[Baalz]

I did a decent job with EA R'yleh, on Faerun coincidentally. This is a huge map, with a *lot* of water so you can spend a considerable amount of time staying wet. Going onto land is, yeah, a challenge, but assuming you don't need to do that until you are dominating the water you've got one really, really big advantage working for you - you can sit and wait for the perfect timing to attack. Nobody is going to attack you, so just wait until somebody along the long coast is committed to a grueling war, then make a deal with whoever they're fighting with and hit every coastal province and as many inland provinces as you've got amulets of fish (mind lords can solo thug quite well). Blast mercilessly with the artillery (mind hunts, vengeance of the dead) which you've been meticulously passing out void eyes and spell foci for - with the gem income from your large unassailable water empire you should be thinking along the lines of a dozen artillery attacks per turn indefinitely - it's not a high bar for R'yleh. When you do have to have to fight a real army you can likely dictate a lot of the terms of the fight because of your strategic flexibility (attacking out the water, lots of teleporting troops), and make sure you use the advantages you have. CBM gives you slave trolls which are a *huge* addition, use some of the tougher summons to round out your roster for roles other than chaff. Ring of sorcery + 1 30-gem empower gets you to D-3 which gets you mound fiends which lets you leverage that strongish D income you've been dark knowledging into some undead troops - plenty of which are amphibious. For combat magic very small two slave communions + power of the spheres opens up a whole lot of possibilities for all those single path randoms particularly after you pass out a couple boosters. Mass protection, regeneration & foul vapors are fairly easily doable, weapons of sharpness, strength of giants, legions of steel & later army of lead/gold should be staples and those undead/darkvision troops start looking pretty mean under darkness. Of course you've got top notch astral support as well, so will of the fates etc. are pretty easy. Aboleths have some very nasty linebacker communion potential - think quickened, lucky, ethereal, breath of winter, resist magic (ok, they could have done all that themselves which is why mind lords make good thugs) plus iron skin, resist elements, personal regeneration (helps prevent afflictions), soul vortex (surround them with some sacrificial chaff so they'll suck up the reinvig they need after being slaves to cast this expensive spell) - and toss down a strength of giants on them as well as it not only improves their offense, it increases the rate they're healing from their life drains.

Once you've got a good foothold on land, leverage your good astral income (you've been clamming, right? And you searched all the underwater provinces with a priest to get the extremely common underwater temples, right?) to aschric record every likely looking place which, this being EA, should give you a good spread of indie mages to get you the rest of what you need on land.