[Baalz]

Oh no Ming, I wasn't insulted. I wouldn't be posting here if I wasn't inviting people to try and poke holes in my arguments.

Well, I did the test you suggested, and though I have to admit it was more even than I expected, MA Oceana was still crushed.

Setup:
MA Oceana
40 knights - 4000 gold
11 bishop fish - 1380 gold
40 Oceana Tritons - 400 gold
11 PD - freeby
1 troop herder commander (not factored)
total - 5780 gold

EA Oceana
1 bishop fish - 180 gold
40 knights (with an E/W bless) - 3400 gold
1 troop herder commander (not factored)
30 Oceana tritons - 300 gold
total - 3880 gold

Losses -
MA Oceana 1/12 commanders 71/80 troops
EA Oceana 0/2 commanders 29/70 troops (mostly tritons)


Test 1 - Despite everybody being evenly spread out EA Oceana managed to get 3 knights to flank around and kill all the bishop fish due to their amazing amount of movement point. Uuuugly.

Test 2 - I scripted everyone to attack closest so that wouldn't happen again.
Losses -
MA Oceana 1/11 commanders 71/80 troops
EA Oceana 0/2 commanders 29/70 troops (mostly tritons)


MA Oceana got off 7 volleys of smite. As the math suggested generally 1-2 knights were killed by smite per turn when they were targeted, though it often hit tritons decoys because it had more chance of doing HPs of damage. Nothing else caused significant damage to the EA Knights who sported fashionable 22 defense and 21 protection.

Now, on to my reservations.
1) I don't feel like the MA Oceana sacreds are cost effective though they did surprisingly well in this particular setup. Dumping gold into them would have slowed my initial expansion quite a bit. Massing capital only sacreds is a slow process which can't be done after my initial expansion in time to meet my first fight. I also shudder to think how this setup (which takes almost a year to mass up the troops and commanders for) would fare against R'yleh chaff and mindblasters if I'd ended up fighting them.
2) Recruiting a significant number of non-mages in the early part of the game is crippling to research. Granted, one of my bones about MA Oceana is that there is hardly anything worth researching, but still 10 bishop fish is costing on top of the gold 70 research points per turn - *forever* even after they die. Does anyone think landing an extra 14 lightless lanterns in year one might be significant?
3) The idea of landing a significant number of fish amulets to get a dozen bishop fish out of the water, with practically no air income and..well, crippled research from massing bishop fish seems prohibitive. This seems completely infeasible out the water in an early enough time frame to be relevant.
4) I've seen W/S on EA Oceana several times, astral has a good synergy with a water bless on high defense units and Oceana is obviously planning on fighting R'yleh at some point. This would go even worse under that scenario.
5) This tactic has steadily diminishing effectiveness as research progresses. Even if you can somehow manage to leverage bishop fish into an effective initial force, what do you suppose you'll do once shark attacks (smite will almost always target the high HP low MR sharks) and shadow blasts start being cast, vengeance of the dead is being spammed at you, and thugged out high MR kings of the deep start teleporting in? Not to mention fighting above the water once real evocation spells start throwing down massively more damage than our smite can (assuming you get the priests up there in the first place).