[Agema]

With neutral magic, Daughters are 80GP for 4 research, Mothers are 130GP for 5 research, so daughters are more cost efficient. This advantage would be enhanced with positive magic scales; however, it would be less advantageous with drain. If you took positive magic scales, I'd agree daughters would be a more attractive proposition.

On the other hand, a mother gets you a mage worth a damn in a fight. I agree there's no point buying crones early on, whole first year maybe (you could send out some E/W ones site searching). There's nothing they can cast early on that mothers can't, and you've better things to spend money on than crones. However, if an emergency arises early on and you need to pack the mages out, you do NOT want to be stuck with the limited capabilities of daughters, especially if your god hasn't woken up yet.

Funnily enough, I did initially include some pretender options similar to those you suggest (dormant with better scales, etc.) but removed them from the final version. I think the god will be very busy when it arrives forging and summoning, and there's a much greater risk that by the time it wakes up it has few or no gems of the right types (particularly Astral, Death) to do anything with, which will slow down development a lot. But I'd consider your suggestion very viable.

Tolkien - you're quite right, empowerment is 30 gems 1-2.