Just got rolled by AI Neifel. What did I do wrong?

[Stryke11]

I just played a SP game as Helheim with a W9F9 bless and to make a long story short all pretenders but myself and Neifelheim were destroyed. We both controlled roughly half of the map. I eventually gave up on the game because I felt like I was wasting my time. I spent close to 4 hours on it and aside from an occasional breach that was fixed within two or three turns, it was a stalemate. The issue was mostly that it was producing giants (which I though would be expensive to have a lot of, but I guess I was wrong) to a much higher degree than I could combat. There was a new 300-500 giant army at random ends of the map every three turns or so. I beat them one by one but the tide never stopped and they'd get a province here and a province there. It seemed for every one standard Helheim infantry troop I produced, they got 5 or more giants. I feel that as a human of reasonable intelligence I should've been able to beat the AI, and I was wondering if anyone had any specific strategies for beating Neifelheim, either as Helheim or just in general.

My situation:

W9F9 bless - awesome for one army (the one led by my prophet). This army was unstoppable. It was about 80 units, the prophet, a screen of 20 infantry w/ glamour, about 10 valkyries and 50 Helhirdlings. I could easily take out 500 giants with this army, but the problem was it was my only one, and therefore where I won with it, I'd lose everywhere else. Problem was, prophet was only Helheim priest with enough holy to bless everyone, and I didn't want to take the chance of having some random priest cast blessing and maybe bless half of my sacred troops while the other half get slaughtered. They cost too darn much for that.

Bad income and production - the dual bless cost me at the scales. I think I managed order 1 and maybe productivity 1, but at the cost of imprisonment, cold 2, and maybe drain 1. (I don't recall specifics, but I know I didn't have bad order or production scales). I was making about 1000 gold a turn at this point and as such was severely hampered in national troop production. I don't know what I set my dominion as, but it wasn't high, yet seemed to spread very well, even though I could never afford more than a few temples.

Virtually magic-less - Since Helheim isn't a nation that is strong in water or fire, and therefore unless I tied up my pretender in site searching (rather than researching, which I chose because due to low income mages were rare), there was no way to get a fire or water gem income. As a result, pretender (red dragon, if it matters) didn't do much of anything but research and the occasional fires from above. My national dwarf mages I had research as well, but every three turns or so, due to a huge death gem income, I had them summon up an army led by a bane lord of ghosts, pale riders, behemoths, and that one shadow skull-head dog ethereal summon. These were formidable armies, but would all eventually fall to the huge masses of giants. As to my main living armies, I would have the Helkarl cast frighten and ghost grip, and the Vanjarls (I think) go with lightening bolt if they could, but other than that my battlefield magic was nonexistent. This is largely due to the poor choices available to the commanders, although I may have missed something, and my desire to leave the dwarves to research. Near the end, just for fun, I sent armies (like five castings) of arouse hunger into undefended rear provinces, and I won them, raised the taxes, pillaged, but lost them the next turn to 100+ giants I guess the AI was keeping in reserve. This strategy was fun, but did not slow down the giant war machine apparently at all.

It just seemed to me that they giants were building at an unbelievably fast rate. I would assume an army of giants would be harder to field as a check on their increased strength. I could have beat 100 or so giants per army but 500 was just insane. Especially when I could afford maybe 50 regular Vanir infantry (not even counting calvary or sacreds) a turn, spread out over three main fronts (left edge, right edge, center). We're also not talking all militia armies here (though there were some). There were plenty of skinshifters, frost giants, and all commanders. There was even an army of like 50 frost giants (the big blue chubby guys) near the end.

So, what did I do wrong? All AI's were set to difficult but that didn't stop me from steamrolling all the others. From what I could tell, despite a couple arrows from above, the Neifelheim pretender wasn't casting any enchantments, and neither of us had a global. Is Neifelheim overpowered, do giants not cost enough, or do I just suck? The map was the one french one available here on these forums, Tyrande I think. I was in top left corner and giants were in the bottom somewhere, I think to the right.