Your mage guild gives experience, your mages a stronger, you have an archmage hero that can teach level 1 spells, and a world spell that buffs your arcane units. Amurites, simply put, have a strong arcane branch of the tree. They even have the arcane trait on both of their leaders.

In addition, firebows are a longbow replacement that have access to fireball. This makes them extremely strong if rushed, because they can kill stacks of units very effectively making them great defenders and city attackers until the enemy can gain access to stronger units and strong collateral.

Finally, Govannon can teach level 1 spells to any unit, so Amurites can get extra use out of the second tech line they research. Firebows can learn level 2 spells this was as well (since they have channeling II.) Basically, you have an amazing early game unit (Firebows) and a ton of synergy with the arcane line. Use at least one of these.

Balseraphs are very much a jack of all trades master of none (unless you pick Keelyn.) They have a lot of unique units and unique buildings, but most of them are just as good as what they replace. Even you world spell is a blanket benefit: a double length golden age. You just do things well.

Festivals is where you get your biggest benefit. Now, Fesitvals is already a very strong technology. Markets are awesome and so are Carnivals. The fact that you can research an economic tech and get a solid unit (Freaks) is a very good bonus. This is especially true in FFH/EitB - most techs are expensive, and either economic or militaristic. Being able to double up essentially saves you a ton of beakers. Freaks are also very nice to have - you're once again doubling military and economy. You get to keep all of the awesome freaks, and the shitty ones get turned into happiness and culture.

Finally, you need to play to your trait's strengths. Perpentach has three traits, but can't keep them. So make sure you use the traits as well as you can while you have them. For example, while you're creative plop down some monuments occasionally, or while you're arcane produce some adepts, or while you're spiritual make some priests and swap some civics. As Keelyn you want to abuse the hell out of summons and puppets. As Furia you want to fight people early and often, so make use of your powerful combat traits and ability to play with paper thin defenses.

You want to be at war, and you want religion. You have access to Crusade, which just gives you tons of bonuses while at war. You have access to demagogues, who are super cheap units who are very strong but require you to be at war. You can get extra demagogues from towns and cities by using your world spell.

Basically, you want to mess stuff up with your melee and religious units. You have all sorts of awesome stuff, but most of it goes away when you stop being at war. So your job is to just always be at war and killing people.

You make vampires and you kill things with your super units.

Really though, the Calabim murder spree begins at Code of Laws. Instead of Courthouses you get Governer's Mansions. This building gives you extra production for your unhappy population. This means that every pop point is +1 hammer, and every anger generating move is potentially more. The largest benefit though is that you can pump up your cities and be a dick to the population and still be okay. That's important, because you want huge cities.

For your vampires to feast on. Now Vampires - you can build them directly after you have a training yard, a mansion, and the Feudalism tech. You can also build your hero, Losha Valas, and turn any level 6 unit into a vampire. Vampires can eat population for experience. Regular vampires also know Death I (skeleton), Body I (haste), and have the potential to learn Death II (spectre) and Body II (regeneration).

So not only do you get units with absurd amounts of experience (and so tons of disgustingly powerful promotions), but they are also powerful spellcasters. Basically, you want to get your vampiric army formed and then go mess stuff up because your units are absurd.

Ashen Veil also synergizes very well with the Calabim. Your Vampires, while absurd, don't do any collateral damage, so Ritualists are an extremely potent addition to your army. The AV civic sacrifice the weak is also amazing for the the Calabim. HALVING the food costs for growth is just super good. It means you regrow super fast after feasting, and you can grow super huge cities. Keep in mind it doesn't even matter if you only have a happy cap that's kinda low, like 8. Just grow your cities anyway - the fact that you get 1 hammer from each unhappy pop means you can just keep growing and growing and still produce fine. You're really resilient to blight too - just eat your cities down and then you don't care that they're shrinking, because it benefits you anyway.

Basically, abuse your vampires. The enemy can eventually get strong units and powerful collateral and then vampires become less absurd, so you really want to hit your timing well. It's easy to fall off because you'll generally have starved your cities and will have subpar infrastructure for actually teching and producing much, so you can fall behind if you mess up.

You start out allied to the barbarians, but suffer a tech penalty. Your world spell gives you a bunch of free barbarian units around the map, often stronger than what other players can have. Warrens allows you to double your unit production.

Basically, you want to kill or choke everyone you can as fast as you can. You want to drown everyone in a sea of units. You can't beat them in tech, so you need to beat them in production and abuse the fact that you can run around unmolested by barbarians. Normally you have to play super safe so a barbarian spawn doesn't wander into your base and kill you. The Clan give zero fucks, and can survive with very little defenses and can attack over great distances because no barbarians will get in the way.

You really want to do some damage early on though. The -10% to tech means that you are always behind, especially when the enemy has strong builder traits. However, Warrens doubling your production means you can get great returns from adding cities and adding hammers to your cities. You can't really fight for tech, but it's hard to keep up with endless streams of units.

Basically, you need an advantage. Then you can tech up or go all in. You just really need to make something happen with your free barbarians and your created units, or you are behind.

You can build most units without the normal building requirement, and your world spell adds a wolf for every unit you have. Basically, you're another rush civilization. You want to kill someone with a bunch of units before they can build enough to defend themselves. Failing that, you choke people.

Charadon is a lot like the Clan, because you also have the barbarian trait. This means you cannot win an even tech race - you need to make everyone else weaker or you need to gain an advantage from someone. This can be taking cities or forcing diplomatic concessions.

Mahala can't rush as hard because she need to deal with barbarians. However, she has a much better time competing for tech, so you can actually put up a decent fight for a long time. You fall off when other civilization benefits kick in, or the fact that you have no arcane line or libraries kicks in. So you still need to do damage or benefit, but you have a longer timer to do so.

You have the tolerant trait, which is a neat little bonus. You have a somewhat interesting monument replacement that gives great prophet points and a promotion, but unhealth. Otherwise you play very generic. Aside from your world spell you are basically a vanilla civ. No bonuses no maluses. I guess you can lower the AC if you want.

Your world spell, however, kicks everyone out for a long while. It's possibly the best world spell in the game, and completely makes up for everything else. Just play normally, but remember you can always have several more turns before you need to defend anything.

You're a vanilla civilization that can't use religions, has awesome leader traits, and randomly gets hero units. Do whatever you want (except religion.)

Your mounted units are stronger than normal. Your world spell is blitz and strength for all of your units, but wears off quickly. You start with horses. Basically, the game is telling you to use mounted units, with a strong possibility of rushing someone.

Tasunke is great for rushing, because both his traits are warmongery. Grabbing some early mounted units and running into someone with war cry is extremely devastating. Rhoanna has good builder traits, so she has a weaker rush but can survive on fairly even footing even if she rushes poorly (or doesn't rush at all.)

You're basically a vanilla civ with souped up mounted units. Use mounted units, and then do whatever you want in addition to that. Tasunke wants to rush and does it well, Rhoanna doesn't care.

Illians get lots of fun toys to play with, but you aren't allowed any religion. First, you have stasis. It's incredibly powerful and in multiplayer games normally banned (partly because of power and partly because it's boring to play.) Stasis can be used early to aid a rush, early to try and punish any greedy play, or later on to cripple production and research at an important moment. (For example, stasis wait a few turns and go to war. They can't produce in preparation nor can they reinforce.)

What really makes the Illians shine is their Priests of Winter. You get three of these from a special ritual at Philosophy. These priests are completely amazing though. They can learn Ice I and Ice II, which gives them two one extremely powerful summons. The priests are also very high strength, and naturally can experience. But really, what's important is the high strength units with super summons that come super early and in a set of three. They are absolutely amazing to rush with.

Illians are the only Civ guaranteed Ice mana, which is also a huge boon for them. You can get a second source from Letum Frigis, but that's it (so no one else can have more than 1 ice). Ice I is a powerful permanent summon powerful support spell, and Ice II is a powerful temporary summon. Both are amazing. Ice III is a massive collateral damage, and is the strongest of its kind. It also turns the terrain to ice, which is useless to everyone else.

Oh, I didn't mention ice? Well you don't mind ice. It's not the best, but you use it just fine. You can turn your own tiles to ice with a Temple of the Hand, and you can affect everyone's tiles with The Deepening. Ice is pretty shitty for everyone else, but you're fine. So this means you can ruin your land for conquest without much trouble, and you can ruin everyone else's land.

Overall the Illians are a very strong aggressive civ. They don't have any economic traits, and both of their traits are strong offensively. So you can't really rely on out-building the enemy. You need to put on pressure whenever you can. Early priests are strong for that, and early units of any category can continue the pressure. If you find Letum Frigis first you get even better by grabbing an additional Aggressive trait.

So just work on getting out the Priests and being aggressive most of the time. You have a rush, but then you still need to be a presence because you will fall behind if you don't continue to apply pressure.

They're not well documented and I've never actually played them. So I'm not really sure how to strategize them beyond "kill everyone."

Khazad eschew most of the arcane line, but make up for this by having all of their units be magic resist, and their mundane collateral (seige units) are much more powerful. In addition, their units are dwarven, giving them poison resistance, double movement in hills, and more effective workers.
This is in addition to the Dwarven Vaults, which necessitate stockpiling gold. This reward you for investing in gold generating mechanics, which then comes around and incentivizes the use of rush buys and unit upgrade as a backup plan (with ingenuity making upgrades more efficient.) After all, if you plan on keeping around a ton of gold then having rush buy as an option means you can always dump that money into something if you need it right now. It's extra security and the possibility to surprise.

Overall, the Khazad only really have two pulls on them: you want to get siege units, because they're a very small investment for a huge amount of power. You also want gold, and lots of it. This leaves you a lot of room to maneuver in though. You can go down any of the tech paths except for the arcane path and do reasonably well.

Runes of Kilmorph is the preferred Dwarven religion most of the time. You get a ton of gold by spreading the religion and by building the shrines. The unique civic is nice, because bonuses to production are always good, your world spell synergizes with building mines, and you can cash rush your buildings. Your world spell, by the way, is a little tricky. The later you use it the more use you get out of it, so it's tough to decide specifically when to use it. Just be careful using it before you have your improvements in place - you might lose out on a bunch of farms and be forced to run windmills when you really would prefer mines.

The normal strategy is to rush RoK just because of how powerful it is when you scale based on gold. Runes is already an extremely powerful religion early on, and synergizing so well with the benefits makes it normally worth rushing. It comes quickly and easily in the tech tree too - just mining (a necessary worker tech, and you start with the prerequisite) and mysticism (unlocks the powerful god king civic and elder councils.)

However, other religions also synergize well. Veil is always powerful, Order let's you save a lot of money from maintenance, OO is strong for early culture and is always good when naval combat is present, Empyrean nets you an archmage and is the only real counter to recon unit strategies, and Esus gives you a hodgepodge of benefits everywhere, including allowing you to hire nightwatch units with cash.

Overall, you want to prioritize gold and keep in mind that your collateral is super good. Everything else you do is just generally strong because of magic resistance and the ability to double move in hills. Runes is amazing for you early on. One other little note is that you can really easily get sanitation, so going for great people or supporting really non-lush areas is very easy, since you have construction and sanitation on your desired tech path.

You get a small number (scales on map size) of super cities. The rest of your settlers become settlements, that can claim territory but don't make anything on their own. However, settlements don't cost maintenance, so you can spam them anywhere you want, and you don't need to rely on having a strong city location.

Because you want really good city locations, you might need to settle at larger than normal distances (this isn't even considering that your cities are huge and already settle further apart than normal), and you have to deal with protecting random settlements, you really want to use Centaurs. See, Centaurs are the Kurio's replacement for mounted units, and they are amazing. Centaurs can defend (so you don't also need regular city defender - just all Centaurs), and can run really far (further if they sprint) so you can easily defend your large territory with a small number of units.

That is actually a really key part too - more than just mobility, the fact that you can skimp on army count is really useful. Having only three or so cities that can produce means that you have a hard limit on production. It doesn't matter how many hammers your city actually produces if you're only able to make one crappy unit. This also means that you don't want to dabble in tech - you want to ramp up to end game techs early and use your super cities to pump out super units early. Three warriors a turn isn't scary, but three champions a turn can be.

To aid your endeavors you also get a couple other bonuses, and can synergize well with a few wonders. The jeweler (unlocked at smelting) and tailor (unlocked at crafting) buildings give you extra happy and commerce. Your cottages upgrade an extra time, becoming enclaves. Guild of the Nine allows you to bypass your limited unit production by allowing you to just buy almost any number of units. It also lets you "produce" at your settlements. Tower of Complacency makes one city grow till the food cap, and Pillar of Chains rewards you for having a huge city. Order high priests are effectively a Tower of Complacency in every city.

Overall, you just want to abuse Centaurs and any mechanics that synergize with super cities, such as cottage spam. (Keep in mind settlements can work cottages for you, to keep them growing.)

One of my favorite civs in the game. The Lanun are masters of the ocean, but this does more than give them naval dominance.

So first off, the basic mechanics. You get extra food from water tiles, extra commerce from water resources, a super cottage for water (but they must be space out), and your naval units move faster. You'll notice that most of this is economic benefit, and not militaristic benefit.

So what are the actual benefits here? Well consider a normal coastal city. Your water tiles are 1/0/2 and 1/0/1. These tiles kind of suck. You can make them better though - a harbor (fishing), lighthouse (sailing), and shipyard (iron working), all come together and make 2/1/3 and 2/1/2 tiles. Still, these tiles aren't that amazing. A grassland aristofarm is 3/0/3 or 3/0/2. Grassland aristofarms come out earlier, are easier to set up (just use some workers you produced at an already strong city, rather than building infrastructure at a brand new city), and have more food.

So for most civs, a coastal site is only good if it has good resources. It simply takes forever to set up. Look at the Lanun, and you see a completely different scenario. Your coastal tiles can improve all the way to 3/1/3 and you get 1-3 Pirate Coves, which can eventually make for a 5/3/7 tile.

Even without any infrastructure at all your tiles are a respectable 2/0/2, and adding a pirate cover gives you a 2/0/4, then a 3/1/5, then a 4/2/6 tile. You normally get two of those in a coastal site, which makes them absurdly good when your happy cap is something like 6 and that represents a third of your tiles.

And then you need to remember that coastal cities generally give better trade routes, and a lot of coastal infrastructure gives trade routes, and a lot of trade route benefits are doubled for coastal cities. I was playing a SP game earlier on a fractal map and I was ending up with cities that had 6 or so trade routes giving about 5 commerce per trade route. I was getting over 100 points in my GNP from trade routes alone.

____

The most important thing to watch out for as Lanun is normally production. Coastal cities are really nice, but a normal water tile gives no hammers. Only once you've gotten Iron Working and build a shipyard do you get a single hammer. Pirate Coves alleviate this by giving some hammers, but ultimately coastal cities are very weak production cities.

To get around this, you normally want a good number of inland production cities, you want to keep your coastal cities near hills or production resources, you want to grab the Heron Throne, or you want to use Cash Rushing. All of these mechanics are very effective at managing production.

As for tech path, you generally want to avoid mounted units, archers, and recon units. They aren't strictly bad for you, but the other lines synergize much more effectively. Going down the melee path gives you shipyards and unlocks some ships. The arcane line gives you a lot of goodies, and arcane units riding on boats can cast spells as far as I'm aware. Running around with floating eyes and fair winds is nice. Religion gives you a lot of benefits depending on the religion you go.

As for which religion to choose, if any, you are a really flexible civ. AV is always good, and your ability to tech super fast with coastal sites can do some silly things. Lanun are a popular Hyborem rush civ because of that. Even ignoring the Hyborem Rush you still get massive collateral and increased research.

Runes of Kilmorph is good because it unlocks cash rushing and benefits production. The extra gold is also nice for Hannah, because that is increased with Financial. The early units are also great for their tech level, which lets you get to this religion early safely.

OO is also great, and the synergy between water walking demons and coastal cities should be obvious. The ability to spread OO for culture at your new cities is also REALLY REALLY GOOD. You generally need to pop borders before any coastal site is good because of how you need to position your pirate coves. So anything that gives free border pops is amazing.

Order is more of a utility religion than anything else, so it's not usually good to rush. However, if you're investing into religion it's nice to switch and get the maintenance reduction. You really benefit from spamming cities everywhere because you can make use of really shitty terrain as long as there's some water, so making these cities less costly is nice. This works well with Falamar in particular because he will be shitting out settlers all over the place.

Empyrean is a late game religion and a recon unit counter, so it's fairly niche. Consider switching to Empyrean if you're headed towards T3 priests and the high level tech, because Crown of Brilliance and Chalid are amazing. Esus is probably not for you, considering your lack of synergy with the mounted and recon lines. The gold is nice, but you can get that from Kilmorph.

As for things to focus on, consider going down the economic branch and using a cottage economy, rather than aristofarms. Foreign Trade comes from that branch and works with cottage economics, and it is simply the best civic for you. It speeds up your pirate cove growth and gives you extra trade routes in every city. It really rewards spamming out cities, because you naturally get powerful cities for trading (Sea Heaven +50% trade route yield, Lighthouse +1 trade route, Great Lighthouse +2 trade routes in coastal cities, overseas trade bonus.) Guilds is along that tech line, and opens up cash rushing things and gives you an extra trade route as well. It also lets you use unlimited engineers, which is one way to grab extra production out of coastal sites (considering that every coastal tile is at LEAST 3 food with a lighthouse, and potentially much more with an improvement on it.)

Overall though, just be aware that your tiny coastal cities are extremely potent, and your developed coastal cities can rival inland cities. Utilize this economic advantage to push for whatever tech route you plan to win with, but be aware that you need to remember production.

Both of the Elven civs are extremely similar, so they can be though of in the same vein.

The most immediate elven strength is their economy. They can build improvements on top of forests and ancient forests, but their workers work more slowly than normal workers. This gives them the strongest late game economy, because Towns sitting on top of forests or ancient forests are simply amazing.

Elves are very naturally bad at aristofarm economies though, which combined with slower workers means that the elven economy is the slowest to start. Not only can you not get cottages super fast, but you can't even start with super aristofarms (well you can, but you get worse farms slower.) Then there is the need to get Priests of Leaves to create forests, and the Elven economy is very definitely a slow starter.

Fellowship of Leaves is the obvious religion choice. It's by no means the only religion you can have - Runes is always powerful early on, Esus is strong for the Svartalfar, and the others are possible. However, AV isn't that great because you will likely burn your own forests away. As for FoL, the real benefit is that you can create forests and create ancient forests. This gives you eventual tile yields of 3/2/6 for flat land, and 2/3/6 for hills. For a normal civ the best tiles they can get at 2/1/7 or 1/2/7. At a full size 20 city this means you get an extra 20 food and 20 production, all for just 20 commerce (at most, usually less.) And this is only if they invest in cottage spam as well. That 20 food can become another 10 specialists, so you can easily make up the commerce difference and more. Consider even just 10 regular sage specialists - that's +30 beakers without any other benefits.

In addition, the Guardian of Nature civic means that you can reach these absurd city sizes, because your happy cap just shoots up like a maniac from all your forests. Guardian of Nature alone can cover a city up to size 20! It even improves healthiness, even though forests already do that. You can survive at giant city sizes even after blight hits a lot of the time.

Now for the differences: Svartalfar have the Sinister trait (+1 attack on Recon units), so they benefit from going down that tech path. Animal Handling, Poisons, Feral Bond, Animal Mastery, and Guilds are all stronger for the Svarts. In addition, the FoL unique units, Fawns and Satyrs, are stronger for the Svartalfar as well. Then you look at the Svart traits - Arc/Rai, Org/Sum, Agg/Exp. All three leaders have a combat heavy trait. It's clear that they are designed to be scary at some point - your +1 attavk strength and things like Raiders, Summoner, and Aggressive all make you a scary opponent. Finally, Alazkan the assassin is really strong and his item is super good.

Svarts can afford to go Esus as well, especially as Volanna (Agg/Exp) who doesn't need to grab Arcane units. Esus gives a lot of cool recon bonuses, the super good Nox Noctis, and the ability to use a few useful spells (blur, poisoned blade, potentially regeneration), which is also nice. It also kinda is nice with your world spell - make some sneaky units and then attack with then using hidden nationality. Although your WS is pretty weak in multiplayer, considering it's usually obvious which player controls the "barbarian" sinister recon units.

Now for the Ljosalfar: first off, you actually have a useful world spell. March of the Trees is both a rush spell and an anti-rush spell, so use it wisely. It damages your economy, so it really needs to eithr save your life or end someone else's. Secondly, you have stronger archery units. This isn't actually too useful though, as archery units don't do too much. Your hero is good early on, but weaker later on, so he's nice to build fast but mostly ignorable if you don't.

Your traits also support being a builder more than the Svartalfar too - Phi/Rai, Spi/Cre, Exp/Arc. All of those have at least one strong builder trait, if not two. So while the Svarts need to get something done with their military (which they kind of need because they can't rely on March to save them), Ljosalfar just need some time alone.

Both elven civs can't use any siege units, which does mean that to conquer anything you need either an overwhelming number of units, or arcane/divine collateral. This is partly why the Svartalfar have so many arcane benefits - arcane collateral makes the most sense for them. So normally you want to go a recon/arcane combo. The Ljosalfar can go for arcane collateral as well, but they can also afford to wait until they get Empyrean rank 3 priests, or they can simply wait until their economic superiority forces an enemy out of his borders.

Overall, the elves have a super economy, but need time to set it up. Svartalfar do so with scary recon units, while Ljosalfar do so with their world spell and good builder traits.

The Luchuirp love their golems. The big difference in tech path is that your axemen unlock at construction, not at bronze working. The secondary difference is that your other tech trees are stunted. No rangers or beastmasters for your recon tech. No horse archers for archery/mounted, and no marksmen for archery. For the most part you are relying on the melee, arcane, and religion branches of the tech tree. Your workers are golems as well, which allows them to be built without food and makes them much faster workers. However, this does mean that you cannot use food to build them, making food weaker as a resource for the Luchuirp.

Construction is a very high valued tech for the Luchuirp - it unlocks most of the units you get from the melee line, and is already a strong tech without including that. Barnaxus also unlocks at construction, and he is a very important unit for you. He is your hero, but doesn't gain passive experience. What makes him special is that a combat promotion on Barnaxus gives the equivalent empower promotion (1/2 strength of combat promotions) - an incredible bonus, especially when you consider that golems cannot otherwise gain promotions. He can be rebuilt if he falls in combat, but it does remove all of his promotions. Also, you need to make sure that no enemies can pick up his pieces - you might never get them back, and at the very least you will probably have to pay for it. One other benefit of going for construction is that once you research masonry (a prerequisite) you get your world spell. This creates a golden hammer at every city - you can settle it as a great engineer, or use it as equipment for increased combat strength. One trick you can use is to grab all of the hammers with cheap units, bring them to one city, and delete those units. This allows you to settle the hammers all in a single city, which is much more powerful than spreading them out thinly most of the time.

Your golems are very powerful, and have a strange growth curve. When you unlock a golem they are usually more powerful than anything else on the field. This makes them super good. However, over time they become outstripped by units that can receive buffs and promotions. Barnaxus changes this though - being able to grant your golems empower I-V means that should you level up Barnaxus, your golems can compete very strongly. The largest weakness isn't going to be your strength - it's your inability to have mobility. None of your golems can move. You can't apply haste to golems, you can't give them mobility, and you can't build horse archers or rangers, so your options for mobile units are very low. Your only real options are Pig Riders->Dwarven Homeguard (mounted), and Gargoyles (archery). The mounted units are more out of your way, but eventually have higher strength. Gargoyles are stronger defensively though, being archery units.

While you synergize directly with the melee branch of the tree and eschew most of the other combat branches, you do get bonuses from the arcane tech branch. (The religious tech branch won't synergize too well outside of the passive bonuses. Most of the support spells won't work on your golems, and you don't need priests for collateral damage, since you can easily grab mages or catapults.) In addition to normal arcane bonuses, you have three unique buildings to work with, and all of your adepts can use repair - allowing them to heal mechanical units like golems and siege units. Fire mana and elementalism gives you the Blasting Workshop, and all of your Golems created there can cast Fireball. Shadow mana and necromancy grant you the Adularia Chamber, granting all golems produced there invisibility. Finally, sun mana with divination gives you the Pallens Engine, and all golems produced there have perfect sight. Alteration is a much less useful magic branch for you - most of the spells don't affect your units, and you get no special building from it. The others all work well though - they have their normal uses in addition to potentially buffing most of your army. One thing to keep in mind as well - Mud Golems (workers) also get these benefits. While perfect sight and invisibility aren't so useful on a 0 strength unit, having cheap units that can cast fireball is effective, especially since mud golems can move two spaces a turn.

Overall, your goal should really just be to abuse the power of golems. They allow you to concentrate your tech and are generally more powerful than anything else on the field. If you can get Barnaxus powered up you will have an extremely potent army. Arcane units can easily be mixed in to provide useful spells like charm person, fireball, blinding light, summons, and the like. Religious tech can still net you strong bonuses, especially with a shrine, but it isn't as important.

You get the cool lightbringer, which is an early disciple unit with sentry. It upgrades into priests, so it allows you to build priests with cash, and it allows you to build priests that start with sentry. Your pagan temple replacement gives disciple units extra experience. If you tech into sorcery you get the citadel of light, which is a defensive structure. You get +1 commerce on deserts, but no don't try to settle in the desert because deserts still suck. (I want this changed by the way. Malakim are supposed to be desert dwellers and yet deserts are still worse than any specialist all the time.)

Varn has really awesome traits. Spiritual works perfectly with +2 experience, Charismatic works really well with passive experience, and adaptive is simply the best. Decius is more focused toward having a huge empire and conquest, and tries to synergize with the Malakim world spell, which gets better as you get cities.

Really though, the Malakim are mostly vanilla. They just focus on disciple units and have traits and small benefits that synergize there, but no huge mechanics changes. This isn't like the Illian, where you have a big early game ritual and terraforming and stuff. You're just good with religions is all.

Pyre zombies are really really good. Basically, that's what makes the Sheaim strong. The only other benefit is that your summons have stigmata, so they are stronger when the armageddon counter goes up. The only other real toy the Sheaim have is the planar gate, which is generally considered very weak as a strategy.

So your game plan really needs to revolve around Pyre zombies. You lose the entire end game melee tree, and everything else you can build is basically the same, so Pyre Zombies are the go to powerhouse for the early game. Averax especially needs to abuse this period of strength - he has a great combat trait and barbarian, which allows him to focus almost entirely to fighting players, rather than fighting the locals. Creative means he can aggressively settle as well, and it also means he doesn't have to waste time in new cities building anything but more Pyre Zombies to fuel the fire. However, he falls off because of the barbarian trait, so he needs to make something happen.

Tebryn and Os-Gabella instead have bonuses towards the Arcane and Religious branches respectively. For the arcane branch the Sheaim synergize mainly with Necromancy. Summoner makes skeletons and spectres even scarier, while Sundered means that those summons are even stronger as long as the AC is increasing. The other powerful necromancy magic is useful as well - rust, pit beasts, blur, and potentially dance of blades are all decent. Pyre Zombies are collateral, so even in the mid game summons and zombies can be used very effectively.

In the religious branch AV is the obvious lore choice, and it matches up well with the Sheaim as well. AV is always strong, and with Sundered any eventual summons are going to be stronger because of the rising AC. Averax can even hop on the AC counter and bump it up, content that his peace will keep the increasingly terrifying barbarians looking elsewhere. The other religions can also be useful, especially for Os-Gaballa considering that she can switch between them at will. However, come end tier tech AV is probably the one choice for Sheaim. Baloths are a great summon, Ring of Fire is amazing collateral, and none of the other religions can really compare with that raw power, especially when you consider that AV gets the most late game benefit out of summoner and sundered. You can take a small detour through the arcane branch as well - summoner and sundered both work well with early death magic, so Death I adepts and Death II mages are a great addition, especially considering how powerful defensive Death I is and how powerful both of them are with additional collateral (Ring of Fire.)

Overall, the Sheaim game plan is to abuse Pyre Zombies to allow the followup of magic or religion to be effective. Averax can go for other branches, but he generally needs to have a large advantage after Pyre Zombies anyway, so it isn't extremely important which path he goes. Tebryn and Os-Gabella are just so tied to magic/religion that is doesn't make any sense to do anything else. But really, Pyre Zombies.

The Sidar only really have two benefits: Their specialists/great people are stronger, and their recon line has additional mobility. They can also turn level 6 units into settled great people, but that's a minor bonus most of the time, considering how difficult it is to get a level 6 unit and how unwilling most players are to part with such a powerful unit.

Economically, the Sidar are absolute masters of an aristofarm economy. Food is more important for the Sidar than for any other civilization, so the fact that one of the two monster economies is heavily farm based is amazing to them. Late in the game they may even choose to remove Aristocracy, considering that a half a specialist is worth more than 2 commerce if they can afford it.

In terms of military the Sidar have divide soul for their recon units - effective this gives Sidar recon units an additional two tiles of influence. In addition, this can be used to pass over obstructed terrain, so this can mean more than two more tiles of influence depending on terrain. Finally, this can be used to move while healing, albeit only two tiles a turn.

The Sidar can actually run any type of military they want though - divide soul is powerful, but not so much that it is automatically more powerful than anything else. The normal detriments to recon units apply - less powerful in a fight compared to a melee unit, and less powerful when fighting cities. This also means that Sidar who go for recon units normally need a second form a military - whether it be archery, melee, mounted, arcane, religious, or naval. Recon units are never enough alone to conquer someone, so a second area of power is usually gathered. Siege is strangely placed for Sidar - the construction tech allows for more farms (and thus more specialists), but catapults are very slow. So Sidar likes the tech, but not the unit. However, the niche of siege is only filled by fire/air mages and AV/OO priests for most of the game, so catapults might be grabbed for war.

In terms of useful tech, wonders, and civics, the real benefits come from great person benefits and anything that allows you to afford more great people. This means agrarianism, aristrocracy, mercantilism, caste system, happiness, healthiness, Guild of Hammers, Hall of Kings, Theatre of Dreams, The Great Library, guilds, liberty, philosophy, national epic, and scholarship are all very powerful for the Sidar (with culture boosters mainly good for a cultural victory.)

Religions are always an option, and all of them have some benefit. OO is generally good on water maps with and here is no different, AV brings powerful early collateral on units that can be hasted and given mobility, Empyrean gets very strong once you have Crown of Brilliance and Chalid, Order gives a lot of benefit to having lots of cities and works well as a secondary tech, Esus synergizes with recon units and has an archmage, Runes has very strong passives for early game and good early units.

The two leaders play similarly, and just excel at different areas. Sandalphon builds a little stronger, with his ability to churn out wonders and great people. Shekinah can snowball earlier with creative, and has the more powerful arcane branch, and so can be more aggressive but can also build very well.