Good Pretender design for Marverni?

[Graeme Dice]

Wish_For_Blood_Slaves said:
with marveni you want a sage, and this is why: its not about recruitable troops - clearly they are sub par, but the mages are POWERFUL, so you want some decent evocation and at higher construction levels they can make decent Golem thugs/SCs and armies of mechanical men.

I can't think of any reason that having a sage would help towards this end. The 20 research points he provides is two turns of mage recruitment, and if he's researching, you are expanding half as fast as you would be with a 50 point wyrm.

Give him a little death and he might even be able to replace himself with skull mentors then go around looking for magic sites to power the marveni machine.

He's going to find a bunch of sites that you won't be able to use with your national mages, and since he can only forge one item per turn, you're never going to be able to make good use of a rainbow mage.