[rdonj]

Enslaved aliens and space trolls, and predator aliens. The pirate raiders are actually probably too cheap, they're much more durable than any of the other units and are ranged so they won't get butchered nearly as fast as your other units. Of course they do actually take resources so it would be tough to mass them, relatively, since you definitely want order and probably want to take sloth. I would suggest putting them somewhere between 30 and 35 gold (35 is probably overcosting for the unit itself, but they're really just screens for illithids), and basing everything else off assuming they're your best blockers.

Huge blocks of illithids and mutants ARE pretty strong. For some races they can be pretty painful to deal with. However r'lyeh can't build very many big blocks of illithids, they are just too expensive to support. I don't know about the magic resistance, it wouldn't hurt too much I think against mind blast but master enslave would just destroy them.

Just to give you an idea of scale, I invaded R'lyeh's homeworld with the insectoids in a game where rlyeh was the strongest other power. I sent probably about 550 bugs down to their planet and have over a thousand more land troops in space atm, with another 170 finishing off the dragons and have another 1,300 bugs on my production worlds. And that is just my ground troops, I also have probably 600+ males. It is late winter of year 4. Anyway, those 550 planetary assault bugs (just drones and soldiers) destroyed somewhere in the vicinity of 150 illithids and mutants, in several battles not involving armies of 100-150 bugs, losing only 1 female and no more than 100 insects.