[Baalz]

Nah, I think you're thinking about the dominion bonus the wrong way. A bonus is exactly what it is, your units are straight up good without it and only get better from there. Mechanical men are *merely* as good as what other people can summon when out of your dominion for a length of time - hardly worthless. They certainly don't stop being useful. Your "do not heal" constructs such as your national summons carry that hitpoint bonus until they take the damage, so unless your opponent is piling their own bodies up to wear you down you're really only counting "real" battles, not turns out of dominion. I also think it's a mistake to confuse not being immune with being vulnerable to elemental evocations. Yeah, as I mention lighting is a problem early on as it is with any small concentrated group of units - heck, that's exactly what lighting is best at. Outside of that though....how many falling frosts is it going to take to drop the 22 protection 50 hitpoints guys? How exactly is the fact that they can be brought down by powerful enemy mages with access to the right spells any different than every other unit in the game? I also think you overestimate the hurdle you're facing here. If, as I suggest, you focus tightly on construction research after a brief time in ench, how long is it until you get to constr-7? Varies of course, but outside of rough luck should be by midgame when you're facing any real concentration of enemy evocations. I also don't think its that difficult at all (with this setup) to get the fire and water mages. You're site searching early with 1f 1w h1 mages, so you'll almost certainly line up a couple sites (holy -> astral income) while you're playing with luck-3 in a positive magic scale so gem income events are extremely common. With that in mind, how high is the bar to clear 5f (flame helm), 2S + 2E (crystal shield) for a total of 9 gems to get to F4 with phoenix power? You scarcely need to outfit all your mages like this, just outfitting a couple per year from your pretender will give you all the big fire you want. Water is a bit more expensive, but hardly prohibitive. For one, with your luck 3 scales it's quite likely you'll get a couple of the Great Olm national heroes who will commonly net you W3-4 with no further effort, and also likely you'll net some of those big water gem income events. Outside of that, you just B-lined to const-6, so water braclets are a no branier, a ring of wizardry for 12 pearls is a deal even if you have to alchemize 24 other gems for it, and with another crystal shield you're up to W4 for under 20 gems (assuming you didn't have to alchemize). Again, that's hardly a high bar when you're talking about scraping those gems together over half a year.

True, you're not going to have amazing fire, water or astral incomes, but neither do you have amazing output requirements. Everything you're doing is uber efficient and you scarcely need tons of big fire/water mages, just one for each major army is plenty.