Thank you for the elaborate and convincing response
I could be argumentative and say things like - "put more magic on your pretender", "get a minor bless", "take an awake SC with great scales apart from sloth", "Crank up many castles so sloth wouldn't prevent you from mass recruiting". Instead of saying any such things I think I'll take your excellent advise and just setup two SP games - one that will follow your advise to the letter and a 2nd that would dump those sloth points on something else (I'll try to come up with something good). I suspect it is very likely that the first game will look up much better - Regardless, this is the first nation that I ever consider taking prod-3 a valid choice. Up until now I have never taken anything other than sloth 3, be it SP or MP. I thank you for helping me see the good side of the production scale.