The Gaming Den

For most nations, the bless strategy is a no-brainer. Either your sacred units (and commanders) are good enough that you are more-or-less compelled to support them with your pretender's build, or they are crap enough that you never bother. An intermediate state, where there's an actual measured choice, is rare, IME. So, in a from-scratch situation, how does one get there? How does one set up sacred units such that one could look at their pretender options and say 'well, X bless would be good, but an expansion SC or rainbow researcher or whatever might be just as good?'

The most common factor for me is availability. When you can pour Eagle Warriors, White Ones, or Flagellants out of every fort, that's strong incentive to support them. When you can only trickle heavy infantry out of your capital, that's strong incentive to ignore them. Build-anywhere heavy infantry might be one way?

A decent number of the giant nations are actually bless optional despite being cap-only.

I think what makes something bless optional is having sacred troops good enough to use, but then regular troops that are also good enough to use, and expensive troops in general. Then scales/versus/bless becomes a very legitimate choice.

In order to have a bless-optional nation you basically need an embarrassment of riches. Mictlan is pushed towards a bless because their non-sacred troops and their out of cap mages aren't anything special. Arco is pushed towards scales as their troops are resource heavy and their recruit-anywhere mage is decent, plus they don't have very good sacred troops. If Arco had Mictlan sacreds you could make either approach work.

When designing your Pretender you basically get to pick two from a list of - Major Bless / Good scales / Awake. For the bless to be optional but not required you have to be able to expand decently without an awake monster, have sacreds worth a bless, but also have troops and mages that reward additional investment. Basically a nation without any glaring weaknesses that need to be filled.