The unfortunate thing about early vs late bloomers is that they scale WILDLY based on the type of game being played. Like, the current NG game is squarely in the lategame and while many people are crippled no one is huge that I know of and no one is 100% dead yet. Because its a big fricken game.
I'm out of the game and Turland AI'd
And if you REALLY think "no one is huge" you've been paying even less attention to Rizdos then I was
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As for my fave nations, Atlantis was a favorite in Dom3, but they got somewhat nerfed in this one. Pangea is always good, but the nation that surprised me with how much I like it has to be LA Caelum.
I did not expect to love birdmans this much.
It has TWO ranged sacreds, one that's a fast cheap one and one that is heavily armored and generally not gonna die instantly. With F9D9 bless these bastards kill ERRYTHING. And of course there are MAMMOTHS for if you need something to hit heavy in melee, though that's...problematic if they rout.
But where I found it shines is it's pretty much PERFECT for Corpse Man spam. It has plenty of low level earth mages (with resource creation as a bonus) to make lightning rods, and then Air/Death for the spell and that ring that ALSO boosts Frankenstein yield.
So you send in the Frankensteins as a wall to hold off enemies while your arrows WRECK ERRYBODY.
And of course the focus on Construction is handy for pretty much EVERYTHING, so it has a bit of versatility too.