Luchuirp bafflement

You don't need to found a religion to follow it. You do get a disciple when researching every religion tech you know.

mmm... going down fanat just to get stygians to upgrade warriors into seems way too large a detour for the Luchuirp though, instead of just going straight for Sorc.

Sure, but you still want some nice bulky units to run alongside your golems, and you still need something to research AFTER sorcery while building those blasting workshops and new golems. Even with empower 5 wood golems are somewhat frail, and stygians with bronze and a ton of promotions do a great job of protecting them from counterattacks that use roads.

To be honest, to an experienced Luchuip player fireball golems just seem like an Auric Ascended. if you can get them, you don't need them. I find it a lot better to tech get Wood Golems asap, then get OO and the OO follow-up tech, and then priesthood. Cultists will allow you to destroy wellfortified cities whenever they are near water, and can be built directly, and also heal your living troops. When you get a big city that isn't near water you can hit it with wave after wave of replacable golems and even more replacable catapults and it won't last long. The Overlords also gets you Stygians if you want them, and Dwarven Druids if the game drags on that long.

Saverous is quite useful to have. He can get to strength 10 with iron weapons iirc, and can get promotions which is a rare thing in your army. He comes very early, and makes up for the fact that you generally want to keep Barnaxus under lock and key once he gets to Combat 5.

I tend to build the tower of complacency in my capital, and then build an asylum there. In these conditions, the Asylum actually becomes a very strong building, as its main penalty doesn't affect the Luchuip's Golems and even the happiness penalty is canceled out by the Tower. Then ou can build lunatics, which are actually a very nice unit for their hammer cost (the main cost is in building an asylum perhaps).

Once you have done this, I would go for Iron working for strength 10 golems. If you want you can get Sorcery, but it means that your units will fall behind in pure strength. Besides, with the Luchuip a lot of the advantages of a fireball, the fact that it is a ''fast catapult'' that does not slow down your army, are completely irrelevant as your golems can't get Mobility I. You may as well just build a load of catapults at a +much+ earlier tech and use them instead. After all, they can even be repaired in action by your dwarven adepts.

I rarely get beyond KoE in the Sorcery Line. All you need is adepts, and you only need them for repair.

I totally owned once in an MP game as luchuirp. I had two great commerce cities with cottages and acadamies and totally out researched everyone in that game. I also had omgproduction and made a huge army of fireballing, invisible wood golems and gargoyles. Plus some mobility chariots for long range punching

Fireballing, invisible wood golems. Wow.

Still, there's nothing you can do with a Fireballing, invisible wood golem that you can't do with a perfectly average wood golem and some Cultists a whole lot earlier .

Well most of the map was land (tectonics 30%). But sure, the civ I had the most trouble with was the OO following Sidar. Who I think actually started the war against me

I also had the two RoK heroes and stuff.