS/RoW to boost mages on a task specific basis. Also indies with Astral are more common than anything other than Nature, so while you could build up a Lizard Shaman to do what you need, I would consider it better to have someone ready to rock already, so that you can get the most bang out of your Pearls.
All of these other things sound good in theory, and probably work like gangbusters in SP, but they appear to need perfect luck, and perfect circumstance to have viability in MP, in the timescale of a competitive game. I know I must be crazy to be arguing these points with Baalz and Endoperez, but I've never been afraid to put my balls where my mouth is.... errr.....
