[AreaOfEffect]

Perhaps...

Yes. An awake pretender would be a good start I think. Though I must admit, to generate a large number of devils so early in the game would require you to give up valuable time with your national mages, something that most people would not recommend, Baalz in particular. I'll indulge though since your interested in the prospect.

I guess it really comes down to weighing the longer term results versus the short term. You could invest blood slaves into contracts and have your god craft them with only two levels of research. By now I suppose you could have generated, at best, 3 to 5 devils. The real stop gap here is blood slave generation, which conflicts directly with gold generation. The real plus here is that you have a greater amount of total research and a long term supply of devils.

If you went with brute casting devils one at a time, you could in theory keep your god researching. Depending on whether or not you took drain or magic scales, and depending on what pretender you choose, he could amount to the same research as say 4-6 of your national mages. I guess that means that one contract is worth about 5 devils in research. The real gain by brute casting is that you could have a lot more devils in the early stage of the game. Perhaps say, and mind you this would just be a stab in the dark, 17 devils. That would be enough devils to reach their critical mass in effectiveness. A sound strategy for an early rush/mobile expansion.

Though honestly, it sounds like a foolish strategy for the long term. Unless of course there was more to your strategy then just early devils...