Re: Eriu guide
 

How about taking a blood pretender with Eriu? (particularily a fountain of blood, which is useful for opening that path in general?) Blood empowerments are cheap, and it opens up communions for your national mages

Re: Eriu guide
 

PD: I've been trying this a bit, and I must say it works really well. 15 gems and you have a flying thug

However, I have also found (playing against Ermor) that if your opponent has any cursing abilities, you are likely to meet trouble: you will suffer only one dot of damage, but afflictions will pile up. Note that even after this happens your thug can survive a few battles, but sooner or later he'll end up pwned (though even in the battle he gets pwned he tends to destroy a lot of stuff)

Just saying

Re: Eriu guide
 

Oh, and I'm also under the impression that the eye shield works as well as the vine one. Maybe better

Re: Eriu guide
 

Necromanticus threadicus!

Has anybody tried Eriu with CBM 1.6? Hero Blade would appear to me as the tool Eriu has been lacking (a way to stop SC's), but has anybody tried that? The excellent thugs Eriu can field just would seem to me to be natural SC killers with a hero blade (there are other spesific SC killers, but hero-blade would appear to be the catch-all weapon (no matter if facing tartarians, elemental royalty, angels or arch-demons)), but then of course the opponent would plan for that, so not sure how viable it would be.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Hmm... if you took an imprisoned lord of the forest with an e9f6n4 bless, dom 6, O3S2H1M1, you would have exactly 1 point left. Sidhe have 14 base attack skill and a hero's blade gives +3, so blessed and equipped they'd have an attack skill of 20. Then add a burning pearl for good measure. That would be pretty tough to dodge.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I don't think taking blood on your pretender is a very good way to leverage into communion slaves. Either you have blood and/or astral already, in which case you already have slaves, or else you have to spent pretender time scaring up blood slaves to empower mages to B1. I can see blood as a good way to plug your *pretender* into an existing blood/astral nation's communions, but I just don't see it as a good way to bootstrap. It would be better to take earth/astral on your pretender and forge slave matrices.

-Max

Re: Eriu guide
 

I've played a little SP fun with those thugs, and one thing you need to be wary about is flyers. Getting yourself jumped on turn one is really painfull, as it is precisely the time your thug will last without his bless/buffs !

Never thought I'd have to be afraid of Caelum PD...

Re: Eriu guide
 

Flying PD is risky for a lot of low end self buffing raiders. I've lost plenty of thugs to Pangaea too.

The first time I played around with Sidhe Lords in SP, I was surrounded by R'lyeh & Abysia. Without more MR gear they can only raid R'lyeh in pairs (or more) and relying on Barkskin leads to problems with Abysia.