New to Dom 3

[thejeff]

Originally Posted by sffrrrom

I might just try a straight F9W9 Pretender with some fairly vanilla faction next and just try to keep it simple.

The F9W9 imprisoned pretender works for Mictlan because they have good cheap recruitable everywhere sacreds, plus sacred summons. (And even then it's a great bless against the AI, not so much against other players. It gives maximum killing power, but not much for survivability. A good player will use blockers, archers and spells to slaughter the jaguars before they reach anything important.) Since most nations don't have such good sacreds they won't benefit as much from it, so it's not worth it for them. Or they'll have few big tough sacreds who benefit more from being made even harder to kill.
Essentially you can't take a build for one nation and throw it onto another one.