Early Game, Mid Game, and End Game... What's the goal of each?

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Well, in that case, first, I'd suggest taking a nation that is fairly conventional, so you'll get a decent level of exposure to how the game works, and is also fairly difficult to attack. Try Atlantis, or R'lyeh. That will impede the AI's ability to rush you, and you'll be able to experience a full game without being swarmed. Once you get that down, try and go faster. Then move onto land.

For single player, I've found the ocean provinces are great even for land based nations (demo nations, default indie strength). Either of the aquatic mercenaries (Fishermen / Shipwreckers(?)) are capable of taking lightly defended territories; reinforced by the common local tritons, they take more heavily defended ones. Better yet, the leader of the Shipwreckers is a priest - thus letting you build water-based temples next to enemy dominion / territory.

Even without the mercenaries, a decent amount of Water magic seems to allow several of the nations (Jotuns, Abyssians, Machaka especially) to go underwater with enough strength to, again, take a lightly defended water province and then build local aquatic reinforcements - tritons are cheap (resource-wise) and fly in the water. Disposable water cavalry.

Of course, this changes if your SP game includes Atlantis or R'lyeh as opponents.

If Atlantis / R'lyeh aren't in game, though, the water areas have great benefits. Secure temples (if nothing else, a priest with appropriate magic item building them), secure gold incomes, frequent source of nature gems even without searching (Kelp Fortress), and with a rainbow pretender, lots of magic gem sources that probably won't be taken by the enemy.

Again - predicated on Single Player games.

[Cainehill]

Spacepain:
I tried Mictlan a few times and was repeatedly whomped, same goes with Machaka, Vanheim, Ermor (all 3 themes), etc...

Machaka I've played several times and (after initial confusion) done pretty well against the easy AI, up until the demo turn limit kicks in at least.

One thing that helped me was figuring out that Machaka's best spider units (Hunter Lords / Black Hunters - the others, imo, need a priest for morale) are great, especially with any half-decent blessing bonus. Great morale, armor, movement rates, and the Hunters are sacred, so cheap to maintain even if expensive to buy.

Machaka's Bane Spider assasin/scouts are also great - the heaviest armored assassins I've seen in the demo, good weaponry and morale. Quite capable of dealing with most commanders (cavalry are one notable exception - Bane Spider on a stick).

I'm not huge yet on the magic myself - haven't forged an item in 50+games, and limitted magic. Still - some summonables are grand - Summer Lions (Conjuration 4, requires Fire Magic 3) for example. But mostly magic has been in a supporting role to melee combat.

Good luck.

[Taqwus]

Vanheim's Van units are actually rather brutal, considering halfway good prot of 14 plus Glamour. I tried them out with a Water-9 dragon to assist; the dragon, a Vanjarl prophet, Vanlade the Hero and roughly a dozen Vans whomp independent forces of 3 commanders plus 80-90 HI/militia quite handily. If I'd bothered bringing along air gems for Arrow Fend, perhaps casualties would be zero instead of ~1-2.
'course, it was basically game over when the Ancient Presence event apparently killed approximately 26000 people in my capital, but that's beside the point.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by ywl:

Consequently, you can afford an expensive pretender, and more importantly use a pretender with low dominion strength (e.g. mage or dragon).

Low dominion strength can potentially be risky for Ulm, as a poor dominion can leave you rather vulnerable to being priested or dominioned. I ended up having my dominion creeping into Condors' territory despite making no real attempt to push it simply because Ulm isn't any good at maintaining dominion, and a low dominion score just exacerbates the problem.