[Radio_Star]

I looked back at Kailasa with CBM a bit ago and wanted to give a Mother of Rivers a try. You give up quite a bit to get her awake, but you can run moderate dominion with decent scales and get an enormous six water gems a turn. Since, in my mind, Kailasa is pretty much a must-clam nation and you don't have any natural starting water income, the leg up that this gets you is tremendous. You can go from forging your first clam somewhere around year three to forging your first clam somewhere around year one. The quickness bless is arguably the best early blessing for your sacreds, as it helps shore up the low prot at close range via defense and also helps vs your real nemesis, short bows, because of the increased closing and killing speeds. Unfortunately, the water blessing is both not as good and redundant in the lategame, so in essence you're trading quality for quantity. On the other hand, you'll have the gem income to spam gandharvas as soon as you hit conj 5 and will also be summoning multiple siddha and rudra each turn once you hit the research given your early start and high water income. On the other other hand you'll miss that MR like a big dog.

For scales, I'm a big fan of ransacking death for design points. Your early armies are going to be small bands of sacreds so the supply penalty doesn't really matter, you don't have any units worrying about old age and you quickly get to where you don't really give a hoot about gold, so the long-term pop loss isn't a factor. That being said, luck offsets the potentially devastating events (during one expansion test, I had half the population in my cap killed on turn 3) from death scales while giving you sporadic bits of cash and, more importantly, gems. All around, I'd be looking at something like 3 death, 3 sloth, 3 heat, magic 1 and luck 2-3, order as high as you can afford with your pretender, around 0-1, and a minimum of 6 dominion.