Early Game, Mid Game, and End Game... What's the goal of each?

[Cainehill]

Spacepain:
I tried Mictlan a few times and was repeatedly whomped, same goes with Machaka, Vanheim, Ermor (all 3 themes), etc...

Machaka I've played several times and (after initial confusion) done pretty well against the easy AI, up until the demo turn limit kicks in at least.

One thing that helped me was figuring out that Machaka's best spider units (Hunter Lords / Black Hunters - the others, imo, need a priest for morale) are great, especially with any half-decent blessing bonus. Great morale, armor, movement rates, and the Hunters are sacred, so cheap to maintain even if expensive to buy.

Machaka's Bane Spider assasin/scouts are also great - the heaviest armored assassins I've seen in the demo, good weaponry and morale. Quite capable of dealing with most commanders (cavalry are one notable exception - Bane Spider on a stick).

I'm not huge yet on the magic myself - haven't forged an item in 50+games, and limitted magic. Still - some summonables are grand - Summer Lions (Conjuration 4, requires Fire Magic 3) for example. But mostly magic has been in a supporting role to melee combat.

Good luck.

[Taqwus]

Vanheim's Van units are actually rather brutal, considering halfway good prot of 14 plus Glamour. I tried them out with a Water-9 dragon to assist; the dragon, a Vanjarl prophet, Vanlade the Hero and roughly a dozen Vans whomp independent forces of 3 commanders plus 80-90 HI/militia quite handily. If I'd bothered bringing along air gems for Arrow Fend, perhaps casualties would be zero instead of ~1-2.
'course, it was basically game over when the Ancient Presence event apparently killed approximately 26000 people in my capital, but that's beside the point.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by ywl:

Consequently, you can afford an expensive pretender, and more importantly use a pretender with low dominion strength (e.g. mage or dragon).

Low dominion strength can potentially be risky for Ulm, as a poor dominion can leave you rather vulnerable to being priested or dominioned. I ended up having my dominion creeping into Condors' territory despite making no real attempt to push it simply because Ulm isn't any good at maintaining dominion, and a low dominion score just exacerbates the problem.