[Baalz]

Mother oak is alt-5, there's no need to go for ench early. I think merms are not a good way to go initially because of a number of factors regardless of if you get friendly currents. Even with production scales you're going to be horribly resource constrained as to how many you can recruit and their encumbrance makes them not terribly viable until you've got something that can lay out damage faster than their staggering fatigue mounts up.

To be sure there's different ways to play most nations and I wouldn't begin to try and convince you that what you're suggesting could not also be effective, but I think we've got two different philosophies. You're looking to play a slow methodical turtling strategy involving clamming and long term investments. This is rather a classical way to play MA Oceana and relies on having complete water domination to comfortably fortify. My outline is a much more hybrid-amphibious approach which plays on different strengths and sets you up to be a solid land power from the beginning as well as a water power.

I disagree that you can't be competitive on land very early using the strategies I outline here, particularly if you're smart about how you expand. Are you really going to declare war on me (Oceana) in order to snatch 3 provinces before you get to the coast and our defacto new border while setting yourself up for constant siren harassment and coastal raids by troops that have no problem at all wiping out your PD? It's also a bit of a strawman to attack my suggestion of swarm, that's obviously not what my priority was, it's a bonus you pick up when you get wooden warriors and mother oak which is very useful in some situations you'll run into early game. I understand you played an effective game focusing on conjuration, but there's more than one way to play effectively. Also, though I didn't spell it out it's obvious from the rest of what I wrote that conjuration is a close second after alteration.

I also don't think you're really seeing the big picture with the mother oak/llamia queen plan. Yes, you have a solid nature income without the mother oak, but I'm suggesting spending a massive ammount of nature gems to transform scores of mages, summon dozens of llamia queens, not to mention the fact that every fairy queen you can scrape up is pure gold. If you can't find a good use for every nature gem then I think you're doing something wrong.