Expert Players vs Newbies game

[Norfleet]

So if I'm to understand the question, the experts should not necessarily be experts on Dominions II's multiplayer aspect, but instead, experts on single-player Dominions II, and how to design a pretender most suitable not for themselves, but for the AI.

The catch being that AIs never pursue anything that's defineable as a strategy, but instead, just sort of operate in an ad-hoc manner, frequently getting its pretender killed. As such, pretender builds optimized for specific esoteric strategies will be of no use to the AI, who will not pursue said strategy.

With this in mind, the best choice is scales with a no-magic wyrm. Since the AI will casually get its pretender killed, and any magically-oriented pretender will uselessly cast spells until it passes out, the AI pretender should be denied this by not being magical. Ermor should be given, instead, a death-magic POD.