[Micah]

The first step to pretender design is figuring out what your nation needs: Strengths that can be exploited or weaknesses that need to be shored up. Some nations are fairly obvious, some are not.

EA Agartha, for example, is a confusing nation to design for, since they have so many problems as well as tempting sacreds. Designing for them is going to be a challenge best reserved for more experienced players in light of the specifics of the game they're playing in.

To take a more straightforward example, let's look at LA Marignon. The factors to consider with them are early resource constraints on troops and a weak starting army, and a fairly weak early game in general, good magic diversity (only missing N and D), and not much in the way of sacred troops, although the mages would be happy with some E for reinvig.

So, it looks like we need to shore up their early game with a combat pretender. Looking at the pretender selection we have the Moloch and the Cyclops. The cyclops is a lot sturdier and offers E magic instead of F/B, so we'll go with him. Generally on combat pretenders you're going to want to take 9 dominion to get awe, especially with pretenders that have fear, as they synergize incredibly well together. With a cyclops you can also opt to just take an absurdly high level of E magic to boost his protection value through the roof, which also gives you a nice earth bless. Pick whichever you prefer, awe being the safer choice I think. You don't really need to take any additional magic to cover for diversity, unlike some other nations, and you don't need to worry about a bless, so the rest of your points can go to scales.

My general starting scale build is Order 3, Sloth 3, Magic 1, Misfortune 2, neutral growth/death and then 3 of whichever hot/cold scale your nation prefers. Cold is generally preferable if you have a neutral temperature nation because the seasons start with spring and summer, helping to mitigate the scale in your first few turns when the income matters the most. Your opposition in the game will also affect this, if you're fighting against cold-preference enemies you'll want heat instead. (There is also no way for opposing nations to heat up your provinces [Second Sun notwithstanding due to it being horrible], while Wolven Winter will allow them to inflict cold scales on you if they really want, so why be subject to having the worst of both worlds for important battles? Plus if you know it's cold you can plan for it, while if you were expecting it to be +3 heat and they drop 2 WW on you and all of a sudden it's 3-cold you've just been put at a considerable disadvantage.)

Back to the Marignon example: They have a lot of old mages, so growth is a good buy for them to keep them alive. Buying off the misfortune would also be nice, and you have 4 scale picks left on a dom-9 cyclops with base magic, so I'd suggest growth-3 and dropping your misfortune down to a single point (this helps a lot since Order will stop events from occurring too often, especially with a 2 point difference between your scales.) It has been a while since I played Mari, so I'd also want to test to make sure they can handle full sloth, since they do have somewhat resource-intensive troops, but the crossbows are the backbone of your forces and cost more gold than resources. If I had to I'd swap some points into the production scale. The leftover points obviously go to bumping you to E5, and you're good to go.

Just make sure to stay away from crossbows before you get a shield, as they are armor-piercing which will beat his good protection value, and ranged attacks ignore awe, so they pose a very large threat. Cavalry is also always a risk, but any melee or normal bow using troops should be a safe bet. Just make sure to attack with him, not cast spells!

The final build should look like: Awake dom 9 cyclops, E5, Order 3, sloth 3, cold 3, growth 3, misfortune 1, magic 1. Adjust as needed if you want production.

Grab some indy N shaman as soon as you can and then try to open up Fallen Angels (the blood summon) for D access...the lack of D magic is the biggest problem with this build (as well as limited S access, you top out at 2S on national mages, which is a bit weak, but you need a combat pretender and S doesn't go too well on them.) Trading for a crystal coin or two is to your advantage. If the shaman you find include wolf tribals make sure you grab them as your N mages, since you can get lucky and get a point of D magic as well...shaman also make decent researchers, so you can churn out a bunch until you get a lucky D pick to site search with.

Anyhow, this was probably way too much jargon and info all at once, let me know if you have any questions. =)