[Squirrelloid]

So, most of a year later, having tried Agartha in some MP games...

(1) Oracles are only good thugs/SCs against indies or the AI.
-subpoint 1: No matter how awesome you make them, they're still cold blooded
-subpoint 2: Wolven Winter only costs 5w
-subpoint 3: 2x Wolven Winter -> dead Oracle, even against PD. There isn't much you can do about this - you simply cannot (reasonably) get enough reinvigoration to stop cold blooded from being the death of you.
(2) You can't really afford the bless anyway. Seriously. You need better scales than a bless allows you.
(3) Once you accept your troops are just expendable chaffe, the fact you'll kill more of them than you're going to hit your own troops with magma eruption should stop disturbing you. So your best use of Oracles is probably heavy evocations.
(4) I can't overstate how bad their basic troops are. They're really bad. Like, lose to deer tribe in an even fight (by *numbers*) bad. Bad attack/defense + bucklers + spears means they can't block arrows, they get hit far more often than they hit (meaning those extra hp don't really help at all), and they do basically no damage when they do hit. There's a reason I was trying to avoid them in the first place.

Now, I've also tried an awake forge lord with F2E4S3D2. It had a better mid game, although the expansion was kind of sad.

I've tried an awake Wyrm with A2, who had great expansion (as you'd expect). I had to do some ridiculous things to have a mid/end game though.

The play strategy that seems to work the best is just to rush conjuration to skull mentors, manual search for death gems while you're doing that, and then rush whatever else you want. I had tarts in the middle of year 3 in one game. Your expansion may be poor, but castle up quickly so you can get more researchers. And if someone kills you early before you can research anything useful, well, at least it was short and not especially painful. You have to cripple yourself far too much to have a defensible early game, so going for a high risk/high reward strategy seems to be the only logical option. Dying early is better than surviving and being totally impotent later. And should you not die early, you'll actually be able to do something.

Edit: Ok, even planning for endgame you'll probably be still mostly impotent. But it'll be better than if you didn't.