Turn 4 is up!
Agree, wouldn't hurt for us to talk about strategy.
Globals: I'm not beelining for any globals, though given that all my best summons are astral based I'll be looking to put up the astral gem generating ones (Stellar Focus in the medium term, and ultimately Arcane Nexus). That plus clamming should give me a more than healthy astral income, which will power my late game.
Tackling AIs: My medium term goal after grabbing as many indies around me as possible will be to stomp the AI on the southern continent that sits between me and C'tis (endomorphious). I want a border with someone friendly, and I think this will be the easiest way to get it. From the monkey perspective, the southern AI dies first. Or at least gets marginalized. If he gets stomped down to a tiny size, then he can be contained and ignored.
I don't like the submarine Atlantis AI. I don't have a plan for him yet (it'll probably be thugs / SCs), but those amphib nations can be a real pain. I'm just hoping he doesn't cause too much trouble until our research is high enough to provide some solutions.
Hammers: I can make hammers, once I've researched some constr. It wasn't the first thing I was going to research, but it's obviously on the list of things I must have. If noone else has easy access to earth paths, I can make hammers for you guys - I'll want some gems from you guys for them though. No markup though, I'll trade them to you at cost (which should be 12 gems once I've got my own hammers).
Trolls might be a problem. Or they might not. The trolls you get from the earth summoning spell are meh unless you buff them (big bags of regenerating hit points, with low att/def values - like 10/9 ?). The AI ones in Semi-Rand might be less crappy though - they might have some stars, or be a better class of unit to start with. And even the crappy ones can be a problem for units that don't have high enough def; Str22 + decent weapon means they will one hit kill most human troops. You went with a bless approach though, right? If you send enough sacreds you'll probably do well against them, but scouting might be in order. I like Doo's suggestion about sending a commander to attack with orders to retreat. Get some info - find out what you're up against before going after a (potentially) tough province like this one.