Good Pretender design for Marverni?

[SelfishGene]

My ideas about game size are those maps provided to us in the retail package. You can use third-party maps, and i don't think doing this is invalid, but it's not really a part of the game as designed.

The random generator creates "large" maps with 20 provinces per player. Even this means you will have combat fairly early as these maps tend to be blocky with little terrain compared to Jason Lutes's nice designs.

For example, i find playing Marverni in Dawn of Dominions vs. the AI to be a very, very difficult affair. Surrounded on all sides by empires that are, lets face it, better than yours, including a water nation you can't even fight, is a pretty difficult thing! On one or two notches above normal difficulty the AI tends to swarm me before i have a chance to deploy my nice mages in any effective roles.