[rdonj]

As admiral aorta said hinnom is perfectly viable as a scales nation. You have access to all magic paths except for water natively, so there's no need for a rainbow pretender. And growth 3 will help significantly with the eating everything problem and help power their blood hunting. There's also no strict *need* to recruit lots of their sacred researchers... kohen are a lot less useful magic-wise than ammi are, you should think of them more as thugs, although obviously they're better at this with a bless.

Further, there is no need to use the sacred troops of either nation. Niefel giants can be very powerful when massed together, but it's too expensive to buy them in numbers that way, and niefel jarls can do the job as well. A single jarl is enough to take most indy provinces, and two can take any but the most painful. So there's no need in the early game to build niefel giants. The same goes for hinnom giants for the most part, except that their troop sacred isn't as good. You *can* use them, and you may consider buying one on the first turn when you can't buy the commander version. But afterwards it's much more useful to buy the commanders instead.

The existence of the grigori is immaterial to all of this. Grigori are a late game summon, and they are stupidly powerful whether you have a strong bless for them or not. So no, you won't be using them for a while, and you can't design your nation solely around their existence. But when you can make them, they are 100% worth their cost. The recruitable SCs of either nation have nothing on the grigori. Just think of them as what they are - late game SCs.

Also why are you leading your armies with national commanders instead of indy commanders?