Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

What units are used as astral assassins?

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

No, and neither would a Shroud. A pretender can't get his own blessings back from these items.

Fear(+5). You can also get a cheap Fear(+21) on a Mound Fiend if you give him a Shroud and an Horror Helmet.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

I did a series of tests using maximum harsh scales to get maximum blessings. I was able to get all 4's plus a 9 or a couple 9's even. My final judgement was that it could be a viable strategy for the right person. Various nations have immunities (or even preference) for some harsh scales so that only about half of the scales were really affecting them. If you took really low dominion and cheap castles you might even manage to keep your main armies outside of the affect of your scales entirely. For a nation with really good sacred units it could be quite a power punch. Unfortunately it took more careful managment than I can do.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

Ermor under Ashen Empire or Soul Gate can pretty much be hammered on the harsh scales. I'd usually take turmoil, sloth, death and misfortune 3. The misfortune 3 sounds like a good idea (ie, you'll get more corpses through random events) but it's not that great because I find you get an awful lot of emigrations instead. That's ok though, as they'll be dying eventually.

I'm still pretty new to the game but I'm finding Ermor's Ashen Empire to be incredibly overpowered (at very difficult AI) using harsh scales, a 9 death magic Prince of Death and a 9 starting dominion.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

Jim, the AI is well known to be unable to handle undead hordes such as Ashen Empire Ermor's. If you're playing SP, you really should eliminate it from your roster, either for you or even for the other AIs.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

I found this out the hard way, never having played Serpent Cult Pythium before my game mentioned above. I had to have a thistle mace with nearly every mage I owned in order to cast charm. One thing I did like is the W1 with those guys for the quickness.

I had heard that SC Pythium was not very good. I think this is mostly correct, but I wish the game could have Lasted long enough to have my 20+ nature-blessed berserked hydras fighting the 50+ devils. Would have been very interesting to see how it went. The devils are not fully immune to the poison.

I may have to test this out if I get some time.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

Actually I've was playing it MP (well 2 of us and 15 AI on Orania map) at normal level and we both crushed the AI out of sight. We tried at difficult AI and continued to crush the AI so I took up Caelum instead (my friend made the quantum leap from Ulm to Tien Chi http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif).

Looking through the archive, it seems I've picked another monster as my new favourite race. Dammit....I'll give Machaka a go next then.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

also, the AI's have much greater difficulty w/ high indy str. As such, and perhaps counter-intuitively, crushing the AI's is much easier the harder you think you set it (indy-str-wise, at least).

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

Yeah the game we had panther was going quite well and was a lot of fun but the game got bugged because of the damn patch. It made the game so buggy that it actually time warped the game back several turns. Everything was just messed up. It was a shame we had to kill that game =[.

Re: 10 Magic Strength Pretenders....
 

I think R'lyeh has the only national assassins with astral - I should have said "astral hit squads", which are put together with the sole purpose of getting a chance to cast Astral Duel at enemy astral mages, especially the pretender.

Cheap disposable astral mages, perhaps using communion, aiming to get lucky, as even an S3 has a small chance of killing an S8.