EA Abysia - Looking for advice, and bread

[Jazzepi]

Does anyone have any hints or tips for playing EA Abysia? I'm a little befuddled in how to play them, and what a good pretender strategy is. I feel like their troops are so resource intensive that you have to take order 3 production 3 misfortune 2.

Once you've got your scales set like that you don't have any room for growth (also, you can't take death because of the old age problem) and I don't feel like you can play with drain either considering how weak their research base is.

So no matter what I do I end up with scales like this

Order 3
Production 3
Heat 3
Growth 0
Misfortune 2
Magic 1

Then I can't figure out what sort of pretender I want x.x

Any help would be much appreciated.

Jazzepi