[Illuminated One]

What I've been wondering is if you could make good use of the sceptics.

You have a lot of castles, probably more then you can build a lab in, your dom isn't to strong and you don't need to much temples.

So in theory you could take drain, get better scales otherwise, and put your research centers at the front, where your masses of bloodhunting sceptics are keeping both your and the enemies dominion out. And if you just see your enemies dom being vulnerable sneaking 20 sceptics into his lands is a nice surprise.
The biggest problem is that once you have drain in a province, you can't do much about it, so you must conquer a good bunch of territory without your god.