Some Ashen Empire Ermor questions,need some advice
 

I am thinking of playing Ermor in MP game soon.

However I haven't spent much time playing Ermor before, mostly played against Ermor. Also I have heard it has been changed quite a bit in Dom3.

So I've put together a list of question that I hope other more familiar with Ermor players might be able to answer.

Here it is:

0. Could somebody well familiar with this nation describe these changes for me?

1. How quickly Ermor's dominion kills population? (in numbers please if you know them). I assume it is directly proportional to Dom strength? Does "death" scale in particular province matters as far as dominion deaths concenred? (other than basic -0.2% of population of course) Does it matters if the province belongs to you or not?

2. How the free undead spamming in conquered provinces tied to Dom level? (again, if you have some numbers it would be great).

3. What affects what type of undeads spams in the particular province?

4.Does remaining population, or the ammount of unburied corpses matters for the reanimation or for the free undead spamming? (other than reanimating armed vs unarmed soulless with your bishop)

5. What is the best tactic for Ermor player once they conquer new province? Rise taxes to 200%? Pillage?


6. If you have chosen Prince of Death as your pretender - how may additional undeads he will get and what type of undeads? Does it depends on dominion level?

7. Any additional tips and suggestions on playing AE Ermor?

8. How do you feel about AE Ermor in dom3 in general?

Thank you.

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No specific numbers from moi. I'm not that methodical.



0. Some changes that come to mind:
- Unholy is now folded into Holy.

- Banishment is significantly stronger, making your task much harder.

- Beware R'lyeh, which gets many, many H3 prophets if it lives long enough -- and that's a Dom3 H3, comparable to Dom2 H4.

- Relative to the other nations: the other nations can take dormant or imprisoned gods, but you -can't- unless your plan depends on burning lots of death gems for empowerment, getting lucky with Etimmu's arrival, or simply doing without a death mage in the early game.

- Soul Gate is now a global enchantment, not a theme.

- Spectres, once researched, used to be a fairly cheap way of getting other paths since they had TWO unrestricted randoms. They appear to have restricted randoms (WESD?) now. I haven't checked whether Dusk Elders are similarly restricted, 'tho, but they only have one random.

- Going underwater is more feasible than before, because tritons no longer 'fly' underwater.

1. Death depends on dominion, not ownership. A high AE dominion makes ordinary Death +3 scale look like Paradise.

2. Yes, if memory serves. Don't expect oodles of freespawn in weak or enemy-dominion provinces.

3. Presence of fortress and presence of temple. IIRC, w/o a fortress, you won't get Legionnaires, just ordinary longdead and soulless. KotUS require both fortress and temple, if memory serves.

4. Freespawn reanimation continues well after everybody's dead. The corpses will decay over time, so if you feel like using them, do it fast. I don't recall noticing a difference in freespawn due to pop or corpses.

5. You might as well do both, because the population is going to very rapidly die anyway. If there's a magic site that produces income (typically an Earth site that's a mine) -- 200% tax will double site income even when there are no people. You will almost certainly want sources of Earth and perhaps Fire magic (mines and alchemy).

6. Gets ordinary longdead. Chaff. Don't recall dominion effect. Small numbers, insignificant compared to ordinary freespawn.

7. Consider bad scales in everything but Luck. If you do take drain, your research will be quite poor until you reach Cons 4 for Skull Mentors; but if you take Magic scale, you will lose MR in your dominion and Banishment becomes even more dangerous.

Take high dominion. Pick at least moderate Death (3 is absolute, absolute minimum -- Dusk Elder summoning). Include Earth and Fire. Consider getting low levels of other paths -- you should have quite a few points from lousy scales. Skip Blood unless you're feeling profligate. You won't be getting many blood slaves unless you do it by Wishing.

Construction 4 has two very useful items for you: Skull Mentors (+9 research, D2 = 10 gems) and Skull Staves (+1D, D2 = 10 gems again).

Don't worry THAT much about bless effects ex. the much-liked F9W9. Your Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre will be fairly few initially and cannot be summoned or recruited by any means. Wailing Ladies are sacred but you'll likely have even fewer for quite some time. You will have very little money, so magical income becomes important.

Oh, and if R'lyeh is in the game, kill them fast. Their dominion spawns hordes of slightly insane commanders, and will drive them more insane over time; and during their insane periods, they will declare themselves prophets, becoming H3 priests. R'lyeh also gets mindblasters (which will generally focus on your commanders, since you have few other units with minds -- and your mindless hordes will dissolve if the commanders are dead) and astral magic (which is helpful for Solar Rays even early on). Even Water now has anti-undead spells -- Cleansing, IIRC.

8. The inability to take a dormant/imprisoned pretender (well, unless you're feeling reaaaaaally lucky), the banishment upgrades, and Dreamlands prophet-hordes make the Ashen Empire less powerful, overall.

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Note that the AI is still incompetent against AE Ermor.

You can get away with a dormant or imprisoned pretender against the AI. It's not even hard. I didn't use any weird tactics, just used my prophet to reanimate longdead horse and built lots of temples to get better units.

The main question is what to do with the points? You don't need scales and don't really benefit from a bless. Which is also why they don't really suffer from not taking a dormant/imprisoned pretender.

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Just to add a bit:
IIRC in dom2 the AE dominion killed 5% of the population each turn (I'm not sure if that's dominion dependant or not, but it definitely only kills in friendly dominion regardless of ownership)

As for strategy, if you don't mind the MR, then Turmoil-3,Sloth-3,Cold-3,Death-3,Luck-3,Magic-3 is pretty much the only way to go (with some variation on magic and luck).
You want the extra points from Cold and not from Heat, since more undead have cold auras, so you might as well give them a minor boost, the Luck-3 (maybe 2) is mandatory due to Turmoil, and works really well with it, especially with death ("a super rich person died in your province, you get a giant pile of cash").
Magic 3 is debatable due to MR, but your research won't be too amazing early one (atleast until you get skull mentors and enough gems), so the boost is really tangible.
Beyond that - Try and get some of those Arch-Bishops, they can spam Longdead Horsemen (or do they have a slightly different name?), which are atleast quick enough to suffer banishments for less turn until they (hopefuly) reach the enemy priests.
Remember that Reanimation (from priests) is also dominion dependant (unless changed from dom2), so it pays to have your Reanimators stay in your capitol for a few turns to get some beefy forces.
Make sure to cast Dark Knowledge on every province ASAP, death gems are your income.
If possible get some Earth on your pretender, not only will it help with finding valuable mine sites (which you need to completely clear of population and then tax to 200%), but its a great way to get nice forges for your death thugs, and generaly works well with death.
Another important thing to remember is that you need to forget about admin, forts are there only to protect bottlenecks and important provinces, so don't worry about placing forts next to each other.
Your priests can't preach, so build many temples and take good dominion.

Umm... That's all I can think of right now.

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Hm. Earth also lets you find Firbolg Fortresses, possibly the most common free fort type. That's valuable since you won't have much income.

For the same reason of low income -- you do need to be careful with temples. 400 Au is a lot more of your income than it is of anybody else's. True, you don't spend it on troops... but a temple loss will hurt a lot.

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High dominion gives you more freespawns, so I'd go with a 10 dominion, unless you can't afford it. Which you should be able to do, since you can get so many points from scales.

What controls the spawning of the free Mound Kings? Just dominion? It always seemed to take awhile to get the first one, then they'd come fairly often. Nice to not have to use summons to ferry troops around.

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If you can expand rapidly, tax everything at 200% and have some luck events, you'll have no problems with money.

Temples are really all you have to spend money on. And the occasional fort.

Maybe a few labs and Indy mages with useful paths.

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Ermor should try and have a temple and castle in every province, since they need both to summon the maximum possible number of troops. You also want to be very careful of where you put temples, since it's relatively easy to destroy one that isn't protected by a castle.

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From my latest AI stomp, they have one 100% random which can be anything except nature, and a second 10% random that is probably the same. Only remember seeing the second random two times, one was W2D3, one was A1D4.

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Very true... this nation is best used for a human in multiplayer games or as a computer opponent or a first time SP gamer. The main reason is the AI will blindly starve its own troops which results in diseases and low morale thus any human playing Ermor only needs to survive the early phase of a SP game.

The good news is this has been fixed within Dominions_5. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

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I'm pretty sure that you stop getting ghouls once everyone is dead.

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The other main reason the AI loses is that it doesn't react to being attacked by all undead armies by recruiting more priests.
It just keeps throwing regular troops at you. You get more troops faster and they don't route, so even if they're weaker troops you win.

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Thanks a lot for your great suggestions guys, it was very helpful.

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ad 6) Pretender, the one-and-only pretender for Ashen Empire must surely be the Lich Queen. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif While the Prince of Death is a nasty fellow who can fly inherently, the Lich Queen provides immortality (which even if she never dies is also recuperation and that's an awesome ability in its own right in a world that features eyeloss and armloss weapons amongst other things), a starting dominion of 4, good overall stats, and decently priced paths (sure, 40 isn't the best in the world, but is is better than many).

You can easily make her something like a mighty rainbow pretender (4 in most/all paths, higher death) with dominion 9 or 10, though less if you take high magic for better research. My personal choice of scales is the turmoil 3, sloth 3, cold 3*, death 3, luck 3, drain 2, going with the extra MR and points to spend on the pretender over better research (which delays the point where your research explodes which is when you start to forge skull mentors but certainly doesn't cripple you).

* exception: Cold 3 is usually the best climate choice but if you know you are going to be facing tough players playing cold nations and less tough players playing hot nations you might reasonably choose Heat 3 instead. Every bit helps.


On awake/dormant/imprisoned...

The rational choice in almost cases would be awake. However, should you be about to embark on an MP game that, for whatever reason, you know or have a reasonable suspicion might be long (players involved, few players on large map, agreement beforehand, whatever), one interesting option is to go dormant, partially for the 150 extra design points, partially for the change it does to your opening gambit - the "low domain undead approach". (If it turns our you were wrong, and it is a short game, you are hosed - hey, it is a risky gambit with a potentially huge payoff)

With a dormant Ermorian pretender, your dominion will spread very slowly at start meaning fewer undead but also considerably more gold since your provinces will stay alive for much longer. With an awake pretender, you'll often be best off just pillaging provinces/taxing 200%, but with a dormant pretender it works really well to do a normal 100% tax, recruit every single mercenary company for insane prices (you can afford to offer more than anybody else as you have no real expenses), and just conquer as much land as possible with the undead you do get and the mercenaries, preferring farms over all others.

Depending on number of mercenaries available, you will be stuck at 1 province/turn longer than otherwise, which sucks, however, when your pretender does break free, you'll have 150+ death gems stored, and it will take you only 2-3 turns to get a research/recruitment factory up and running
1) Dusk Elder [total 1]
2) 2xDusk Elder [total 3]
3) 3 or 4 mix of Dusk Elder/Archbishops [total 6-7]

You'll hit the floor running with lots of provinces generating a few undead, your capital generating lots of undead, a huge income compared with what you'd have had with an awake pretender from turn 1 spreading your dominion like mad (not only are most provinces dying only slowly, they don't have your scales either), and not significantly behind in overall research since your mage recruitment earlier would have been limited by gem income anyway. This has allowed you, during the rounds until awakening and for the next many, many, rounds, to build way more fortresses than you'd have been able to afford with an awake pretender. As for temples, just start building them when provinces (with fortresses) reach dominion 9-10 to start raking in those Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre - no reason to build them earlier in this type of strategy.

An additional advantage is that with a domain that'll for the first large part of the game stay mostly within your own borders or even behind your borders you appear significantly less threatening to your neighbours - and to the graphs (if they are enabled).

The major downside, and there's no hiding it, is that you forfeit 10-13 rounds of sitesearching with your pretender (say one every 2 turns) - that's a really significant hit to your gem income that shouldn't be underestimated. On the other hand, it shouldn't be overestimated either, just like the ability to maintain a low dominion and high income for a long time shouldn't be underestimated where fortress construction is concerned - many undead from non-fortress provinces or fewer but from fortresses? You can call it either way.

Another downside would be if the game turns into a short game or a blitz, but then, the assumption of choosing this opening gambit in the first place is that it'll be a long game - that's just a risk to assess before play begins.

Ah, well, it has worked for me in one MP game and it might for you, but then again, it might not. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



EDIT: It seems that some people have misunderstood the "low domain approach" to mean that the pretender should have a low dominion. Far from it! The pretender's dominion should be the usual 9-10 of Ermor (and more likely 10 than 9), the "low" comes into play because it takes longer time to spread it throughout your realm since it takes longer time to get going, spreading only via home province and temple check until your pretender breaks free. That is what allows you to rake in the cash to build castles with, castles that'll soon enough have maximum dominion generating lots of good undead. It is more money per turn for more turns with the expected long-term payoff of being able to afford more castles, temples, independent mages (if you find any), while still generating the best undead troops in large numbers from fairly early in the game. I apologise for any confusion that may have arisen from my description of it as a "low domain approach". http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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You're still a death dominion nation. It'll take some luck and good diplomacy to keep your neighbors from attacking you early.

Interesting approach, though.

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Yep, as stated you NEED to have some sort of - if not guarantee, then at the least strong hunch - that it'll be a "long game" for it to be worthwhile to risk. The situation I've encountered it in with my bunch of MP friends is when we play on large maps with mighty AIs filling out the spots of missing players - with such a setup, the game tends to turn into a "beat the AI first, THEN go for the other players' throat when we've all built up" unless the player nations get positioned right next to another in a corner, since a destructive player-vs-player war while the other players eat a couple of AIs usually means a loss for those fighting players if the guy who gets jumped puts up a spirited defense.

I can think of other setups where it might work in MP, but the dormant low-dominion (early game) gambit is definitely not something for general use. It does feel weird to rake in the cash without having to waste any turns (and troops for those turns) on pillaging as Ashen Empire in the early game.

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A "long game" strategy needs to have a big payoff in the late game in order to make the early sacrifices worth it. I'm not sure what you get by taking low dominion and dormant with AE Ermor, which has more points from scales than any other nation. Taking drain just causes problems by making your research bad, so in the one part of the game where you should be dominant (the end) you're not. And, taking low dominion just makes your immortality worse. On top of it all, human players will hate you just for being AE Ermor, so your chances of getting through to the late game unmolested are quite small.

AE Ermor has enough points to take an awake pretender, decent magic paths, and luck+magic, or a dormant pretender and really good magic with the same scales, and do it all with decent dominion. Since AE can't use blood and the liches all start with a bunch of death, you can afford to just buy all the paths you want. For a more rainbow, less combat-oriented lich you can take the master lich instead of the lich queen.

If you sacrifice magic and awake you can buy an extra level or two in most of your paths, but that's not that important - by the time there are spells that you can actually cast with those levels, you'll have enough gems to forge booster items or just empower if you must.

With a rainbow mage pretender, your biggest constraint is not paths, or even gems, but simply not having enough time for all the stuff you will need to do.

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Ah, you misunderstand. Dominion should definitely be 9-10 as usual! It is just that you don't spread it far in the first 10-13 turn because all spread is done by your home province, its temple, and, if you really feel you need it (you might not) a prophet, meaning that when it DOES start spreading at the usual speed, you have an expanding number of provinces it has not reached yet and won't reach for the next many turns, while the provinces it does reach first will all have castles built with your extra money.

No, it really does not. Given that you cannot count on independent mages (you might find them, you might not), what you have is researchers recruited for death gems and, as soon as you reach construction to make skull mentors, you get cheaper research by making mentors than summoning more researchers either way. (Of course, if you do find independent mages, you have more gold income to sustain a decent number with while still castling). It does take longer time to reach this point but once you start the summoning factory after your pretender breaks free, it doesn't take all that long time (and not particularly longer than if your pretender had been awake unless you had dedicated your pretender to research).

The long-term research impact is neglible - the bonus to magic resistance in your own dominion is there to stay, and it helps out all of your troops and commanders. Where it hurts and leaves you very vulnerable is fundamentally having no mages the first 10-13 turns and no real battlefield spells the first 20 - the early game.

I agree, but low dominion on the pretender is not the idea - just limiting the initial spread.

Depends on whom you play with, the game setup, &etc - anyhow, so long as they don't start molesting until the midgame it can work. If you are playing with a bunch of "let's all unite against Ermor early on" players, you should of course never attempt this gambit; as stipulated, it is not for every occasion.

I prefer having 4 in all elemental, astral, and nature with whatever is left for death to maximize sitesearching [leaving out blood] when I do start searching and to give a host of nice blessings to the Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre and the Lictors (who turn into really impressive infantry this way, but that's more of a side effect).

Now, in practice having 2-3 in most paths will be quite enough, of course, there aren't that many 3-4 sites and the blessings aren't in any way essential, but I've got more points lying around than good is, so why not spend them on something fun and beneficial? The exact allocation of points has nothing to do with what this gambit is about, you might reasonably prefer another allocation. (You again seem to assume that part of the point of playing this gambit is to get extra design points. It is not. The point is delaying initial dominion spread to increase your money-earning capabilities for a long, long time. The extra design points are just gravy to be blown on whatever toy you fancy)

The reason to take a Lich Queen over the Master Lich is that she starts with Dominion 4, he starts with Dominion 3, and she can fight. Even assuming you go a nearly full rainbow, excluding just blood, the cost difference between them at dominion 10 is a mere 81 points, a trivial sacrifice for Ermor to get a pretender who survives longer in combat and is viable for suicide-teleportation attacks, able to survive against most any assassin players can come up with (quite useful if your pretender ends up holding a global enchant and you have nasty enemies in the mid-to-late game, immortality is fun but it is funnier not losing the items/globals you are carrying)

I agree, but again, in this gambit the point of "sacrifing" magic is not to get extra design points (it is a conscious choice to get tougher troops in the face of battlefield magic and you could easily choose to focus on magic instead of drain while playing the gambit - I apologise if I made it seem that going drain was an important part of the gambit, it is not), nor is the point of sacrificing awake to get extra points (it is to delay initial domain spread, which is the entire point).

Indeed it is, and what's even better, normal rainbow strategies work even worse when you go dormant... But then again, normal rainbow strategies are not the point either. The entire point, and I realise I am repeating myself, is to buy time to earn $$$ fast and to keep generating more gold every single turn while you are expanding and for many turns after you stop compared to starting awake - the fact that you'll probably end up with a rainbow pretender able to do some real good siteseaching in turns 14-25 or so after summoning the first 2 dusk elders is really nice, but it is not the goal. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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It's true that I didn't understand your plan entirely at first. Preserving gold income longer and trying to keep your living population and units longer is an interesting choice. Since you are containing your own dominion as much as possible, you can still take suck-for-scales. Really, this strategy works for anyone, not just AE-ermor. In a way it might even be worse for AE-ermor because you don't have any nation-specific troops to recruit in your provinces. You'll be dependent on indy living units and fewer freespawns than normal, and you won't have any order to boost your economy, leaving you still worse economically than a normal nation. And, your living troops won't be able to go into the "death zone" because of supply problems. You'll be short in the military department with a bunch of units that don't really work well together.

While it's true that skull mentors are immune to drain, the mages that use them aren't. Even if you add another +research item to each mage, you are still looking at ~30% drop in total research. But, if you can keep them out of your drain-afflicted territory, you could cut that down to more like 15% for not having magic, which is probably acceptable.

In a really big map the strategy seems better, not only because you have more time to "boot up" but because you can keep your dominion out of more of your own provinces.

It is definitely unconventional, I will give you that much. I guess I am not convinced that there is enough of a gold bonus compared to just pillaging everything to death, since once your dominion DOES get into a captured province, everyone will still die promptly.

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Not quite. The only living troops I'll recruit are indy mages and mercenaries [and I have the income to pay top dollar for them, practically guaranteeing that I get them, thus also depriving others of early game expansion boost], plus some cheap archers/crossbowmen if I come across them (though preferably not - upkeep is bad except for mages) - makes for an awesome (and cheap!) combination. As for the "death zone", that's only in the core of the realm, and that's not where the living troops are being used - they are being used on the fringe to expand the empire, so the "death zone" is irrelevant to the use of living independents/mercenaries.

And while fewer undead will be generated, you'll still get plenty enough from your capital and provinces nearest it once dominion overspills from the capital to keep beating up independents, even at the higher independent settings. NOT enough to deal with a player early on, of course, but again, that was one of the stipulated risks of this gambit. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Once you start building multiple castles (which you'll do very quickly), you'll start getting good undead as well, though you'll have decidedly fewer chaff since you won't have anybody reanimating soulless until your pretender awakes.

Err, you mean an increase of ~30% research going from drain to magic, not a drop of 30% going from magic to drain (a standard 0 XP spectator drops ~23%, revant 25%, dusk elder 20% - unless I remember numbers wrong) - and as researchers gain XP, it keeps dropping. Also, in case one runs across independent mages it may look better for the drain side who can afford them better - and then again, it might not. Anyhow, I guess we just have different playing styles, for while I'd deem such a gap significant in a short game, I don't consider it really significant in a long game - so long as I don't get beat to both the AQs and the artifacts. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Yes - small map is a no-no for this gambit, a medium is "give it a thought, just in case", a big is "give it a serious thought"... and if in doubt, just play conventional and safe.

Try it out - I'm definitely not going to say based on my limited tests of this that it'll always pay off for long games or that sticking to a conventional tactic isn't, on average, better - but I do consider it a fun experiment and have been sort of surprised by how well it worked out - it takes a LONG time before your expanding periphery of provinces get more than a few candles since the first 10-13 rounds or so you'll generate a total of home province + 1 temple check per round. Provinces also survived for a surprisingly long time when you've only got 1-2 candles in them. There's really little reason to have more provinces dying off quickly than you can afford to build castles in. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

It does feel a bit counterintuitive to not start building temples until you feel threatened, want an area to preemptively be safer for your pretender to move around in, or decide that that 9-10 dominion castled province really deserves to provide Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre, though, and to be happy when other players dominions cross seas and rivers to dominate your periphery, which can happen. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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And with no pretender, who has the magic skill to build the lab required to recruit those indy mages? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif
You could just wait for a mage mercenary, but you still aren't guaranteed to get it (and if you spend all your money on it, then you are losing the advantage of Dormancy in gold)

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Yup, indy mages are only after pretender breaks free and at least two rounds of summoning dusk elders or if you should get an indy mercenary mage, and only if you find them, of course, not worth spending more than 200-300 gold to get hold of. Not that that differs mightly from most other nations - few nations, even if they find independents early, will recruit independent mages the first few rounds as they've got other and better things to spend their gold on - as does Ermor; mercenaries and castles.

There are no guarantees here. As stated in the opening, it is a risky gambit, and the only thing that comes close to a guarantee is that you'll get better castle-building going and that, if you are right in your assessment and don't get jumped, you'll have a higher income for considerably longer time, resulting in a stronger non-magical position in the mid to endgame. Translating that into victory obviously depends on the circumstances of what you find. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

But don't trust me saying it can work - playing styles differ, as do the opponenents you face. Try it out (in a non-blitz game on a mid-to-large sized map) and see how it works for you, or run a couple of SP simulations where you expand to the range you'd expect to do it in MP and see what your gold income, castle situation, and undead generation per turn looks like after 5, 10, 15 rounds compared to a normal awake start. Who knows, it might not ever be worth it for you in the games you'll play, but then again, it might. Depends on situation.