EA Mictlan Setup - Q's from a noob

[Hellboy]

A question for either Shovah32 or CharonJr (or anyone else who cares to comment):

I noticed both of you took drain 2. I've done a bit of testing w/ drain2, and I find it very scary. Your Mictlan priests are down to 2rp (as opposed to magic 1, where they're 4rp). I know we're talking about 120 build pts here, but still at 2rp it seemed to take forever to build up a decent research rate.

Now from my limited experience w/ blood nations I think that blood nations don't need to research the full tree as fast as other nations, since blood offers good payoffs all on its own. Still, I tend to go for construction 4, before I start my blood research and construction 6 before I go way high in blood level. And even though you can probably get away w/o pushing broad research as fast as some nations, you will still need get some high levels in non-blood magic for the end game. So, when all is said and done, don't you find drain 2 to be rather a serious handicap for Mictlan?

Now one thing I've done in the past to get around drain 2 is to go for skull mentors and lightless lanterns asap. However, it seems to me that this is rather difficult for Mictlan, since skull mentors look impossible (no death mages), and lightless lanterns take all the way to construction 6 before you can build them.