Please Help Me Tune My Man

[Teleolurian]

After playing around with a bunch of nations/themes (though nowhere near half of them), I've actually done really well with Man. Surprising, since I used to get my head handed to me quite readily in DomI with the same nation. Either they're stronger or I'm better (than I was).

I'm not too keen on a lot of aspects of pretender creation (like building a pretender using complementary schools; so far I just ape my nation's magic so that my pretender is more along the lines of a pre-empowered mage). I'm looking for advice on tuning my game/play style with this nation.

Pretender: Druid (erm, the extra-vine-summons guy) 6 Nature, 4 Earth.
Wizard's Tower
1 Growth, 2 Order, -1 Luck; leftover points into Dominion.

Minuses:
Longbowmen never hit anything.
Weak priests means my prophet is usually my starting scout.
Infantry kind of suck.
Knights of Avalon are incredibly good. Too bad they're also incredibly expensive.
Mage production sucks, since it's capital-centric.

Plusses:
Huge armies of Wardens, commanders decked out with dual Serpent Kryss and berserker pelts. Crude, but doesn't require me to focus heavily on construction, leaving me more time to research Conjuration. Can't wait to try this with nature-9.
The best researcher-for-cost is the Daughter of Avalon, which is easily affordable. I'd buy one of these and my holy-unit allowance of Wardens.

Playing against the easy Ulm on Britain (man, is that map a pain for anyone playing against Vanheim), I started in Ireland and quickly took control of the western island before venturing east. Ulm was sort of in the Scotland area; the AI did a poor job of defending their poor (isolated) Freak Lord when I finally breached the castle walls with a horde of Vine Ogres and Wardens. His masses of Blade Winds did cut down several ogres, but a Heroically Speedy Lord Warden quickly cut him down to size. All in all, this is the most effective game I've ever played.

So, how do I tighten it? My armies were mostly Warden-centric, backed up by frontlines of Vine summons and flanked by longbows. I largely ignored the rest (with the exception of a wandering troop of flanking Avalon Knights which gladly lent support to several other armies). I've essentially ignored all of Man's other troops, since they tend not to be alive very long.