Yep it's play by email. The game hosts after everyone sends in their turns to llamaserver or if times runs out.
I'd offer advice for your pretender except I never play that nation
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I guess some general advice couldn't hurt.
Try out all your pretender setups and see which ones give you a decent early good game expansion (about one province a turn). You can use supercombatant pretenders which lose their worth late game or maybe you have a certain national troop or commander that would do well for expansion. If your early expansion requires use of recruited units are they expensive or resource intensive? Do your scales compensate for that? If you have good troops you probably won't need a SC pretender but appropriate scales are more important and you might want to go with a bless, rainbow or late game caster pretender.
Pick from the pretender choices that have the best early expansion and see which one would work well with your vaguely defined late game strategy. Common examples of late game strategies include use of global enchantments, lots of troops backed by mages casting battle spells, summoned troops, thugs and supercombatants. Think about what your mages are capable of casting. Are they capable of summoning good units? Can they cast good evocation or battle buffs? Will your mages need boosters? Are they capable of forging those boosters or will your pretender need to forge them? Can your pretender cast big late game spells like globals?
Just some stuff to think about.