How is LA R'yleh overpowered?

[ano]

Yes, I won with R'lyeh once but it was May '08. A full 4 month-long late-age game. Actually though there were some pretty good players, all was decided rather fast and yes, I could say then that R'lyeh is fantastic nation that should be dealt with early on or it becomes unstoppable in hands of a good player. That was particularly true for a water nation, of course.
But despite it was tremendously strong there were some problems, of course, and the main one was money. Your chaff does cost upkeep and your mages are very pricey. But with G3 population died really slow and everything was quite manageable. But now I consider R'lyeh the most hopeless nation in LA and I would never pick it unless it was given to me by some cruel random... Actually, if someone wins a competitive game with LA R'lyeh now I will be very surprised.